a topical issue: radicalization

The relatively lonely, isolated status of most mass shooters means any community they interact with and any media they consume will have an outsized impact on their psyche. -- http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-mass-shooters-are-not-kind-crazy-you-think/

This article reminds me of the Bruce Alexander thinking about addiction.  It's interesting because it draws parallels between the people who "self-radicalize" and then act alone, and the people who are coached or goaded into becoming violent either through local connections or via online social media.  Regarding the latter:

... And there's a reason almost every issue of Dabiq includes a fawning story about the actions of some suicide bomber: They want anyone contemplating an attack to know their actions will be remembered and celebrated. You're targeting people with a strong sense of humiliation and no sense of community, and promising them great power and social status -- the two things they've never had. In every circumstance, there was a concerted effort on someone's part to make violence seem cool. - ibid.

This seems to be an extreme case of phatic behavior: promising people acceptance and community within a concrete "afterlife", if not in this life.  There are parallels in the self-radicalized cases discussed in the article.

Naturally, the degree to which people give up their (sense of) self and propriety and so on can change on a case-by-case basis.  Someone who signs up to join the military would not be said to have become "radicalized" -- but he or she does have to give up a lot of aspects of day-to-day life, in exchange for another structure.  The spectrum could continue all the way to normal day-to-day occurrences, where, for example, we might interrupt an in-person conversation to answer an important telephone call.  "Sorry, I've got to take this."

This reminds me of Avital Ronell's conception of telephones in The Telephone Book.

The idea that "mass shooters are not the kind of crazy you think" is interesting, because it suggests that they are still, in a certain sense, "crazy" -- that is, even if just under the influence of a kind of temporary insanity.  Again, this can be relaxed into everyday life -- even into everyday non-human life (wolfs, dolphins, and so forth) -- by which we could give attention to the kind of situations that are particularly "prone" to phatic behavior.  Surveying situations of prone-ness would outline the preconditions of phaticity, and we might find underlying causes of both the overt condition and its preconditions.  A latent tendency to "phase shift" before the phase shift is brought about.