Expanding an individual act into a social problem manufactures a collective responsibility.
And the exposition:
The "You didn't build that" society is also the "You didn't do that" society. The flip side of Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama's collectivist rhetoric is that just as no one invents the airplane, creates a company or writes the Great American Novel on their own, no one kills six people on their own. If you killed six people, it's because of the Second Amendment. If you wanted to kill sorority girls, it's because of Seth Rogen movies. If you're a half-Asian who beat and stabbed your Asian roommates to death, it's because of white (or half-white) supremacism.
What we have in Rodger's manifesto is an unusually clear explanation of precisely why he did it, and none of those things comes to the fore. Given a provisional acceptance of its insane premises and a temporary suspension of disbelief, it's a perfectly rational document. And within it is an instance of precisely the sort of collectivist nonsense Greenfield has just pointed out.
He wasn't attacking any specific individual who had actually done him harm, he was attacking everyone because of their collective guilt - blonde women and men not because they were happy together but because they were capable of it, his roommates due to mere proximity and the fact that they were alive, random passersby because they were all of them equally guilty. Collectively guilty. It was not this weird propensity of the Left to collectivize guilt that killed those people, but it is that propensity that justifies it, that serves to dilute the guilt. He, the individual, the sick, frustrated, inadequate, creepy psychopath who planned to kill his loving little brother for no better reason than a suspicion that the boy was or might become more successful in his relationships than Rodgers, it was he who committed the crime.
YES!
To assign blame it is necessary to pinpoint and describe the precise influence that motivates killers. A theory of reality that explains every personal failure as the direct fault of social conditions does precisely this. The bizarre reality is that we cannot “fix” societies with the same ease that we can “fix” individuals.
Not that repairing the broken nature of a psychopath is simple. It is, however, doable. Trying to assign blame to society and fix whatever is deemed to cause pathologies is not doable. Blaming categories, however, allows progressives to establish authority over large swaths of society. This does nothing, of course, to stop pathological murderers. In point of fact it manufactures more of them by giving them full justification for acting out. This is the key to unlocking the tyranny of progressive thought.
By looking for external causes to Roger’s actions he is given full justification and made into a perverse hero. By this reasoning those who stopped him are guilty of the crime of restricting the free actions of a justified homocidal maniac.
The solution to all of this is quite simple. Stop the insanity! Abandon progressivism/liberalism/socialism.