Several days ago I read My Twisted Life, by Elliot Rodger.
After reading it I knew that it was a work that would require deep thought
before I could comment on it. After much contemplation I think I am ready to summarize
my thoughts.
Elliot Rodger was a young man who felt himself different and
apart from the world, and he was. There are many in this life who will know the
great pain that comes from being socially rejected. Some will know this as
children, as I did, and yet others such as Elliot will have happy childhoods
but as puberty approaches they will know this loneliness and rejection as young
adults. Still others will know this all their lives.
As humans, we want to be accepted by our counter parts.
Although some may be introverts to varying degrees, I don’t think even the most
hard-core introvert wants to be rejected at their core. There is a difference
between wanting to spend alone time and being rejected by the population at
large. Some might choose to be isolated but no one chooses to be rejected.
The easy thing to do, after reading My Twisted Life, would
be to judge, to assign labels on Elliot such as misogynist, socially inept,
egotist… harder still to reach for a common ground, to reach for understanding,
compassion.
Many will say that we need to spurn the killer and have
compassion for the victims and yes no doubt about it, we do need to have compassion
for those whose lives were ripped away, however that does not preclude having
compassion for the young man that felt so much despair and depression that his
hurt stayed festering for years until he finally erupted.
It has been said that Elliot was a high functioning
autistic. I know something about this, as a friend and family member to several
people with Asperger’s. I have witnessed the way that society treats these
people that have something a little different about them.
I’ve heard it said that over 50% of human communication is
nonverbal. That means that most of us are programmed to pick up nonverbal clues
in communication. When someone doesn’t know the language of communication very
well, such as when to smile, what to do with their hands, when they don’t
project friendliness, relaxed expressions and body language and in essence don’t
do the “right” nonverbal things, then other humans will automatically react
with uncertainty, hesitancy and fear, and that fear leads to rejection. I have
seen this many times in watching how some of my friends react to my other
friends that have Asperger’s. “He’s weird.” “I don’t know, something about him
that isn’t right.” The person may not have actually had a conversation with my Asperger’s
friend or family member but have already felt this sense of awkwardness emanating
from the person enough to have formed an opinion and a judgement. In all
fairness, this is something that keeps us protected from harm as we try to decipher
clues about another person to figure out if they mean us harm. Ultimately we are
always conscious of our survival, which leads me back to Elliot.
The most basic human need and the one that drives us as a
species is the need for love and acceptance. It’s why babies cry the minute
they are pushed into this world. Without attracting love and attention to
themselves they will surely die. As we grow up in a family we are taught and
trained to lose our neediness for others and schooled to become independent, to
feed and clothe ourselves and to become less needy towards our parents and
eventually to find a mate to love and marry.
What though, if you are like Elliot and put off signals that
constantly repeal not only the opposite sex, but people in general? Humans are
a complicated system of emotion and survival, programming and deprogramming and
we have to live under an umbrella of almost impossible-to-follow social
constructions, rules and expectations. This is why the show Seinfeld was such a
hit because it brought to light the crazy social rules we twist ourselves like
pretzels to follow.
When you don’t fit into society it can be extremely lonely,
disheartening and depressing. For some it can signal the start of a physiological
disturbance. Elliot didn’t just feel lonely one day and went out and killed
people the next. It took years of rejection and pain to bring about the
conclusion that it did.
Now most people who experience rejection and the pain of
being a social outcast don’t go out and shoot up a town of people. That’s where
mental health comes in. There are many
ways that people deal with this sort of thing. Some will accept it and learn to
live with it. Others will keep trying to find friends that accept them for them.
Many will succeed in this and find at least one or two friends that accept them
and many have even found a mate. Some though, like Elliot continue to sink
deeper into depression and some will commit suicide. For still others,
depression turns to frustration and then to anger. As evidenced in his
manifesto, Elliot’s thoughts circled again and again to the fact that he was
socially rejected by females and he began to hold a deep-seated rage towards
not only the women who he claims rejected him but also towards the popular
jocks who seemed to win where he failed. Elliot held a rage towards all those
who lived a “normal” life that included love and sex primarily, but also
friendship and acceptance, as that is what he claims that he wanted above all
else. He began to blame the world around him and even his own mother for the
fact that others had the life that he couldn’t have.
Through it all, Elliot refused to explore the possibility
that he himself could do some things to improve himself, to make himself a
person of substance to have something to offer a potential mate. His manifesto
is filled with the attitude that he was perfect and the world was wrong.
It is troubling to look at ourselves as imperfect. It is
painful to consider why we have failed and that we might be flawed. Elliot
seemingly could not perform this task of self-reflection and problem solving.
It was beyond him. His writing reveals his problem-solving to be quite
superficial, stating that the reason he didn’t have a woman was that he wasn’t
rich, rather than a personality flaw that he could work on. He spent great
expense and effort to try to win the lottery as a way to gain approval and was
wrapped up in a materialistic attitude about life. As his rage deepened his focus became singular,
not to ‘settle’ for a life that included whomever would be his friend and
whichever girl he could win, no, he had to have a pretty girl, a blonde and be
the most popular kid. He would never lower his standards and so his rage
continued to build. Towards the end of his life, it was plain to see that he
had lost all sense of reality and only had the most superficial wants and
desires. His anger had built to the point of no return and this failure to
accept reason and reality is what truly lead him to his hate filled murdering
spree.
Elliot Rodger’s life is a sad tale of rejection and then
rejection of rejection, which resulted in a rage that could not be quenched. On
some level, we all know the pain of rejection and we also know the anger that
wells inside when we feel we are dealt with unjustly. Elliot knew it all but
his anger rose to such heights that not many of us have felt, namely the anger
that causes one to take a life and feel glee while doing so. Elliot needs a
moment of our compassion, not in the same sense that the victims do, but yet in
a way unique to him, for a person carrying that much pain inside should garner
our consideration, our sympathy and maybe, just maybe, our forgiveness because
we all have this great capacity to feel pain and rage and it is only our
reason, something which was worn away in Elliot, that separates us from a
killer.
