Reply #7: I'm going to be lazy

[iverglas]

and just paste excerpts from a post of mine in Guns in a discussion of whoever he was that murdered numerous women in a fitness gym a few weeks ago.

There's always talk of "depression" and being an excluded outsider and yada yada. Well, sometimes people are depressed and excluded for very good reason. They're assholes.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=244827&mesg_id=245313

Being depressed and blaming other people for one's problems are not necessary corollaries, and in fact tend to be quite different things. And depression involves an absence of self-worth, not a feeling of entitlement. Blaming others and feeling entitled are much more classic indications of a personality disorder. Maybe in a person who isn't smart enough to get what they want by manipulating, an unsuccessful narcissist, depression follows.

... I think it's less likely in a middle-aged person, for depression to launch them into months of hateful thoughts and words, and plotting to kill -- and in this case, as in the case of Marc Lépine at the Montreal Polytechnique, for instance, to kill individuals who themselves have nothing to do with the person's problem, who merely represent the group he sees as the cause of his problems. Women.

Men kill women. Men harm women. They kill their intimate partners, they rape strangers, and some, like Lépine and Sodini, kill groups of strangers, because they are women.

This isn't a sign of depression. Depression doesn't cause misogyny. A personality that accepts no responsibility, that feels entitled, is a personality ripe for misogyny when it goes looking for an object of its need to blame and punish. Women are vulnerable targets. Women are already objectified in our society and the mind of the person in question. He is entitled to sex -- women are for sex. He can't get any. It's women's fault. Because nothing is his fault. Taking responsibility isn't an option, for someone like this. He gets miserable enough, what he needs is vengeance.

And there just is not sufficient evidence in this case that his actions stemmed from anything but his supreme narcissism and feelings of entitlement.

He doesn't talk about women he likes and can't succeed with, or about what a relationship would bring him that he's missing. He talks about wanting sex, and vilifies women who have sex with other men, and women in general.

<quoted from another poster> "When they endure years of being a social outcast they come to believe that there truly is something wrong with them and that they are, in fact, worthless."

It really is possible that they are just horrible people, and that's why nobody wants to be around them.


Aha! I just googled the term I coined up there, "unsuccessful narcissist". First up:

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article2439812.ece

In therapy, Young tries to engage “the lonely shamed child” that he sees as the source of the pain for an individual with NPD. All of which is difficult to achieve, because even if a person agrees to treatment, Young points out dryly, he may walk out unless the therapist keeps telling him he’s simply the best; ordinary won’t do.

“A lot of people only come because they’ve been sent by desperate partners or bosses. Successful narcissists have something extra that means people tolerate their bad behaviour. The most dangerous is the unsuccessful narcissist. He doesn’t have money or power or charm, so he’s fired a lot of the time. He drives more and more people away, until he ends up alone and a very bleak person.”

In treatment, people diagnosed with NPD are divided into two groups. In one are “pure” or thick-skinned narcissists. They have often been extremely spoilt and indulged and given no boundaries as children. In the second group are thin-skinned narcissists, such as Vaknin, who have grown up feeling unloved and unlovable. Young says the former are almost impossible to help; the latter may respond to therapy. “If there’s no change in a year, the chances of success are low. The person with NPD will constantly try to prove he is superior to the therapist; that the professional knows nothing.”

However -- a more successful narcissist can also be a woman killer.

I'd suggest that what happens in those cases is that the narcissist has succeeded in getting what he thinks he's entitled to -- and then the thing he thinks he's entitled to exercises its own will, and thwarts him. The woman who was his possession, by right, divests him of herself.

And that just isn't permitted. Murder is the reassertion of entitlement, the regaining of self-love.

But oops, then he's an unsuccessful narcissist. Couple the failure with the foreseeable consequences of the act done to reassert the possession / to regain the self-love -- punishment for the murder committed -- and you get murder-suicide.