The acute sense of being inadequate in a competitive world that values semiocapital above all else and owning nothing except an imagination fiercely colonized by digital information led to scenarios that one may feel tempted to dismiss as "isolated" cases. But these "isolated" cases are just a symptom that also gives a whole new extent to crime as something that one can (re)define according to his or her own purpose. Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shooting in 2007), Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Columbine High School massacre in 1999) may have chosen to become mass murderers and kill themselves in order to escape the pain and bullying of their daily lives and gain a moment of fame that was impossible to gain otherwise.
But with Anders Behring Breivik, there is a different story as the perpetrator responsible for the Norway attacks in 2011 came with his own agenda backed by political and ideological values. Shortly, he acted as a neo-conservative automaton, as Bifo puts it, desensitized by his own delusions, by the way he perceived the current Western civilization as a territory threatened by feminization, Islamization, and in danger of losing its Christianity and Father figure (still an authoritarian fetish as popular as ever). Scarily enough, there are actually no significant differences between Breivik's own declaration and the one delivered by Tea Party militants and intellectuals alike. Examining Breivik's background, one thing becomes clear: his disconnection from everything outside and inside himself. It's an alienation that can be translated into countless hours spent online, wired to role-playing games, discussion forums, and niche websites that did nothing but reinforce his already existing psychic suffering and populate it with menacing avatars of otherness, avatars that need to be defeated in order to claim one's belonging to the "right" community. Bifo argues that psychic suffering coupled with extended exposure to the online flow can lead to such tragic attempts to win one's life back, to re-territorialize a ground that is colonized against one's will and without any visible effects until it seems almost too late to do anything about it:
Financial capitalism is based on a process of unrelenting deterritorialization, and this is causing fear to spread among those who are unable to deal with the precariousness of daily life and the violence of the labor market. This fear in turn provokes a counter-effect of aggressive re-territorialization by those who try to grasp some form of identity, some sense of belonging, because only a feeling of belonging offers the semblance of shelter, a form of protection. But belonging is a delusive projection of the mind, a deceptive sensation, a trap. Since one's belonging can only be conclusively proved by an act of aggression against the other, the combined effect of deterritorialization in the sphere of financial capitalism and of re-territorialization in the realm of identity is leading to a state of permanent war.
As soon as the people could tolerate a room full of first graders being shot up the gun control debate was over.
fukk Antifa let’s me know all I need to know about his beliefs.