He broke up with his girlfriend. She was seeing an older man. So he shot 32 people on a Virginia college campus.

Illogical?

Somehow not to him. But how?

Are some people so detached from fellow human beings, so insular in their relationship with one human being, so invested in that objectified human being being a reflection on their social worth (as opposed to being worth something in one’s own right) that being cast off for someone else is so much the end of the world that it justifies ending the worlds of so many others.

I don’t know much about the life of Cho Seung-Hui but he apparently seemed almost indistinguishable from a lot of young college students. As a screenwriter, what intrigues me is that writing was where he, too, spent his time.
Today millions of people spend their lives in online games strengthening their detachment from the real physical community, reinforcing that their First Lives, their real lives, are somehow throwaway, boring, worth escaping? In a sense many of us are becoming writers, creators, making our own movies, being the journalist, playing out alternative lives as avatars in online games.
What does this mean for how we may come to feel about the lives of others? Does being engulfed by other worlds mean we lose touch with the physicality and lack of control we have in real lives and all the management skills that go with that?

Aren’t our views of the ‘normality’ of others largely based on the limitations of what we perceive to be our own ‘normality’? Most will never be one of the Cho Seung-Hui types of this world, but will addictive immersion into characters and virtual worlds make people like him that little bit closer to acting upon their irrationality? After all, rationality and resolution is about balances, about realism, about social skills, emotional skills, diplomacy skills. Cho Seung-Hui failed probably felt he was resolving his dramas, perhaps even felt he was rational. What do we do with such conflicting definitions and is society somehow generating them, making them more common?
If we feel our lives are petty, boring, drudgery, and prefer to be a character or an avatar than our real self, with young children striving for their 30 seconds of fame over and over on You Tube, then what are our parents, children, girlfriends, friends? As empathy becomes a lost skill, do others become means to an end, important tools in envisioning our own status not in society but in our minds, poured out in some online showcase among the avatars or characterizations of others? I’m a screenwriter. Perhaps I should double check my sanity in the mirror each morning (actually, in my own way, I do).
For those who spend most of their spare time in virtual realities instead of the real world, what of the real people behind characters? In time when novelty gives way to the conscious realization of addiction, will others become mere fodder, are they expendable, are they seen as just ‘ants in the human race’? Will we be seeing more alienated youth killing en mass in schools and universities, bars and cafes, because it ‘might as well all be a game’? Or perhaps I’m just a writer letting my sociology-informed fears run amok. I hope so.
We raced ahead of our infantile, primitive selves, arming ourselves with killing machines before we knew how to smile at strangers. Now we’re racing ahead again. We test drugs before mass release on the market but we are all psychological guinea pigs in the real multi zillion dollar industry of marketting and it not only wants us comfortably addicted and paying for our fixes but just like the pharmaceutical companies, its not going to encourage us to question when it would rather we just went ba-aa-aa. But Cho Seung-Hui was an English student who like many in the affluent world, are on antidepressants for depression. He was writing plays and stories, gory ones, very gory, full of chainsaws and hammers and killing and went armed with guns, ammunition, knives purchased almost as easily as they appear to players in a video game. Sounds like the majority of online games these days or the type of violent DVDs those blunted to subtler emotions have to settle for to feel anything. And when they can’t even feel for those? What’s next? If the fine line, the last thread of humanness in the lives of these deadified and alienated ‘normal’ people is the girlfriend who just moved on… what next? We should check our fellow human beings. Borg may be closer than we think.
Maybe it’s time to smile at strangers and connect so the ‘passing normal’ like this killer might humanise us rather than shoot us.

My heartfelt condolences to the families of those real humans killed in the Virginia tragedy and those harmed in it. The lives taken were lives of potential which now live on in the nostalgic worlds of those who knew and loved them. They deserved whole lives, their own destinies. They deserved to be more than pawns in the played out resentment fantasy of one disturbed individual.

There has been mention that Cho Seung-Hui may have had an autism-spectrum diagnosis. Well, many non-autistic people have been mass-murderer’s throughout history too, some with personality disorders or undiagnosed conditions other than AS, some without.

Like the general population, people on the autistic spectrum may have co-morbid conditions such as bipolar, depression, schizophrenia, personalities disorders (including sadistic and narcissistic personality disorders), intermittent explosive disorder or even psychopathy but that doesn’t mean any significant percentage of people with these conditions kill or harm anyone. In fact, with the exception of those with psychopathy and some personality disorders, those with these conditions and they are more likely to be harmed than harm.

Cho Seung-Hui may have displayed the stereotypical hallmarks of an ASD- impaired social interaction, impaired communication skills, obsessive interests and behaviours – but the same could be said of some with combinations that included things like Selective Mutism, psychopathy (yes, child psychopaths – which involves an incapacity for empathy- have existed), obsessive compulsive personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder (many of whom have been misdiagnosed as autistic or have both), or anhedonia as part of childhood depression (and infants as young as 18 months can have childhood depression).

Furthermore, the number of non-English speaking Asian migrant children who are misdiagnosed as new arrivals in English speaking countries is astounding. Relying on the anecdotes of family members back in Korea about Cho as an 8 year old who they hadn’t seen for over a decade conveniently fails to question that such a family may desperately need to cling to reasons why Cho was somehow inherently ‘damaged’ goods and therefore no direct reflection on their families.
There are many more good role models on the autistic spectrum who also have a range of co-morbid disorders (managed or not) who clearly demonstrate that it does not in any way necessarily connect that having these things makes one dangerous.

When things like this happen, we look for scapegoats be it individuals or conditions. This won’t bring back the dead and will only conveniently distract from the reality that such acts have been, throughout history, perpetrated by all kinds of people, all kinds of people.

Its also essential to remember that although the news makes these things immediate to most of us, that in our personal daily lives, most of us will never encounter nor be victims or even personally know victims of such crimes or their perpetrators.
… Donna Williams

author of The Jumbled Jigsaw

www.donnawilliams.net