Cho Seung-Hui’s ‘manifesto’, describing his subsequent
shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University
For many, the worst thing in the world is being rejected by others – kicked out, cut off, blackballed, sent to Coventry, unfriended. It doesn’t matter how it is done. They are all ways of being ostracized. To be excluded by others is psychological death.
Exclusion is also a form of non-physical bullying, and it can sometimes have devastating consequences. In the US, the Center for Disease Control has estimated that around 4,600 children between the ages of ten and fourteen years commit suicide every year.76 Teenage bullying is associated with depression, loneliness and suicidal thoughts.77 Although the direct link between bullying and suicide remains to be established, contemplating killing oneself is considered a major risk factor. It is not always the physical aspects of bullying that are so detrimental, but rather the social exclusion that it usually entails. A Dutch study of nearly 4,811 schoolchildren aged between nine and thirteen years of age found that social isolation was more harmful than physical violence for both boys and girls.78 Given the choice, teenagers would rather be hit than excluded as those who had experienced both forms of bullying reported that social aggression made them feel worse.79 What makes these findings all the more shocking is that many teachers do not regard social exclusion as being as bad as physical bullying. In other words, not only is it difficult to monitor or police because it may go on largely unnoticed by teachers, but they can also be more tolerant of it.80
Rejection can also be accompanied by that other toxic thought, humiliation – ridicule and mocking by the group. No one can easily tolerate the public destruction of one’s self worth, because that would make life worthless. When people feel they have been humiliated, some will wreak terrible revenge. If they do not turn the aggression in on themselves with suicide, a few will direct it back at others. They ‘go postal’ – a reference to the spate of US postal workers who murdered former colleagues in rampages during the 1990s.
Rampage killings are the consequences of social rejection taken to the ultimate extreme. One analysis81 of school mass shootings such as Virginia Tech and Columbine revealed that in thirteen out of the fifteen cases, the perpetrators had been socially excluded, as illustrated so shockingly in the quote from the Virginia Tech manifesto. Others simply try to hurt society as much as possible. In the Dunblane school massacre, Thomas Hamilton targeted the most innocent victims – children – as retribution against the adults who questioned his suitability as a Scout troop leader in charge of children. In letters to the press, the BBC and even the Queen, he spelled out his resentment at his dismissal from the Scouts, which had festered for twenty-five years amidst rumours and accusations that he was a pervert, leading to his ridicule by the community. We do not yet know enough about the Sandy Hook atrocity of 2012, but gunman Adam Lanza clearly acted to inflict as much suffering as possible, and again on children. What sort of disturbed individuals could care so little about the hurt they brought to others?
One could argue that it is not that these murderers did not care about others, but rather they cared too much. They cared more about what other people thought about them than they did for the lives of their victims, their families and ultimately themselves. These atrocities were deliberate sabotage in order to be noticed. In their disturbed minds, these murderers thought they were getting even with an unjust world.
Most of us lead relatively normal lives without the extremes of ostracism and violence, but we all know what it feels like to be excluded. Even in the absence of extreme exclusion, we still lead our lives seeking the approval of others and, in doing so, maybe we all care just a little too much. Almost everything that we do is motivated by what others think, and how we are being judged.
If you ask most people about ambitions and goals, they will talk about success – something that many want but few can attain. Success is defined by what other people think. Even success in terms of material wealth and possessions has this curious aspect. We want more money to buy more of the trappings of success so that we can have status within the group. Non-material success, such as fame or infamy, is again defined by what others think. Every author writes in the hope that he or she will be read by many. Every painter wants his or her work to be appreciated. Every singer or actor wants an audience. Every politician needs support. Even the solitary rampaging gunman is motivated by what others think.
We have reached a point in our civilization where many want to be famous for the sake of just being famous, irrespective of how they go about it. There is some deep compulsion in most of us to be noticed by the group. When a small child is crying out to his parents, ‘Look at me, Look at me!’, they are declaring one of the fundamental needs when it comes to being human – the need for attention. That childhood urge never really goes away as we grow up into adults seeking the attention of others because they validate our existence.
The need for attention is the bittersweet twist to domestic life. Most children are raised in a nurturing environment that breeds dependency on others. Initially that dependency addresses all the physical and emotional needs that our long childhoods engender. It is a time when we learn how to become members of the groups that surround us, but when we eventually grow up to attain a level of independence, acceptance and inclusion as adults, most of us remain bound in a continual cycle of seeking approval from others. Almost everything we do is done with a view to how others will perceive us. That quest provides both the joys and the miseries of being a social animal.
People spend time together for a number of reasons. We may have family commitments and most of us work alongside colleagues. There are also few places on this planet where one can escape the presence of others entirely. But whether we have no choice or we actively seek out the company of others, we always prefer to be liked by the groups that we join.
Likeability depends very much on what qualities the group decides are admirable. The psychologist Richard Nisbett has argued that different cultures value different ways of behaving in groups and indeed perceive the social world differently in terms of the relatedness of individuals and groups.1 In Eastern traditions, members of a group are interdependent and see themselves not so much as individuals but as a collective team working for the common good. This interdependence stems all the way from the family to the workplace to the whole of society. In contrast, Westerners are much more likely to consider themselves as individuals and value those who achieve success even when that comes at a cost of trampling on others on the way up to the top. Asians take great pleasure from participating in and succeeding as a group, whereas Westerners tend to take greater pride in individual achievements. Such an individualistic approach would be considerable extremely rude by most traditionalists from the East. As Nisbett points out, in Chinese there is no word for ‘individualism’, with the word that comes closest being one that corresponds to ‘selfishness’.
Ultimately, whether collective or individualistic, validation in any culture only really exists in the minds of others. It is not enough that I believe my achievements to be a success, but rather they have to be recognized as successful by the group. This deep-seated need to be valued by the group arises because of our domesticated brains. Our success depends on acceptance from the people who inhabit our social landscape, the one that is shaped during our development. However, that landscape is now destined to change in ways that could never have been predicted.