Adam Lanza's Mother Was A Doomer

This post is about mental health, or lack thereof. God Only Knows we can't change the Human Condition, but we can control how we react to it and how we live within it. The rule of thumb for sane people says try to not to make things worse than they already are. But crazy people can't help but make things worse because they're crazy, and of course they don't know it.

The insane mother of the whack job who shot up all those kids and teachers in Newtown was what I call a Doomer. The mainstream media is calling such people "preppers" (from here and here).

Nancy Lanza, whose gun collection was raided by her son Adam for Friday’s massacre at Sandy Hook school, was part of the “prepper” movement, which urges readiness for social chaos by hoarding supplies and training with weapons.

“She prepared for the worst,” her sister-in-law Marsha Lanza told reporters.

“Last time we visited her in person, we talked about prepping – are you ready for what could happen down the line, when the economy collapses?”

Friends and family portrayed Adam Lanza’s mother Nancy as a paranoid ‘survivalist’ who believed the world was on the verge of violent, economic collapse.

She is reported to have been struggling to hold herself together and had been stockpiling food, water and guns in the large home she shared with her 20-year-old son in Connecticut.

Mrs Lanza, 52, was a ‘prepper’ — so-called because they are preparing for a breakdown in civilised society — who apparently became obsessed with guns and taught Adam and his older brother, Ryan, how to shoot, even taking them to local ranges.

The fools at Salon want to know what a "prepper" is.

According to the American Prepper Network (APN) website, preppers take “personal responsibility and self reliance seriously.”  They follow the Five Principles of Preparedness, a fairly innocuous edict preaching self-reliance, thrift and keeping at least a year’s supply of “every needful thing” at the ready. But they aren’t just preparing for Cormac McCarthy-style end times; the APN considers short-term economic instability just as dangerous a threat...

The APN website rejects the “doomsday” label outright, suggesting they are simply being cautious and promoting what they see as the deeply American virtue of independence above all else...

Statements aside, preppers undoubtedly attract a fringe element. The APN site talks often and explicitly about “The End of the World As We Know It,” which it refers to as TEOTWAWKI. And judging from the abundance of videos and blogs of self-identified preppers arming themselves while touting conspiracies about government, financial collapse and the apocalypse, it’s clear this isn’t strictly a peaceful movement of people hoarding canned goods.

Preppers don’t just stockpile nonperishables — they collect weapons. Like Nancy Lanza, who owned five guns — three of which were used in the Sandy Hook massacre — preppers believe having weapons is just as important as having enough water. They are also deeply suspicious of government overreach, sounding Tea Party-like in this statement on Christianity and the Constitution.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should. I declared war on Doomers who were polluting this website in its comment section on September 3, 2012 in my post Contemporary Eschatology. You can find a good description of "preppers" in that post. You might read it or re-read it, because I am not going to cover that ground again today. And since that Labor Day weekend, I have banned Doomers from making comments on DOTE whenever I spot them. I will not tolerate insane comments on this website—not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

Let me give you an example. The most recent Doomer (or "prepper") I kicked off this website actually prompted my post Contemporary Eschatology. The original comment mentioned Dimitry Orlov, whose advice that person thought I ought to take. Dimitry lives on a sailboat because he believes that's the best way to survive the total collapse of industrial civilization which is coming any day now. That's not my idea of mental health. This person's most recent comment—I'm quoting from memory because I deleted it—started off how I learned to love the collapse and then looked forward to a time when there would be only a few thousand feral humans wandering the Earth in the post-apocalyptic future. Needless to say, this person has been banned from making further comments on DOTE.

Now, when I say Doomers are insane, and Nancy Lanza was certainly a case in point, what do I mean by that? Beside the fact that they are wholly committed to a faith-based end-of-the-world fantasy based on nothing at all?

It has to do with empathy, which came up in the comments section of my post The President's Remarks At Newtown. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Doomers have no empathy, or very little, kind of like Wall Street bankers. If empathy is absent, what happens to others doesn't matter. The suffering of others doesn't matter.

Like some early (and contemporary) Christians, Doomers are perfectly fine with the world as we know it going up in flames (or the economy collapsing) and taking all of us "sinners" down with it, because this fantasy fulfills their sick, gleeful expectations of such an event. They are uncaring about the widespread suffering, death and destruction which would surely result.

Doomers don't care about the dismal economy or anything else affecting people in the here and now. They don't care about income & wealth inequality, they don't care about about the human suffering that comes from long-term poverty or unemployment. They don't care about these and a million other things because the resultant human suffering has no meaning to them. They lack the ability to understand and share the feelings (or suffering) of others. Doomers never comment when I post about these subjects, or they tell me, as someone did the other day, that I should be writing about the only things they care about (in this case, the incipient Mass Extinction).

I assume it is clear that the whack job Adam Lanza was a product of his insane "prepper" mother and other factors. Adam spent hours on end playing the violent video game Call of Duty. To him, there was little difference between the imaginary "people" he was killing in that video game and the very real kids he killed at an elementary school.

It comes as no surprise to me that his mother was a Doomer, which goes a long way toward explaining what he did. Adam grew up in a home where his mother anticipated the End of Days any time now, and bought guns to get ready for it. Nancy Lanza taught her son to be proficient with those weapons, and there is little doubt in my mind that neither Nancy or her son had the least bit of empathy toward others. Other people were simply an abstraction to them. For Doomers, other people are simply Fall Guys in the coming collapse, cannon fodder in their apocalyptic fantasies.

You can pass gun laws until you're blue in the face, but the mental illness remains. This society breeds mental illness. You can see it everywhere you look, if you've got eyes to see with.

Speaking personally, I have no patience with Doomers or anybody else with a major-league psychological disorder. I will not tolerate them on this website. The Newtown massacre presented me with a good opportunity to shed some light on the situation, so I did.

Bonus Video — Holiday Greetings From J.P. Morgan Chase, a DOTE 2012 Propaganda Prize nominee

 

Comments

[Ben]

This society does indeed breed mental illness, which makes slaughters like Sandy Hook really fucking sad. Lanza and his mother never had a chance, and as a result 20 children and several adults will never again enjoy the company of their family and friends. It goes without saying the families of the victims are never going to completely recover from this, the years will go on, but there is nothing that will erase the pain.