Alienation and Suicide

It is worth examining this morning's Reuters report, which takes advantage of temporal distance in its effort to account for the context of yesterday's shootings in Omaha. Consider the summary provided by the lead paragraphs:

A 19-year-old school dropout who shot and killed eight people at a shopping mall had lost both his job and girlfriend and believed he was worthless, according to a report published on Thursday.

"I'm a piece of s---," said a suicide note left behind by Robert Hawkins who killed himself after murdering five women and three men in the mall, "but I'm going to be famous now," the Omaha World-Herald reported.

Police said the rampage appeared to be part of a premeditated suicide by Hawkins, who turned his SKK assault rifle on himself after a midday bloodbath at Westroads mall on Wednesday that also left five people wounded.

One way to approach this episode might be in light of Robert Blauner's classic study, Alienation and Freedom. Even accounting for the fact that this was a study of factory workers published in 1964, I believe that his efforts to analyze the nature of alienation are just as relevant today, if not more so, particularly in light of the fact that my last invocation of Blauner came in a response to a case of three suicides at Renault. In that previous analysis I excerpted the following characterization of alienation from Blauner's forward:

Domination, futility, isolation, and discontent are each aspects of experience that have been identified as elements of the general condition of alienation, a leading perspective in modern social thought.

In his "Alienation and Modern Industry" chapter, Blauner then develops these aspects under the following headings:

• Powerlessness
• Meaninglessness
• Social Alienation
• Self-estrangement

Hawkins, of course, was not a factory worker. In the words of the Reuters report, he "was fired from a fast food restaurant for allegedly stealing $17." However, as we know from Barbara Garson's The Electronic Sweatshop and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, the fast food workplace is as alienating as any setting Blauner could have encountered in 1964.

Nevertheless, the very concept of alienation appears to be taboo in the news accounts. Not only is it absent from the Reuters report; but a Google News search on the three keywords "Hawkins," "Omaha," and "alienation" yields no hits. One explanation for this may be that editors do not want their reporters to be amateur psychologists; but the usual way of dealing with events like this is to seek out sources of "expert opinion." I find it hard to believe that reporters could not find sources that would view this event through the lens of alienation, which then makes me wonder whether or not this is a matter of editors not wanting to depress their readers, particularly when their advertisers are facing what could turn out to be a truly grizzly Christmas shopping season. This would then reflect back on reporting the news as an approach to communication that exhibits that "loss of meaning" about which Max Weber warned; and being subjected to such a loss of meaning, in turn, leads to that personal feeling of meaninglessness, which is key to Blauner's profile of the alienated individual. In other words we are dealing with an act of an alienated individual by reporting it in a way that would aggravate a feeling of meaninglessness in others who happen to read the report, thus cultivating feelings of alienation among other readers, many of whom are already enduring the other aspects of alienation in their everyday lives. We are caught in a vicious cycle; but we are impeded from recognizing (let alone reflecting) on it, because to do so would be "bad for business." Then reporters, such as those who file stories for Reuters, prepare their accounts, reminding readers of all the precedents that keep accumulating while trying to "inoculate" any "enquiring minds" from looking for any patterns. This is how we now get our information about the world the Internet has made!