Dangerous Losers

On April 25, a man armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives charged through a security gate and was apprehended by Secret Service agents before he could descend the stairs that would have led him into the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. He has since been charged with attempting to assassinate President Trump. Writings by the suspect indicated his desire to target members of Trump’s administration, as well.  

Naturally, observers discuss the possible causes, including mental illness, radicalisation in online echo chambers, and the conduct of the Trump Administration. Some speculate that the self-described “Friendly Federal Assassin” was motivated in part by a feeling of personal failings: that his graduate degree from a less prestigious school was not commensurate with his undergraduate degree from Caltech, and nor was his subsequent employment (he worked as a part-time teacher to supplement his game development business).  

We have little evidence so far that any career frustrations or financial woes played a role in this particular case. But the idea that they could have is not at all far-fetched. One does not have to look far to find cases where serious violence follows the loss of wealth, prestige, or some other form of social status. 

Sociologist Donald Black proposes that it is a general feature of human behaviour that whenever anyone suffers a decline in social standing relative to others, it is likely to cause a conflict. Losers do not suffer losses gladly. And sometimes they react with violence. 

The exact form of violence varies. Downward mobility leads some to turn upon themselves. For instance, a study of all wage-earner men in Finland aged 30 to 54 at the 1980 census found that those who lost jobs were twice as likely to commit suicide. And a study based on models applied to data from the US National Longitudinal Mortality Study found that in the years immediately following losing their jobs, men were a little over twice as likely to kill themselves as men who remained employed.  

Others direct both blame and violence outward. Such violence might still have a suicidal component, as is seen in many rampage killings. In America during the 1980s and 1990s, there were at least 20 cases in which a fired American postal worker attacked former supervisors or colleagues, often as part of a rampage or crime spree. For instance, one disgruntled postman killed his supervisor and her boyfriend at her home, then went to his workplace and killed two other employees. Such killings were common enough that they gave rise to the phrase “going postal,” referring to rampage killing, in much the same way that a similar phenomenon in the Malaysian and Indonesian cultures gave us the term “running amok.”   

Note that it is not poverty as such but a relative decline in one’s position that is the crucial variable.