Article
Some years ago, I got a call from an analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center.
After yet another gruesome mass shooting (this time, it was Dylann
Roof’s attack on a Bible-study group at a Black church in Charleston,
South Carolina, that killed nine and wounded one), I had written an article
about the young men who perpetrate such crimes. I suggested that an
overview of these killers showed them, in general, to be young losers
who failed to mature, and whose lives revolved around various
grievances, insecurities, and heroic fantasies. I called them “Lost
Boys” as a nod to their arrested adolescence.
The
NCTC called me because they had a working group on “countering violent
extremism.” They had read my article and they, too, were interested in
the problem of these otherwise-unremarkable boys and young men who,
seemingly out of nowhere, lash out at society in various ways. We think
you’re on to something, the analyst told me. He invited me to come down
to Washington and discuss it with him and his colleagues.
The
meeting was held in a classified environment so that the group’s
members, representing multiple intelligence and law-enforcement
agencies, could more easily share ideas and information. (I was a
government employee at the time and held a clearance.) But we could have
met in a busy restaurant for all it mattered—the commonalities among
these young men, even across nations and cultures, are hardly a secret.
They are man-boys who maintain a teenager’s sharp sense of self-absorbed
grievance long after adolescence; they exhibit a combination of
childish insecurity and lethally bold arrogance; they are sexually and
socially insecure. Perhaps most dangerous, they go almost unnoticed
until they explode. Some of them open fire on their schools or other
institutions; others become Islamic radicals; yet others embrace
right-wing-extremist conspiracies.
I
emerged from the meeting with a lot of interesting puzzle pieces but no
answers. Since then, there have been more such attacks, more bodies,
more grief—but precious little progress on preventing such incidents. A
few recent examples: In 2021, a 15-year-old boy murdered four of his fellow students in his Michigan high school. In 2022, an 18-year-old man carried out a massacre in a Texas school; another, the same age, committed a mass murder in a grocery store in upstate New York. A 21-year-old male attacked a Fourth of July parade in Illinois. A 22-year-old went on a rampage at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado.
These
attacks are not merely “violence” in some general sense, nor are they
similar to other gun crimes classified as “mass shootings” beyond the
number of victims. Drug-war shoot-outs and gang vendettas are awful, but
they are better-understood problems, in both their origins and possible
remedies. The Lost Boys, however, are the perpetrators of
out-of-the-blue massacres of innocents. Their actions are not driven by
criminal gain, but instead are meant to shock us, to make us grieve, and
finally, to force us to acknowledge the miserable existence of the
young men behind the triggers.
After
each Lost Boy killing, Americans are engulfed in grief and anger, but
eventually, we are overtaken by a sense of helplessness. Sometimes, we
respond by raging at one another; we fight about gun control or
mental-health funding or the role of social media as we try to fix blame
and reduce a seemingly inexplicable act to something discrete and
solvable. But I wonder now, as I did back in 2015, if all of these
debates are focusing on the wrong problems. Yes, the country is awash in
guns; yes, depression seems to be on the rise in young people; yes,
extremists are using social media to fuse together atomized losers into
explosive compounds. But the raw material for all of the violence is
mostly a stream of lost young men.
Why
is this happening? What are we missing? Guns and anomie and extremism
are only facets of the problem. The real malady afflicting these men,
one about which I’ve written
much in the intervening years since that original article, is the
deluge of narcissism in the modern world, especially among
failed-to-launch young men whose injured grandiosity leads them to blame
others for their own shortcomings and insecurities—and to seek revenge.
The Lost Boys are
mostly young and male, largely middle- or working-class. Frustrated by
their own social awkwardness, they are so often described as “loners”
that the trope has been around from as early as the 1980s.
But these young males, no matter how “quiet,” are filled with an
astonishing level of enraged resentment and entitlement about their
roles as men, and they seek rationalizations for inflicting violence on a
society they think has both ignored and injured them. They become what
the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger called
“radical losers,” unsuccessful men who feel that they have been denied
their dominant role in society and who then channel their blunted male
social impulses toward destruction.
And
they are, above all, staggeringly narcissistic. Almost all of the
recent mass killers, for example, thought they had a special mission in
the world. We know this because they felt compelled to tell us so.
Indeed,
to search for the killer’s manifesto is now part of the ritual of
investigating a massacre, a tradition we might trace back to the
Unabomber, the ur-Lost Boy Ted Kaczynski,
whose terror campaign included a demand that the press publish his
35,000-word treatise. (And yet, when he left society at 29, he wrote in his journal:
“My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge. I
do not expect to accomplish anything by it.”) There are many other
examples: the Los Angeles mass killer Christopher Dorner left behind an 11,000-word screed in 2013; Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019, posted a 74-page rant to the internet. (Patrick Crusius,
who murdered 23 people in El Paso in 2019, claimed to be inspired by
Tarrant but managed to upload only four pages to the infamous 8chan site.) At this point, so many such documents exist that there are scholarly research studies analyzing them.
Juliette Kayyem: A ‘lone-wolf’ shooter has an online pack
Many
of the Lost Boys claim to represent various causes derived from a wide
spectrum of sources—sexism, racism, religious bigotry, conspiracy
kookery, and anti-government extremism among them. (Nor are all of these
aimless young men killers: When I first examined this problem, I also
identified a type of Lost Boy who convinces himself that he’s doing
good, such as Bowe Bergdahl,
who thought of himself as the fictional action hero Jason Bourne when
he deserted his military unit in Afghanistan in 2009, and Edward
Snowden, who is the embodiment of a particular kind of nonviolent but
nonetheless highly destructive misfit.)
Narcissism
is a common malady, but for the Lost Boys, it is the indispensable
primer for a bomb whose core is an unstable mass of insecurities about
masculine identity. This, of course, helps explain why such spectacular
and ghastly acts are an almost entirely male phenomenon. Women, who are
less prone to commit violence in general, are rarely
the perpetrators of these kinds of senseless massacres. In general,
they do not share the same juvenile fantasies of power and dominance
that are common to adolescent boys. Nor do they tend to harbor the same
resentments about sex and status that are common to all teenagers but
that in the Lost Boys persist beyond adolescence and soon grow to
volcanic levels.
For example,
in 2014 Elliot Rodger became a kind of patron saint of “incels,” or
involuntary celibates (men angry at women for not having sex with them),
when he killed six people and plowed his car into several more in
California before killing himself. Rodger explicitly said
his attack was “retribution” against other men—and the women who sleep
with them—for having sex while he remained a virgin. Four years later, a
self-described incel who’d praised Rodger killed 10 people in Toronto.
Lives
that seem to unwind over problems related to sex or sexual identity are
a persistent theme. Micah Johnson, a Black military veteran, claimed
that he was avenging the deaths of Black people at the hands of the
police when he ambushed Dallas police officers in 2016, killing five and
wounding nine others. Perhaps more pertinent, though, was that Johnson
was a failure as a soldier and his life had gone into free fall after he
was booted from the Army for stealing women’s underwear from a female comrade. That same year, Omar Mateen, who had expressed particular animus toward homosexuals, became a mass killer when he attacked a gay nightclub
in Florida, as did the accused recent Colorado shooter Anderson
Aldrich. Aldrich’s lawyers have said that the alleged killer is
nonbinary, but some observers, including a former friend, suspect Aldrich is merely attempting to troll the LGBTQ community.
Another
way these young men express their sexual insecurity is to seek heroic
redemption by imagining themselves as the defenders of helpless women
against sexual threats from other men. Roof, for his part, thought he
was on a mission to stop Black men from raping white women, a common racist trope in America. One of the members of a group of young Muslim men in Canada who planned to storm the Parliament in Ottawa in 2006 reportedly had a similar motivation, believing that NATO soldiers were raping Afghan women.
This
masculine insecurity is even more striking when we consider the number
of such young men who chose what we might think of as “the military
cure,” by joining the armed forces in an apparent attempt to forge a
more manly identity. In a society where relatively few people serve in
the military, the Lost Boys are heavily overrepresented among veterans
or would-be soldiers. Timothy McVeigh, who went on to become the
Oklahoma City bomber, left the Army after being rejected for Special Forces. Dorner was a naval reserve officer; Johnson and Bergdahl went to Afghanistan. (Before he enlisted, friends told The Washington Post, Bergdahl had “identified with Japanese samurai warriors and medieval knights.”) Devin Kelley, who opened fire on a Texas church, joined the Air Force. Snowden joined the Army and tried for a Green Beret, but washed out. The “American Taliban” traitor, John Walker Lindh, also went overseas—but for a different army.
Jihadists,
especially those radicalized in the West, are also examples of this
syndrome. They join organizations that promise to create a powerful male
identity, and, in some cases, to reward them with women
as sex slaves. For all their supposed distaste for Western immorality,
many of the young males who gravitate toward jihadism are avid consumers
of forbidden Western delights, such as music, alcohol, drugs, and pornography. (Even in middle age, Osama bin Laden had quite a porn collection.)
For these men, terrorism may be, among other things, some sort of
self-purification, a way to deny their illicit desires by destroying the
places and people that supposedly coax them toward perdition. (In a
striking parallel, the American Robert Aaron Long—who at 21 had already
been treated for sex addiction—is accused of opening fire on a string of
massage parlors around Atlanta, killing eight, in an attempt, as he told law enforcement officers later, to eliminate the source of his “temptation.”)
From the June 1986 issue: Thinking about terrorism
Fear
of women and hatred of minorities, animosity toward authority, patterns
of absent or dysfunctional fathers, histories of being bullied, romance
with symbols of power, conflicts of identity and sexuality—we can
catalog at length the similarities among these young misfits. They are,
in the main, scared and narcissistic boys, and like many boys teetering
on the cusp of manhood, they are tormented by paradoxes: insecure but
drenched in self-regard, fearful yet brave, full of self-doubt yet
fascinated by heroism. For most males, this is a transitory part of
adolescence. For the Lost Boys, it is a permanent condition, a deadly
combination of stubborn immaturity and towering narcissism.
Knowing about the
common characteristics of these killers and terrorists does not shed
much light on what to do to thwart them. Stricter gun laws, a good idea
in general, will not stop the mass murderers already among us who live
in a society saturated with easily obtained weapons. Law enforcement can
infiltrate and destroy violent militias, terror cells, and other
threats, but that will not prevent unstable young men from searching for
causes to justify their massacres—if they even bother with such ideas.
Likewise, arguments about “toxic masculinity,”
as tempting as they are in these cases, miss the mark. The problem of
toxic masculinity is real, but the swaggering jerks and violent abusers
who sometimes become a threat to their partners (and themselves) are
distinct from the insecure man-boys who decide to prove their worth—or
just to prove that they exist—by committing extraordinary acts of
mass murder. And, in general, toxic men are easy to spot. The Lost Boys
are, by their nature, usually invisible until they strike.
Performative
mass killings and large-scale terrorism are mostly post-1970s
phenomena, and we can likely trace at least some of the Lost Boy problem
to the rapid emergence in the past 40 years or so of a hypersexualized
and yet lonelier, more atomized society. Likewise, the social
institutions that once shaped and restrained the worst impulses of young
men—religion, the military, schools, and even marriage itself—have gone
through drastic and irrevocable changes in the same period.
Michael Carpenter: Russia is co-opting angry young men
We
can lament some of those changes—I certainly do, particularly the
collapse of a kind of mature sense of stoicism and self-control among
men. But we cannot reverse them, not least because that would, in
effect, require turning back time and unraveling years of social
progress. The advances of women’s rights are especially terrifying to a
certain cohort of the Lost Boys, but such progress was necessary and
irrevocable, and society cannot be held hostage to the insecurities of a
small group of males in arrested adolescence, no matter how dangerous
they may be.
Western
societies have now produced multiple generations of these young men, so
we cannot hope to solve the problem by just waiting out the generational
demography. (There are exceptions in the form of “lost old men,” but
the two recent cases of older mass shooters in California—as well as the
64-year-old Las Vegas killer in 2017—are extremely rare outliers.)
Perhaps more alarming, at least some of these young males seem to be
aging into dangerous, frustrated middle-aged men, the gun-toting
cosplayers who now have the time and money to pursue their angry
fantasies. (Think of this as the Lost Boys becoming Proud Boys.)
What we can do,
however, is start talking more about the specific problem of dangerous
male immaturity without falling into endless loops about gun control,
public health, or “toxic masculinity.” We can, in schools and colleges,
pay closer attention to the boys and young men who seem to be sliding
toward darkness, perhaps with more attempts to pull them toward a
community or into mentorship with older men. At the least, we should be
able to find a way to engage in gentle interventions early rather than
face more drastic consequences later. As Enzensberger presciently warned
nearly two decades ago: “It is difficult to talk about the loser, and
it is stupid not to.”
The
immensity of the challenge, as I learned at that meeting in Washington
years ago, is overwhelming. But we can start by redefining the basic
problem and recognizing Lost Boys as a distinct phenomenon. We are not
likely to stop the next mass attacker, school shooter, or terrorist,
whether tomorrow or next year. If we recognize, however, that our
current arguments are dead ends, we can start anew, and become more
creative about finding solutions before we produce yet another
generation of silent time bombs.
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