I have one question which DQ would probably consider a no-brainer for himself, yet I have never been able to wholly understand. It’s about something that has been addressed in more than one of his books and often on the Q&A. So here it is: How can being Takers explain why teenagers in schools across the nation (especially Columbine) have resorted to such murder and violence? I’ve heard the analogies like the boiling frog and all the other stuff, but I still don’t get it.

Being Takers means being prisoners of a civilizational system that “that more or less compels [us] to go on destroying the world in order to live.” Prisoners are, by definition, people who have no choice about how they will live. People don’t like having no choice about how they will live. Very often, it drives them nuts. If the kids at Columbine had had another way to go five years ago, they would have been gone long before their only reason for living became venting their rage against the system that made them prisoners.

ID: 480
posted: 13 Aug 2000
updated: 13 Aug 2000