Tom Nichols has been writing about the Lost Boys syndrome for years and he was on it again yesterday, in an Atlantic column he called The Narcissism Of The Angry Young Men. He focussed in on “otherwise-unremarkable boys and young men who, seemingly out of nowhere, lash out at society in various ways… perpetrators of out-of-the-blue massacres of innocents. Their actions are not driven by criminal gain, but instead are meant to shock us, to make us grieve, and finally, to force us to acknowledge the miserable existence of the young men behind the triggers.” Nichols seemed reluctant to mention right-wing politics, Donald Trump, Fox News, vampires, fascists, Nazism, Tucker Carlson, hate talk radio, QAnon, the MAGA Movement, etc. None of those words were mentioned in his essay (although he bent over backwards to use lame "bothsidesism" examples).
“Guns and anomie and extremism,” he wrote, “are only facets of the problem. The real malady afflicting these men, one about which I’ve written much in the intervening years since that original article, is the deluge of narcissism in the modern world, especially among failed-to-launch young men whose injured grandiosity leads them to blame others for their own shortcomings and insecurities— and to seek revenge. 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. And they are, above all, staggeringly narcissistic. Almost all of the recent mass killers, for example, thought they had a special mission in the world. We know this because they felt compelled to tell us so. Indeed, to search for the killer’s manifesto is now part of the ritual of investigating a massacre…
Many of the Lost Boys claim to represent various causes derived from a wide spectrum of sources— sexism, racism, religious bigotry, conspiracy kookery, and anti-government extremism among them…
Narcissism is a common malady, but for the Lost Boys, it is the indispensable primer for a bomb whose core is an unstable mass of insecurities about masculine identity. This, of course, helps explain why such spectacular and ghastly acts are an almost entirely male phenomenon. Women, who are less prone to commit violence in general, are rarely the perpetrators of these kinds of senseless massacres. In general, they do not share the same juvenile fantasies of power and dominance that are common to adolescent boys. Nor do they tend to harbor the same resentments about sex and status that are common to all teenagers but that in the Lost Boys persist beyond adolescence and soon grow to volcanic levels.
…Fear of women and hatred of minorities, animosity toward authority, patterns of absent or dysfunctional fathers, histories of being bullied, romance with symbols of power, conflicts of identity and sexuality— we can catalog at length the similarities among these young misfits. They are, in the main, scared and narcissistic boys, and like many boys teetering on the cusp of manhood, they are tormented by paradoxes: insecure but drenched in self-regard, fearful yet brave, full of self-doubt yet fascinated by heroism. For most males, this is a transitory part of adolescence. For the Lost Boys, it is a permanent condition, a deadly combination of stubborn immaturity and towering narcissism.
…[A]rguments about “toxic masculinity,” as tempting as they are in these cases, miss the mark. The problem of toxic masculinity is real, but the swaggering jerks and violent abusers who sometimes become a threat to their partners (and themselves) are distinct from the insecure man-boys who decide to prove their worth— or just to prove that they exist— by committing extraordinary acts of mass murder. And, in general, toxic men are easy to spot. The Lost Boys are, by their nature, usually invisible until they strike.
Performative mass killings and large-scale terrorism are mostly post-1970s phenomena, and we can likely trace at least some of the Lost Boy problem to the rapid emergence in the past 40 years or so of a hypersexualized and yet lonelier, more atomized society. Likewise, the social institutions that once shaped and restrained the worst impulses of young men— religion, the military, schools, and even marriage itself— have gone through drastic and irrevocable changes in the same period.
We can lament some of those changes— I certainly do, particularly the collapse of a kind of mature sense of stoicism and self-control among men. But we cannot reverse them, not least because that would, in effect, require turning back time and unraveling years of social progress. The advances of women’s rights are especially terrifying to a certain cohort of the Lost Boys, but such progress was necessary and irrevocable, and society cannot be held hostage to the insecurities of a small group of males in arrested adolescence, no matter how dangerous they may be.
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