The Grievance Collectors

 

This is from a recent article in the National Review by Jim Geraghty:

“Time and again I have written about mass shooters and how many fit a psychological profile as “grievance collectors.” Willard Gaylin, one of the world’s preeminent psychology professors, writes about the dangers of “grievance collecting” in his book Hatred: The Psychological Descent into Violence:

Grievance collecting is a step on the journey to a full-blown paranoid psychosis. A grievance collector will move from the passive assumption of deprivation and low expectancy common to most paranoid personalities to a more aggressive mode. He will not endure passively his deprived state; he will occupy himself with accumulating evidence of his misfortunes and locating the sources. Grievance collectors are distrustful and provocative, convinced that they are always taken advantage of and given less than their fair share. . .

Underlying this philosophy is an undeviating comparative and competitive view of life. Everything is part of a zero-sum game. Deprivation can be felt in another person’s abundance of good fortune.

At the heart of the grievance collector’s worldview is that he is not responsible for the condition of his life; a vast conspiracy of malevolent individuals and forces is entirely at fault. There is always someone else to blame, and these mass shooters always find ways to excuse their own actions and deflect the responsibility to others.”

And so we get down to the heart of the matter. The human condition. Beginning with Cain and right up to the present day, grievance collectors have been responsible for much of the violence and chaos throughout history. At some level most all violence and chaos can be traced back to some individual or group grievance. I have often said that anger and fear are two of the three most powerful human motivators, the other being love.  Grievance collectors have no room for love in their heart, only hatred born out of anger and fear.

We can do things to limit the damage.  More restrictive gun laws, better security around soft targets, improved mental health treatment, closer monitoring of social media posts and the “dark web”.  But it will not change the sickest human hearts. The grievance collectors among us will continue to lash out and find ways to make a statement by killing people.  

As a Christian, I must consider that we may be in “the last days”.  At some point, God will say time is up. Satan knows it’s coming but not when it will come. He’s been working overtime since the beginning and most of all for the past two thousand years to transform or destroy God’s creation. We are now just living in the latest battleground of this cosmic war. Only God knows when the war will end.