Some years ago, I got a call from an analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center. After yet another gruesome mass shooting (this time, it was Dylann Roof’s attack on a Bible-study group at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, that killed nine and wounded one), I had written an article about the young men who perpetrate such crimes. I suggested that an overview of these killers showed them, in general, to be young losers who failed to mature, and whose lives revolved around various grievances, insecurities, and heroic fantasies. I called them “Lost Boys” as a nod to their arrested adolescence.

The NCTC called me because they had a working group on “countering violent extremism.” They had read my article and they, too, were interested in the problem of these otherwise-unremarkable boys and young men who, seemingly out of nowhere, lash out at society in various ways. We think you’re on to something, the analyst told me. He invited me to come down to Washington and discuss it with him and his colleagues.

The meeting was held in a classified environment so that the group’s members, representing multiple intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, could more easily share ideas and information. (I was a government employee at the time and held a clearance.) But we could have met in a busy restaurant for all it mattered—the commonalities among these young men, even across nations and cultures, are hardly a secret. They are man-boys who maintain a teenager’s sharp sense of self-absorbed grievance long after adolescence; they exhibit a combination of childish insecurity and lethally bold arrogance; they are sexually and socially insecure. Perhaps most dangerous, they go almost unnoticed until they explode. Some of them open fire on their schools or other institutions; others become Islamic radicals; yet others embrace right-wing-extremist conspiracies.

I emerged from the meeting with a lot of interesting puzzle pieces but no answers. Since then, there have been more such attacks, more bodies, more grief—but precious little progress on preventing such incidents. A few recent examples: In 2021, a 15-year-old boy murdered four of his fellow students in his Michigan high school. In 2022, an 18-year-old man carried out a massacre in a Texas school; another, the same age, committed a mass murder in a grocery store in upstate New York. A 21-year-old male attacked a Fourth of July parade in Illinois. A 22-year-old went on a rampage at an LBGTQ nightclub in Colorado.

These attacks are not merely “violence” in some general sense, nor are they similar to other gun crimes classified as “mass shootings” beyond the number of victims. Drug-war shoot-outs and gang vendettas are awful, but they are better-understood problems, in both their origins and possible remedies. The Lost Boys, however, are the 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.

After each Lost Boy killing, Americans are engulfed in grief and anger, but eventually, we are overtaken by a sense of helplessness. Sometimes, we respond by raging at one another; we fight about gun control or mental-health funding or the role of social media as we try to fix blame and reduce a seemingly inexplicable act to something discrete and solvable. But I wonder now, as I did back in 2015, if all of these debates are focusing on the wrong problems. Yes, the country is awash in guns; yes, depression seems to be on the rise in young people; yes, extremists are using social media to fuse together atomized losers into explosive compounds. But the raw material for all of the violence is mostly a stream of lost young men.

Why is this happening? What are we missing? Guns and anomie and extremism 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, a tradition we might trace back to the Unabomber, the ur-Lost Boy Ted Kaczynski, whose terror campaign included a demand that the press publish his 35,000-word treatise. (And yet, when he left society at 29, he wrote in his journal: “My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge. I do not expect to accomplish anything by it.”) There are many other examples: the Los Angeles mass killer Christopher Dorner left behind an 11,000-word screed in 2013; Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019, posted a 74-page rant to the internet. (Patrick Crusius, who murdered 23 people in El Paso in 2019, claimed to be inspired by Tarrant but managed to upload only four pages to the infamous 8chan site.) At this point, so many such documents exist that there are scholarly research studies analyzing them.

[Juliette Kayyem: A ‘lone-wolf’ shooter has an online pack]

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. (Nor are all of these aimless young men killers: When I first examined this problem, I also identified a type of Lost Boy who convinces himself that he’s doing good, such as Bowe Bergdahl, who thought of himself as the fictional action hero Jason Bourne when he deserted his military unit in Afghanistan in 2009, and Edward Snowden, who is the embodiment of a particular kind of nonviolent but nonetheless highly destructive misfit.)

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.

For example, in 2014 Elliot Rodger became a kind of patron saint of “incels,” or involuntary celibates (men angry at women for not having sex with them), when he killed six people and plowed his car into several more in California before killing himself. Rodger explicitly said his attack was “retribution” against other men—and the women who sleep with them—for having sex while he remained a virgin. Four years later, a self-described incel who’d praised Rodger killed 10 people in Toronto.

Lives that seem to unwind over problems related to sex or sexual identity are a persistent theme. Micah Johnson, a Black military veteran, claimed that he was avenging the deaths of Black people at the hands of the police when he ambushed Dallas police officers in 2016, killing five and wounding nine others. Perhaps more pertinent, though, was that Johnson was a failure as a soldier and his life had gone into free fall after he was booted from the Army for stealing women’s underwear from a female comrade. That same year, Omar Mateen, who had expressed particular animus toward homosexuals, became a mass killer when he attacked a gay nightclub in Florida, as did the accused recent Colorado shooter Anderson Aldrich. Aldrich’s lawyers have said that the alleged killer is nonbinary, but some observers, including a former friend, suspect Aldrich is merely attempting to troll the LGBTQ community.

Another way these young men express their sexual insecurity is to seek heroic redemption by imagining themselves as the defenders of helpless women against sexual threats from other men. Roof, for his part, thought he was on a mission to stop Black men from raping white women, a common racist trope in America. One of the members of a group of young Muslim men in Canada who planned to storm the Parliament in Ottawa in 2006 reportedly had a similar motivation, believing that NATO soldiers were raping Afghan women.

This masculine insecurity is even more striking when we consider the number of such young men who chose what we might think of as “the military cure,” by joining the armed forces in an apparent attempt to forge a more manly identity. In a society where relatively few people serve in the military, the Lost Boys are heavily overrepresented among veterans or would-be soldiers. Timothy McVeigh, who went on to become the Oklahoma City bomber, left the Army after being rejected for Special Forces. Dorner was a naval reserve officer; Johnson and Bergdahl went to Afghanistan. (Before he enlisted, friends told The Washington Post, Bergdahl had “identified with Japanese samurai warriors and medieval knights.”) Devin Kelley, who opened fire on a Texas church, joined the Air Force. Snowden joined the Army and tried for a Green Beret, but washed out. The “American Taliban” traitor, John Walker Lindh, also went overseas—but for a different army.

Jihadists, especially those radicalized in the West, are also examples of this syndrome. They join organizations that promise to create a powerful male identity, and, in some cases, to reward them with women as sex slaves. For all their supposed distaste for Western immorality, many of the young males who gravitate toward jihadism are avid consumers of forbidden Western delights, such as music, alcohol, drugs, and pornography. (Even in middle age, Osama bin Laden had quite a porn collection.) For these men, terrorism may be, among other things, some sort of self-purification, a way to deny their illicit desires by destroying the places and people that supposedly coax them toward perdition. (In a striking parallel, the American Robert Aaron Long—who at 21 had already been treated for sex addiction—is accused of opening fire on a string of massage parlors around Atlanta, killing eight, in an attempt, as he told law enforcement officers later, to eliminate the source of his “temptation.”)

[From the June 1986 issue: Thinking about terrorism]

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.

Knowing about the common characteristics of these killers and terrorists does not shed much light on what to do to thwart them. Stricter gun laws, a good idea in general, will not stop the mass murderers already among us who live in a society saturated with easily obtained weapons. Law enforcement can infiltrate and destroy violent militias, terror cells, and other threats, but that will not prevent unstable young men from searching for causes to justify their massacres—if they even bother with such ideas.

Likewise, arguments 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.

[Michael Carpenter: Russia is co-opting angry young men]

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.

Western societies have now produced multiple generations of these young men, so we cannot hope to solve the problem by just waiting out the generational demography. (There are exceptions in the form of “lost old men,” but the two recent cases of older mass shooters in California—as well as the 64-year-old Las Vegas killer in 2017—are extremely rare outliers.) Perhaps more alarming, at least some of these young males seem to be aging into dangerous, frustrated middle-aged men, the gun-toting cosplayers who now have the time and money to pursue their angry fantasies. (Think of this as the Lost Boys becoming Proud Boys.)  

What we can do, however, is start talking more about the specific problem of dangerous male immaturity without falling into endless loops about gun control, public health, or “toxic masculinity.” We can, in schools and colleges, pay closer attention to the boys and young men who seem to be sliding toward darkness, perhaps with more attempts to pull them toward a community or into mentorship with older men. At the least, we should be able to find a way to engage in gentle interventions early rather than face more drastic consequences later. As Enzensberger presciently warned nearly two decades ago: “It is difficult to talk about the loser, and it is stupid not to.”

The immensity of the challenge, as I learned at that meeting in Washington years ago, is overwhelming. But we can start by redefining the basic problem and recognizing Lost Boys as a distinct phenomenon. We are not likely to stop the next mass attacker, school shooter, or terrorist, whether tomorrow or next year. If we recognize, however, that our current arguments are dead ends, we can start anew, and become more creative about finding solutions before we produce yet another generation of silent time bombs.

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On the second anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, Joe Biden decorated Americans for courage during the unrest, while on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives remained in limbo as many of the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election bickered over electing a speaker.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Tipping is weird now. The GOP is a battering ram against the truth. Damar Hamlin’s tragedy, anti-vaxxers’ gold A Slow Democratic Recovery

President Biden today decorated 14 Americans with the Presidential Citizens Medal, an honor established by President Richard Nixon in 1969 to recognize any citizen of the United States who has “performed exemplary deeds or services for his or her country or fellow citizens.” There are, I am sure, people on the right who will roll their eyes at honoring a Democrat such as Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, or a Republican such as the former Arizona House speaker Rusty Bowers (whose long political career ended with censure and a primary defeat from his own party). Likewise, the Capitol Police officers and the election officials who will be honored have already been the target of harassment and threats; their medals cannot make them whole now. Nor can such a posthumous honor restore Officer Brian Sicknick to life. (Sicknick’s family yesterday filed a wrongful-death suit against former President Donald Trump and two of the January 6 rioters.)

These American citizens are all, in fact, heroes. They took risks—not only politically but also by enduring physical threats from unhinged conspiracists—to protect our democracy. It’s easy to forget just how much danger these people were in, and how narrowly we escaped even greater chaos. Imagine what America would look like today if some of the people being honored by Biden had been intimidated or defeated, or if they’d just lost their nerve.

I reached out to Rosa Brooks today to explore that question. Brooks is one of the scholars who convened a group of experts and partisan operatives in late 2020 to game out the “worst thing that could happen to our country during the presidential elections.” She and her colleagues attracted a lot of snippy criticism at the time, but the events of January 6, 2021, proved their prescience. When I asked about her view of the worst that could have happened on that day, her scenario was chilling: She believes that had the rioters caught Vice President Mike Pence, or perhaps some members of Congress—such as the Democrats trapped in the House gallery at the time—they may well have been beaten or killed. “We know what happened to the police officers caught by the mob,” she told me. “Imagine if the mob had caught members of Congress.”

From there, Brooks suggested, more violence might have erupted, with more deaths. With Pence perhaps missing or incommunicado, there would have been no way to certify Biden’s victory, and Trump would have attempted to impose martial law.

Brooks’s most disheartening conclusion was that we escaped this disastrous possible outcome only by sheer luck. “I don’t think some sort of resilience in our system prevented that,” she said. “It wasn’t the supposed ‘guardrails of democracy’ that kept things from getting that bad—it was chance, plain and simple.”

I agree. We might be glad Pence stood firm at a key moment, but Pence had to be free—indeed, alive—to act. We might also comfort ourselves knowing that the clowns and opportunists who tried to overthrow our constitutional order have been outed by a thorough investigation in Congress. We can hope that justice is served, with prison sentences for some of the most dangerous seditionists and violent rioters. But is it enough? As the Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn tweeted this morning: “730 days later. We’re still waiting on accountability.”

Too many of the most important figures in the January 6 plot—and, as we know from the House investigation, it was indeed a plot, and not some random outbreak of violence—have escaped true accountability. From Trump on down to the group that the Washington Post writer Greg Sargent calls the “coup lawyers,” including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, we know their names. But severe consequences for such people have been rare.

Meanwhile, most of the Republicans who voted to overturn the election are still in Congress—or would be, if the House could get organized enough to swear them in. (At a ceremony at the Capitol today to mark the anniversary of the insurrection, only one Republican, apparently, bothered to show up.) The White House event to honor those who defended democracy took place at the same time that Representative Kevin McCarthy, just down the street at the Capitol, submitted himself for another few rounds of political bastinado, as the House, for the 12th and 13th times, failed to elect a speaker.

The anniversary of January 6 should remind us that the crisis of American democracy isn’t over, and that we should continue to take seriously what a close call we had in January 2021. (Exhibit A: Twitter’s new boss, the deeply unserious Elon Musk, trollishly chose today to reinstate the account of the disgraced Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn, the man who wanted the military to seize voting machines.)

I have been somewhat optimistic about America’s democratic recovery in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections, and I actually think the contest over the speaker’s job is an example of democracy in action. But we should not lose sight of the ugly reality that the people opposing McCarthy have not done so out of principle or because of policy differences. The “rebels” are members of a caucus of extremists who will be part of the new majority, and whose serial humiliations of the gentleman from California will grant them concessions in the House that will continue to endanger the stability of our system of government. Or, as my colleague David Frum put it yesterday, McCarthy is on the “verge of selling out the country to a nihilist faction so he can briefly occupy a now-powerless office—then cash in for whatever he can get after this fiasco.”

It is fitting that we remember the heroes of January 6, including the many people who weren’t at the White House that day but who stayed at their posts and did their jobs as election officials, volunteers, observers, and many other of the tasks that allow the millions of citizens of a giant federal democracy to govern themselves. But the events today on Capitol Hill and the ceremony at the White House are reminders that the threats to our constitutional order have not vanished, and that we cannot magically wish them away.

Related:

​​January 6 is a dangerous shorthand. (From June) ​​Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning. Today’s News Kevin McCarthy lost his 13th vote for House speaker, but he did move 15 GOP holdouts into his camp after making some concessions. A new report showed that the U.S. economy added 223,000 new jobs in December, making 2022 one of the best years on record for jobs growth. Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills player who suffered cardiac arrest during Monday’s game, had his breathing tube removed overnight and is talking. Dispatches Books Briefing: A new year doesn’t call for a new you, Emma Sarappo writes.

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Evening Read (Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty)

The Writer’s Most Sacred Relationship

By Lauren LeBlanc

Making a living as a writer has always been an elusive pursuit. The competition is fierce. The measures of success are subjective. Even many people at the top of the profession can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick, Darryl Pinckney recalls in his evocative new memoir, “told us that there were really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge. She told us that if we couldn’t take rejection, if we couldn’t be told no, then we could not be writers.”

In spite of these red flags, countless people set out on this path. One lifeline, if you’re lucky enough to find it, is mentorship. Literary mentors offer the conventional benefits: perspective, direction, connections. But the partnerships that result are less transactional and more messy and serendipitous than those that tend to exist in other industries. While many people might think of such arrangements as altruistic or at least utilitarian, Pinckney’s book, which chronicles his tutelage under Hardwick, shows that artistic mentorships, especially literary ones, are far more fraught.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

In much of the Eastern Orthodox Christian world (Russia and Ukraine, for example), today is Christmas. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a Christmas cease-fire, but within hours of the arrival of the holiday, air-raid sirens blared over Kyiv, and CNN reported artillery exchanges at the front lines near Bakhmut. Perhaps the most insulting aspect of the Russian declaration is that it ostensibly came at the behest of the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill, who has been a vocal and especially bloody-minded supporter of the war.

In the meantime, you may wonder why some Orthodox celebrate Christmas in January. Not all Orthodox do this; I am Greek Orthodox, and we follow the Western tradition of celebrating on December 25. The simple answer is that the Christian world broke apart into its Eastern and Western camps in the 11th century, and when Pope Gregory XIII standardized a new calendar in the 16th century, the Eastern churches decided to stay with the old “Julian” calendar, in which Christmas falls on January 6. There’s no particular theological significance there, especially because no one really knows the exact date of Christ’s birth. Now, as to why Orthodox and Western Easter fall on different dates … that’s a little more complicated, and I’ll get back to you on that in a few months.

— Tom

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Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.