UPDATED: Is This Ghost Shirt Time?

Yesterday, in response to commenter Cassander, I wrote:

I suspect that in the mass killings we are seeing some of the results of social dislocation that the dismantling of our national culture has wrought. The response of the "elite" shows that they regard their Americans not so much as fellow citizens but simply as subjects to be ruled.

There's a lot included in that phrase "national culture", and in it I certainly include the religious civilization of the West--and not least the understanding of Meaning In History. If you're interested, you can plunge back into the blog archives. OTOH, if you want a much quicker read and want to focus on the specific issue of the phenomenon of "mass" or "rampage" shootings, you would do well to read Christopher Chantrill at American Thinker today: Mass Shootings: Is This Ghost Shirt Time?

Chantrill starts out with the question: Who is to blame? But it's quickly apparent that he sees this question as detracting from what's really necessary: Coming to an understanding of what's behind it all. And he has a simple one sentence starting point:

When the young men in a culture feel hopeless they expend themselves in a suicide cult.

And from there he moves on to historical examples. His examples are of societies in existential crisis. Societies that, in my terms, have lost their understanding of "meaning in history". Once lost, meaning that is based in love of reality and the source of its being is very difficult to recover. With that in mind, consider Chantrill's examples (he provides detail from Wikipedia for some of his examples) as well as his comments.

Example One: the Ghost Dance movement among native American tribes in the Great Plains in 1890 after the white man had overrun their homelands. ... 

... 

That wasn’t the only desperate response to the Century of the White Man. In China, they had the Boxer Rebellion in 1899. ... 

... 

You could make a good argument that the Islamic terrorism of the Middle East is the consequence of the demoralization of Muslim men in an age of western cultural and economic hegemony. 

The common denominator is the experience of imminent cultural annihilation: for the Plains Indians the utter demolition of their way of life; for the Chinese the collapse of the Qin dynasty. And for the Muslims of the Middle East? Well, I’d say that they have had a whole century of nightmare, ever since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire...  

For some reason Chantrill fails to connect the collapse of the Qin dynasty at the hands of a foreign culture--alien to the Middle Kingdom, the center of the universe--with cultural ahhihilation. Or the same could be said of Muslim self understanding. I urge that analysis on all who care for our future. There's lots more to be said about how, in the West, cultural suicide was urged on society as an advance in human self understanding--not imposed from outside. The techniques of indoctrination and control.

Now here in the United States we have had about fifty years of a ruling class culture that turned on a dime, around 1970, from a policy of praising working class whites to the skies to a policy of blaming whites, and especially white men, for all the ills of the world. Since the Dawn of Time. 

Again, there's much more to it than that. "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!" Does that sound like an existential threat of imminent "cultural annihilation" to you? It does to me. And it didn't just come from nowhere. We need to look for the source of that threat, and a relatively proximate source can readily be found in the American "progressive movement" at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Hey geniuses! What did you think would happen? That all those toxic racist sexist homophobes would just take their cultural obliteration lying down? Ain’t you libs ever read a book? 

And then there are the young white males of Antifa, the young white males of the alt-right. The folks killing themselves in the opioid crisis. The young black gangbangers of the Chicagos and Baltimores of the land killing each other every weekend. The homeless encampments waiting for the end in all the best liberal cities. 

What is going on here? It’s not just the white mass shooters experiencing cultural desperation. 

... 

Look. Since the educated ruling class is the ruling class, it means that everything that goes wrong in this country is their fault. 

And yet they have the nerve -- the noive -- to blame Trump and white supremacy for everything.

UPDATE: Stepping back from the more or less philosophical plane to the more concrete everyday life level:

Of the 27 Deadliest Mass Shooters, 26 of Them Had One Thing in Common

Missing fathers and America's broken boys - the vast majority of mass shooters come from broken homes

The root of fatherlessness is deep and wide, but it ultimately rests in two things: our culture’s dismissal of men as valuable human beings who have something unique to offer—on the one hand, we tell them to ‘man up,’ and on the other we tell them manhood is the problem—and its dismissal of marriage as an institution that’s crucial to the health and well-being of children. This long-standing belief has been supplanted by the notion that marriage is about the emotional fulfillment of adults. 

It is not. Marriage is about the needs of children, pure and simple. That’s how it began, and that’s how it remains. Children’s needs are the same today as they were one hundred years ago. It is we, not they, who have changed. 

Thus, it is we who have failed.

The desperate cry of America's boys

To be sure, there will be those who’ll continue to blame masculinity and the NRA for the recent bout of school shootings. But amidst their chatter are voices of reason who know all too well, either from first-hand experience or because they’re simply paying attention, that the reason boys are broken goes far deeper than policies and politics—and requires us to look at things we’d rather not.

And who are the people championing new forms of family, i.e., the destruction of the family? The ruling elites. Social dislocation, cultural annihilation? You betcha.