by Don Hall

A fifty-seven year old white man sits in an apartment in the middle of the country. He is alone. He wakes up alone, he goes to bed alone. He has endured a bizarre and heartbreaking divorce. This man has a history of temper. He has few friends and those he does he communicates with via FaceTime and phone calls.

According to the reducing of types into groups and, in an effort to understand the behavior of individuals in a large, online society in need of immediate answers, this man is just a time bomb ticking, a mass shooter waiting for that ignition to explode on innocent people in a public square. Interviews with his friends and family would indicate that no one saw it coming (even they probably did). A Netflix true crime show might even be made about his stereotypical incel behavior.

The statistics practically scream that this outcome is guaranteed.

Granted, this solitary man is a bit past his 'purchase by' date. He was far more likely to explode into a violent firearm-gilded spree a two decades ago but still. He is a white man in America. He is heterosexual. He is center-left and finds the excesses of the progressive left and regressive right to be frustrating and laughable. He is not lost but largely left behind. The media tells him repeatedly that he is either a villain or a victim.

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.

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I'd suggest that most socially awkward young men are not fixated on being denied their dominant role in society or even bother to ponder their roles as men. Most are more likely confused individuals with specific issues untethered to the sociological perspective on manhood. A jilted lover. Inability to find work. An estranged family. A sense that their existence has little meaning.

The flattening of individual impulses into a sociological category sounds helpful. It is a method to understand behavior and find answers to why people are the way they are. It is also stereotyping of groups into reduced traits which, at least from my GenX upbringing, was something I was taught to avoid at all costs.

The 'why?' of mass shootings is not as easily classifiable as reducing motivations to a single serving cause. Credible studies indicate that the majority of mass shooters in the United States are not legally insane, are not racially motivated, and do not suddenly snap but rather meticulously plan their murders.

There were 24,576 homicides in 2020 compared to 200,955 accidental deaths, according to the CDC. You’re about twice as likely to die from an unintentional fall, for example, than be murdered. Also: The lion’s share of murder victims, about 80 percent, are men. Meanwhile, the FBI estimates that less than one percent of murders committed in any given year are carried out by serial killers.

Back to the man in his apartment. How is it he embodies a specific description of some random dude who meticulously plans out the murder of random people to fit some bizarre martyr fantasy against his many perceived oppressors and yet does not follow suit with the reductive stereotype presented? How does he buck the system and not represent the pigeonhole single men these days have been mashed into?

He loves his mother.

When I hear a dude speak fondly of his family and specifically his mother, my gut tells me has a decent relationship to women (or at least a non-threatening one).

When a man has a fraught relationship with his mother, the primary relationship with the concept of female, it can't help but affect his general view of women. Not to get all psychoanalytical but like the woman with contentious memories of her father tend to accept less from men, the man who feels emasculated or beleaguered with his mother is bound to have certain archetypes in mind when dealing with women.

He cares less about the opinions of other people when it concerns his own self worth than most.

Relying on one's own self perception solely is the road extraordinary narcissism. You are neither as good or bad, fat or skinny, beautiful or hideous as you think you are. Relying on the opinions of others in large percentages is the road to overwhelming self loathing and guilt. Most people see and think so little of you that their perspective on who you are is wholly unreliable. Focus on having your self reflection be honest and listen to the opinions of people you know and trust and you might not feel the impulse to die by cop and take e few innocent victims along for the ride.

He understands the difference between alone and lonely.

Lonely packs in with it the status of victim. Alone is a choice. The rabid dogs who see the world as unfair and determined to keep him on the fringes hugs the role of victim hard. It is the natural evolution of the Olympiad of Victim Status that the country has been snowballing down the hill that with more power to those who see oppressors at every turn and themselves as the oppressed, more of us embrace the whiney stance of the whine.

He finds opportunities to create without the need for validation.

Everyone has a creativity zone. Whether it's writing or painting or making Tik Tok videos, creation is at the heart of the best parts of what it is to human.

Too many people bake a cake and can only enjoy that cake if others praise its deliciousness. The man in his apartment is pleased if someone else digs his cake but isn't motivated by that affirmation. He bakes a cake because he can and because he wants some cake.

There are in the United States just under 1.3 million white guys between the ages of 18 and 65. According to surveys done by Pew, 38% of them are single—494,000. Between 1982 and July 2023, 76 out of the 145 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by white men. That means that 0.015% of single white men in America decided to kill themselves and others in a selfish, destructive impulse to take their own bullshit out on random strangers.

If a dog bites someone (it happens) we don't suddenly paint the picture that all dogs or even a significant percentage of dogs are feral.

A fifty-seven year old white man sits in an apartment in the middle of the country. He is alone. He wakes up alone, he goes to bed alone. He has endured a bizarre and heartbreaking divorce. This man has a history of temper. He has few friends and those he does he communicates with via FaceTime and phone calls. He has no impulse to kill a bunch of people.

Seems like the stereotype is off. On the other hand, he might bite someone on the street.