Everyone Has What I Lack: The Delusional Vision of Elliot Rodger and its Wider Message

In fundamental ways psychotherapeutic practice stands at odds with the wider society within which it’s embedded. Individuals are bombarded with the injunction to enjoy their life, while both sacred and secular sources openly provide formulas for achieving this goal (from embracing spiritual practices to finding the perfect partner, fame or wealth). Nowhere is this superego injunction to enjoy more obvious than in the way people conspire with it in Social Media. Here we witness how millions of people give in to the pressure of curating their lives in a way that creates the illusion of joy, depth and satisfaction. From a therapeutic perspective all of this can lead to destructive symptoms in those who internalize such a message, for the stronger the demand to enjoy the more they experience themselves falling short.

This injunction to enjoy feeds into the idea that there is an other out there who is experiencing the pleasure that we are being demanded to have. The greater the demand is felt, the more inadequate and impotent we feel.

Slavoj Žižek has written insightfully on how certain forms of religious violence can be read as a destructive symptom of this fantasy. For example, when a preacher screams passionately about all the rampant promiscuity out in the world it is often clear to everyone but the preacher himself that this tirade is motivated be jealousy. The point then is that not that the fundamentalist preacher believes too much in his own worldview, but rather too little.

For Žižek the true fundamentalist doesn’t look with anger at the society around her, but rather is likely to take a stance of superior and patronizing sympathy toward it. When a fundamentalist is willing to kill because of a hatred for Western decadence, for instance, this can hint at a repressed belief in, and desire for, that decadence.

Here the person’s real belief lies in the (fantasized) lifestyle of the other, a lifestyle that they feel barred from in some way. There is then hatred against both the other (for being able to have it) and oneself (for not). Pleasure thus arises from imagining how the others pleasure will be stripped from them in this life or the next.

This destructive logic can be seen clearly in the case of Elliot Rodger. Rodger provided us with a window into the feelings that fueled his murderous rampage by leaving behind multiple short videos and a 107-page document outlining his inner life. What becomes obvious in these vitriolic texts is the way that he was plagued by fantasies that everyone around him was partaking in an excessive pleasure that was out of his reach. His vision was one of a world engaged in some kind of unending adolescent party plucked straight from a teen movie. He fantasized that those around him had what he lacked, and his hatred burned against them.

To teach a medical student how to detect symptoms of an illness one shows her an extreme example. As she examines the advanced symptoms she will become better equipped to spot the less severe versions. In much the same way we can view Rodger as an extreme symptom of a wider cultural problem. One that rarely leads to murder, but often manifests itself in deep depression, hatred and loneliness.

Rodger provides us with a horrifyingly clear manifestation of the ways in which so many are tormented by a sense that everyone else is having a life full of enriching friendships, satisfying sexual encounters and meaningful activities. Such a belief, which we ourselves might perpetuate by crafting our own manicured online image of ourselves, can all too easily lead to destructive behaviour.

That is why we need sites where people can be honest about their struggles and discover that other people also are burdened by theirs. This does not imply that everyone is really unhappy, but rather, that happiness and unhappiness are both a part of life. While some of us are lucky to have suffered few externally generated traumas, all of us are faced with the trauma of life itself.

As Paul Tillich wrote in The Courage to Be, all us are touched in some way by anxiety (which, he writes, can manifest itself in the guise of guilt, meaninglessness, or a sense of our own impending death). Whether the scars this anxiety leaves are shallow or deep, none of us escape life unharmed.

And yet a happier, healthier life might be possible if we are able to compare our scars and realize that we are all, in different ways, walking through mountains and valleys.

The truth is that people are not as constantly happy, smart, and successful as their Social Media persona might imply. Life involves both joy and suffering (which are often mixed together in some way), and learning this might have medicinal benefits both individually and politically.