My thoughts regarding the mass shooting in Las Vegas and other similar events. The shooter was not mad. He was not mentally deranged. He was simply angry. He was angry at a world that has forced him into a box. I call this the hamster effect. I learned as a kid that if you put too many hamsters together in a cage, they soon start eating each other.
Ted Kaczynski was right in this regard, we’ve become perilously dependent on technology. We develop technology thinking that it will make our lives better, which it does for a while, but then we become dependent on that technology, in order to be competitive in life. Life is most certainly a competition. We compete with each other for the best jobs, the best homes, the best significant others, and so forth. We become reliant on technology to make us our best selves, and in the process, find ourselves back in smaller boxes than which we started.
Don’t get me wrong, we need to get automatic and semi-automatic rifles off the street. I enjoy them as much as anyone, but no civilian has any business owning these. However, the real issue is what makes us so angry and so confined and so anxious. We need not be looking for signs of mental instability. We need to focus on developing technology that helps us to be independent, not reliant on the very things we thought would improve our lives.
Population control is not the answer. We need population growth to sustain a healthy economy.
Technology is our future. And technology can provide a better life. Ted Kaczynski was wrong about that. But we need to focus our effort on technologies that get us there, not on technologies that put is in smaller boxes. This will result in less stress, anxiety, anger and all the bad things that go along.
Bryan K. Hurley, Herriman