Name: Malcolm Gladwell Discusses the Psyche of Mass Shooters
Uploaded: 2023-06-05T20:36:47.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Malcolm Gladwell Discusses the Psyche of Mass Shooters' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Malcolm Gladwell Discusses the Psyche of Mass Shooters' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-05. Transcript available.

we were talking about with like school shootings what leads some of these
people to get so caught
up and i think for one if you don't have any purpose through like a job through
a family
have like love in your life like something that gives you purpose every day and
you're really at
the whims of social media or anything tailored towards if you start looking at
something bad
it just gives you more bad you know it's almost like a pair of words box in a
way yeah the school
shooting thing is interesting because what's going on there is that there is
now a kind of uh
it's funny i'm doing in this season of my podcast i'm doing a whole thing about
gun violence so i've
been thinking a lot about this and we have an episode where we talk a lot about
about mass shootings
and i think the psychology of that is really going back to the idea of those
three layers of
that there's a world now a kind of closed culture online of people who are unhealthily
obsessed
pathologically obsessed with this kind of violence and there there is no they've
they've been cut off
from the third layer they're not checking their ideas against what the broader
world looks like
they're totally enclosed in this sealed online culture where the only feedback
they're getting are from
people who think exactly like they do and who feed their kind of obsessive fascination
and addiction
for this kind of weird violence like if you look at people who have been
involved in mass shootings
um they're immersed in that world they know they can talk obsessively for hours
about like the kids
who did the columbine shooting oh yeah there's bootleg manifestos there's
people getting like yeah have
you heard this manifest have you read this kind of like it's his own little
world hermetically seen
world and like there's no connection to the kind of broader society and so they
become to think of
they come to think they get they're getting all their validation from that
first layer
right that's what's sort of that and so you know breaking trying to solve this
puzzle of mass shootings
requires at some point to getting access to those kids and kind of breaking
them out of that
um uh closed universe yeah and the interesting about like all but with online
and living in online
societies now it's like you can find whatever universe whatever universe you
start to create
right whether it's good or bad that there's this other energy from the other
side it's almost like the
mirror where you used to look in a mirror and you would get like an earnest
reflection yourself it
would be based on sometimes you might not see yourself clearly because of how
you thought about
yourself or how you felt about yourself but at least the mirror was going to
give you
it was an honest reflection there was no ability to change the mirror unless
you were in a fun house
or something the mirror was the mirror but now the mirror has the ability to
kind of adjust the way
you look at yourself or to give you reflections that make you think the same
things over and over again
yeah like with um algorithms and that sort of thing with social media you know
because now we're not
even the mirror is just our phone we're looking in there for so much validation
yeah um it's really
weird when the mirror now has the path it's like that's freaking really scary
because if you get
somebody in a dark hole who doesn't have a strong connection to our purpose in
the world where they
feel some one of the senses of value from themselves from other people what are
the other two from the
internal your immediate world of people who share your community and then the
broader world and then
yeah yeah if you're not feeling some of that and you're just in your intern
just in this kind of a
closed space or even in a a space that the mirror starts to design that's
really if you get into the dark
arts a little bit and it's only showing you dark art and everybody in there is
a dark artist and you're
like damn this is the world yeah that's real scary man hope you enjoyed that
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