Now that we have had some time over the holidays to reflect further and perhaps even find some meaning in the inconceivable meaninglessness of the tragedy at Newtown, we can begin to move towards a healing that is not superficial, which can acknowledge the pain we all feel, and which can move to prevent such tragedies in the future. While the debate on the question of gun control in America moves into a new urgency, I can’t help but think and feel that when we give too much attention to this particular issue, as important as it is, we are missing something else about human nature which we should not ignore and which is also so essential to the answers we are seeking.
What is often the most difficult thing to do in circumstances like these is to understand the pain that such individuals as Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Jared Loughner, Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold were feeling as they were drawn to commit such terrible atrocities. Who are these people? What caused such pain in their hearts and in their lives? We so easily condemn these young men to the pits of hell, dehumanizing them as we recoil from the vicious ways they dehumanized so many others. It’s a perfectly natural reaction, and in so many ways it’s also justified, but it’s one I cannot personally abide. Two verses from the Bhagavad Gita comes to my mind as I try to comprehend what was in the minds and hearts of these troubled souls:
These verses compel me to ask: what did these young men really want? I really don’t think it was to be a harbinger of massacre. A great teacher from the contemporary Vaisnava tradition of the Gita has said that are actions are either an act of love or a cry for love. When our desire for love is corrupted, ignored, and seemingly destroyed, it manifests instead into selfish and lustful desires, from which the most obscene and nightmarish acts can manifest. How did the natural and human desire for love in these young men’s lives become so perverted?
As I have read the sporadic and incomplete accounts of Adam Lanza’s life, and as I recall the life stories of some of these other young men who were drawn to such evil, I can’t help but feel some sympathy and some resonance. They are often described as ostracized loners, deeply introverted individuals struggling with intense mental illness. The structures of family, society, and culture which surrounded them did not do enough to cure the sense of marginalization that they felt. They were not like “everyone else” and they didn’t fit into the mainstream of what’s cool, what’s hot, and what’s sexy. From those dark margins, they lashed out in ways which are truly beyond mercy. In order to be seen, to be known, they killed as many innocent people as they could.
How much of the recent news coverage of the Newtown massacre has really attempted to try to understand the pain that Adam Lanza felt? How much of our own thought and conversation about what happened in Newtown has been about Adam’s pain? This is no way condones what he did, nor should it take our focus and care away from the victims of this tragedy, but I feel that we must try to understand the sources of Adam’s pain to truly understand what happened and what we can do to prevent it from ever happening again. No amount of gun control can prevent this evil from showing its face if we choose not to confront this evil where it truly lies, from where it truly came from.
In my first semester at Union Theological Seminary, I have deepened my encounter with the marginalized voice from across many different social, sexual, and religious perspectives. In my own experience, as a straight-white-middle class-North American male, I cannot say I suffer in any way the same marginalization that most people in this world face, yet I cannot say I am free from its curse. All of my life, up to this very day, I share a lot of similarities with someone like Adam Lanza. Like him I am also introverted, not entirely comfortable in the crowd and in the scene, often unable to find a secure place in the social sphere. Like Adam, going back to the days I was chased around my junior high playground because I was a “nerd”, to my struggles today to find a place in the intensely extroverted and passionately activist environment at Union, I have felt a sharp and certain pain at being left out of the crowd.
As I’ve grown, I have seen that the cause of my own marginalization has often been my own fears and paranoias, and I am deeply grateful for my friends, family, and comrades and colleagues who have and continue to give me the love and support to help me become who I am and who I want to be. I am very grateful for my spiritual path which has given me so much meaning and clarity as to the reality of my nature and the nature of reality itself. I am also very grateful for my mental health as well. Perhaps I may be on the “spectrum” of Asperger’s/autism as Adam and many of these other individuals were and are to greater or lesser degrees, but I am secure in being able to discern when my mind is my friend and when my mind is my adversary in terms of having a sane bit of ground to stand on in this seemingly insane world.
I can imagine that perhaps many other introverts may also feel this kind of sympathy and resonance with Adam Lanza. Being an introvert means feeling a certain vibe of exclusion from those who are not introverted. As I have said, sometimes that vibe is simply a projection of one’s own fears, but very often it is quite real. Those who are extroverted, who are “socially adjusted”, often simply do not know how to deal with those who are introverted. They may call the introverted person “mysterious” without understanding how that can be taken as a sort of epithet, as the extrovert’s own failure to see outside of a limited socialized vision. Because one doesn’t fit in what the expected ways and means of socializing, one can be expected to face a certain kind of conscious and unconscious marginalization. This is my experience at least, and I feel it is a kind of marginalization which has to be considered alongside all of the other kinds of marginalization we study and agonize over and fight to transcend.
In many ways, our contemporary culture is geared towards the marginalization of the introvert, and from the darkest corners of this space, individuals like Adam Lanza are pushed by others and pushed by the illness within their own mind to lash out as they do. We live in a culture which is exquisitely geared to the passion of extroversion, of the fashion of being able to impress and of wanting to be impressed, often for the shallowest of reasons, of profit and prestige. The great Christian philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, in Nature and Destiny of Man, writes that the individual shaped by the most superficial modalities of modern industrial and technical culture has an “easy conscience”, since they refuse to look and think deeply into the shape of the reality that surrounds them. We are, in many ways, a culture which has tremendous difficulties accommodating and acknowledging differences which reveal aspects of human nature which don’t adhere to the so-called values of conformity. In that ignorance comes a tremendous price to pay.
It is a common realization and frustration amongst many of us who seek truth and spirit that the art of introspection and introversion, the art of being alone, the art of being comfortable with oneself in solitude, has become devalued. In the “one great big festering neon distraction” we have lost touch. Another fellow Christian mystic of our times, Thomas Merton, writes in New Seeds of Contemplation:
The need for true solitude is a complex and dangerous thing, but it is a real need. It is all the more real today when the collectivity tends more and more to swallow up the person in its shapeless and faceless mass. The temptation of our day is to equate “love” and “conformity”-passive subservience to the mass-mind or to the organization…True solitude is the home of the person, false solitude the refuge of the individualist. The person is constituted by a uniquely subsisting capacity to love-by a radical ability to care for all beings made by God and loved by Him. Such a capacity is destroyed by the loss of perspective. Without a certain element of solitude there can be no compassion because when a man is lost in the wheels of a social machine he is no longer aware of human needs as a personal responsibility. One can escape from men by plunging into the midst of a crowd!
I think we can all agree that something like the tragedy in Newtown has happened because we have lost perspective. It is so overwhelming to try to figure out where we have gone astray, and what we have lost. It is incredibly confronting to admit that one of the root causes of something like Newtown is because we live in a culture which no longer places the personal responsibility for each other’s human needs at the center of our lives. Those who get lost and thrown in the cracks, the Adam Lanzas of the world, bear to us a tremendous reminder of the transvaluation of natural and spiritual values and morals which we all too often take for granted and conform to in our own ways.
The question of gun control is but one facet of a deeper corruption of our human society and nature which is the real cause of the tragedies in Newtown, Columbine, Tucson, Aurora, and Virginia Tech, what to speak of the countless daily massacres we hear too little about here and across the world. One humble suggestion in this case is a call to honor introspection and to honor the introvert. We need to understand, especially if we of an extroverted nature, that if marginalize those who are introverted, we are causing tremendous pain, which rarely but all too often manifests in something which is so inconceivably terrible. There are many like Adam Lanza around us, if not in the potential to cause so much grievous harm, but in those who are solitary people either comfortable or uncomfortable in that skin, and who experience great pain at being ostracized from the love and acceptance they crave and need.
I think, the divorce, the medicines taken by Adam, the don’t care attitudes of the society, remarriage of his father, Nancy’s strict nature, Nancy hiding the problems rather than solving it, Nancy not allowing him to join the army, her intentions to send him for mental treatment, her short vacations leaving him alone in the house, and the easy access to guns all these together might have led to such a crisis.
It is high time to think about how the family bondage can be made stronger. The parents should be mentally healthy enough to look after the children rather than giving medicines to mentally affected children because of separation of
parents.
Please think why so much of children who are affected by Asperger’s are there in the society. Are we communicating with the children properly? The moment children
are able to play on computers, parents only give them computers so that it is easy for them to look after the children. Then how can children communicate with
other children. They are used to communicating with imaginary people in computers. Please think aloud, why so much of children are affected by this disease.
Rather than blaming Adam Lanza for doing this, this incident should be an eye opener to think of what is wrong with the present society and how it can be corrected. He was a victim of the society’s drawbacks.
Let this incident be a stepping stone for a renovation.
Apply the “Glasnost” (openness) and “Perestroika” (restructuring) applied by Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia when Russia underwent an economic crisis.
Nothing happens without the knowledge of GOD. GOD allowed this to happen for the good
of the future generations.
I do not want to blame anybody, but pray that a conscious move to eradicate such incidents in future may be taken by all people around the world including myself.
This can be achieved only by loving each other.
Nothing is impossible for man, if he wants, with the grace of GOD. Let it be a revolution, a revolution of love. I have started the revolution. Join me.
I admire the compassionate stance you’ve taken on introversion. The world is designed by extroverts for introverts and to the introvert it can be a ghastly, gaudy cacophony.
Extroverts run on dopamine and introverts on ACh, two different neurotransmitters. ACh takes the long path round the brain exciting neurons as it goes. But dopamine travels a shorter path and excites fewer neurons. So as extroverts keep cranking it up to get stimulation, introverts get over-stimulated and exhausted.
That’s why we like our solitude. It’s a respite and allows us to spend time in our comfort zone.
But I think your argument may fall at the final fence. Adam Lanza had every opportunity for perfect solitude.
He was estranged from his family, his only contact a secretive mother who was passably sociable yet was known not to invite people to the house. The house was a large one on spacious grounds in a neighbourhood so private the Google car didn’t even get a look in.
Damm, there’s always something. That sentence in the first paragraph should read ‘The world is designed by extroverts for extroverts and to the introvert…’
But it gives me the opportunity to add the observation that the extreme solitude of Adam Lanza could have fed an existential depression (a vulnerability in gifted people and there appears to be a consensus that Lanza was such) and may have created a dissociative disorder.
Christopher,
Thank you for your articulate and thoughtful article on honoring the introvert. It’s brave to discuss this topic at this moment when much of America simply wants to label Adam Lanza a monster. It pains me how we tend to label people in order to feel comfortable in our own skin. The quickness to call Lanza mentally ill before any facts were discovered only sought to further separate the world between good people and bad ones. Thus, as your post points out, in a society in which the extrovert is glorified it is very difficult for an introvert to become comfortable in their own skin without feeling like an outsider.
Yet, just as it is important for us to not glorify the extrovert, I don’t think we should unnecessarily exult the virtues of the introvert. Each of us tends to be predisposed one way or the other (I believe I am predisposed as an introvert as well), but part of the challenge of life is to find a balance in which we strive to be true to who we are yet also challenge ourselves to become who we want to be.
One of my favorite rabbis and teachers of all time is Rabbi Nahman of Breslov who died over 200 years ago yet still has followers called “Breslover Hassidim” today (most of whom live in Israel). What I treasure most about him is not a particular teaching, but the way in which he carried himself. It seems as if he was an introvert — focusing most of his time on practicing “hitbod’dut” which literally means “to make oneself alone.” It is a spiritual practice of going into a secluded place like a forest so you can converse intimately with God. It seems that he spent most of his life performing this practice. However, at a certain point he realized that in order for the practice to mean something more he would have to teach others, and the way to do that was to do one of the most extroverted things you can do — to tell stories to people. He traveled as far as he could sharing stories which hinted at the insights he discovered about God. He did what extroverts do — he met many people and influenced how they saw and understood life. He never lost sight of who he was — he knew that life was meaningless without personal exploration and making oneself alone. Yet he was brave enough to know that any worthwhile power must eventually be shared, or it would die out with him. So, he pushed himself to do something which he may not have been comfortable with so that he could truly become who he wanted to be.