I travel around the United States giving lectures on waging peace, ending war, the art of living, and what it means to be human. Last week I spoke with high school students at Center Grove High School in Greenwood, Indiana about the importance of belonging, which is a crucial aspect of what it means to be human. Reflecting on belonging and its opposite, alienation, can help us better understand the societal violence we are seeing in our country and around the world, such as the tragedy we saw in Las Vegas recently.

To get audiences to reflect on belonging, I ask them what our humans needs are. They often list food and safety as our most basic needs, because they have been influenced by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I then ask the audience, “What is more important for humans: food or belonging?”

After giving the audience a few moments to ponder this, I ask, “What is more important for a wolf-pack: food or belonging? Keep in mind that belonging is the precondition that allows wolves to obtain food, because they are social animals that hunt as a pack, as a community. In a similar way, belonging is the precondition that allows humans to obtain food, water, safety, shelter, and all of our physical needs, because we rely upon a community for our survival. If you put a two-year-old child in the wilderness alone, that child will starve to death.”

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs got it backward. Although he lists physical needs such as food and safety as coming before belonging, the opposite is true. Since the time of our earliest ancestors until today, belonging to a community has been the foundation that has allowed humans to obtain food and safety.

What is the most common characteristic that all serial killers and mass shooters have in common? In his book Female Serial Killers, Peter Vronsky says that “social isolation—loneliness—might be arguably the most common characteristic of the childhood of serial killers.” A lack of belonging in the form of social isolation, loneliness, or alienation is also common among mass shooters. So what is more important for humans: food or belonging? People do not become serial killers or mass shooters because they lack food. But people can become serial killers or mass shooters because they lack belonging.

Painting with Knives

As a child I grew up with strong feelings of alienation, because my mother is Korean, my father was half black and half white, and I grew up in Alabama. My father fought in the Korean and Vietnam wars and suffered from war trauma. As a result, I grew up in a violent household and developed a lot of behavioral problems as a child. I was kicked out of elementary school for fighting, almost kicked out of middle school, and suspended in high school for fighting. In high school I often fantasized about shooting all of the students in my classes, and I wanted to express my pain through violence.

For many people suffering from alienation, rage, and unhealed trauma, violence can be a form of expression. As an adolescent who wanted to express my pain through violence, I often fantasized about painting with knives. When we paint with knives, we use a weapon for a brush, and our canvas becomes living flesh. When I sank into the abyss of agony as a traumatized child, I wanted to paint the world with my pain. I wanted to use a knife to write my rage. Instead of writing for peace, what if I had focused all of my energy on dialoguing through destruction? In the dialogue of destruction one side speaks with violence, and the other side replies with screams and suffering.

If people do not have healthy ways to express their emotions, they will choose unhealthy ways, and violence and rage are not healthy ways to express our emotions. Healing my trauma has been a long journey, and during that journey I graduated from West Point, served in the army for seven years, was deployed to Iraq, wrote several books about waging peace, and created an idea called peace literacy that can help us heal trauma, alienation, rage, injustice, and other root causes of violence. As I received military training and became an adult still suffering from severe trauma, my capacity to commit violence increased, making it even more apparent to me that I needed to find a way to heal my trauma and become peace literate.