There’s a repulsive article by Washington Post’s critic Ann Hornaday making the rounds online this week. In essence she dishes blame on a recent film in which Seth Rogen is seen married to an attractive woman as part of the endemic cultural sexism and culpable for contributing to the psyche of the most recent mass killer.

It seems so obvious. How could we have missed it. Of course, it was that evil Hollywood again.

It’s difficult to get upset at all with her. She’s only doing what we Americans all have become so incredibly good at doing. Ignoring the deeper, uglier, harder truth about our own society staring us back in the mirror.

Society. Not culture.

Our culture is a byproduct of our society. It isn’t our Hollywood fantasies that caused this. It’s our American reality.

At least we’re starting to ask if there’s a deadly product being sold in America. Could it be… Xbox 360?

This routine happens every single time there’s a mass shooting.

We try and find some part of art to blame for the crime. Was it Mortal Kombat? Was it The Matrix? Basketball Diaries? Night Trap on Sega CD? Did The Dark Knight cause it? Was it Judd Apatow comedies? Let’s explore every fantasy path available. Anything to avoid pointing at the obvious more dangerous one. There is something very, very, wrong in our society and it isn’t our fantasies. The art is our own creepy reflection.

In the Post, Hornaday writes: “How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like “Neighbors” and feel, as [redacted] did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of “sex and fun and pleasure”? How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, “It’s not fair”?”

The sinister Seth Rogen, disturbing the minds of potential killers and hack Washington Post critics everywhere by having an attractive real life wife, Lauren Miller, too.

Let’s ignore for a moment how revolting her premise is, that Seth Rogen is somehow so unappealing on a sexual level, therefore showing him with a woman deemed attractive by Hornaday is sending a “sexist message” to potential killers everywhere.

Instead notice how Hornaday’s mind subtly assigned a value to the visual appearance of a human being.

Humans that have the physical appearance of Rogen’s type are supposed to have lower market value. They should not be unrealistically depicted with a human being of higher market value. Because it creates a unrealistic hope or fantasy in the masses.

But Hornaday also notices how similar the mass killer spoke to the fictional serial killer Patrick Bateman saying he “resembled a noxious cross between Christian Bale’s slick sociopath in “American Psycho.”

Then it could have been those Hollywood movies that influenced him, right?

Or could it be that we are scared to admit a hard truth about our American society: We live with a nihilistic view that places a price on humans.

Could it be that narcissistic sociopaths like Patrick Bateman are the type of monsters we grow right in our own backyard all the time? Could it be that American Psycho isn’t all that fictional? That there’s a darker reason the character resonates so well with American Audiences? That we truly do already inhabit a dystopian society where entitled greedy sociopaths get to decide who lives, and who dies?

Not just the ones that pull the trigger, mind you. But also the ones who draft legislation and lobby and meet with in-house corporate legal teams to decide how many dead bodies are acceptable, how many victims lawsuits are necessary, before action is required.

Read the entire self-pitying, empathy starved autobiography by the entitled sociopath killer. Read all of it. In its misogynistic, racist, classist, hateful, bigoted horror. This story is a perfectly straight forward monster story. And the origin of that monster is very clear if you’re willing to read it honestly.

We’ve been creating these monsters.

Obviously the real life Jordan Belfort was only imitating what he saw in the movies.

When you live in a society without any hard value on empathy. Without kindness. Without pity. Where human life has less intrinsic value than our currency, human beings will sometimes become monsters. And these mass killers are just a few of our monsters.

We’re inhabiting a massively populated society without any true ethos on the value of human life. Capitalism is not an ethos. Capitalism is only an economic model, it was never intended to be and never will be an ethos. It has nothing to say on matters of the value of life.

We left a void where our society’s social values about the worth of a living person are supposed to go, and this murderous survival-of-the-fittest nightmare is the vile shit that has filled it.

Want to blame a horror movie? How about Jaws?

Happy 4th of July and good luck out there Alex Kintner.

Maybe we’ve been emulating Jaws in our decision to endorse mass murder. Jaws certainly resembles our current economic system and the value of human life in our society. We know there’s a deadly shark out there. We knew that from the opening scene. But now the town politicians and businessmen are telling us that everything in our community has to stay the same. We must be open for business on the 4th of July. Yes, we know some kids will die horrific deaths. But what can we do? There’s profit to be made and freedom to be celebrated.

We can’t stop this horrifying system no matter how loud we yell now, the system decided that’s not profitable.

We believed that we could leave this massive void in our society as it dished out a market price on our class status, power, physical appearance, race, gender, and our human lives. Leave it to the invisible hand of the market to figure out. Have we seen what that invisible hand decided about the ethics of third world child sex slaves, fatal automobile products, and outsourced sweatshop labor?

What’s so scary about America?

Be warned, this house is haunted by the shrieks of a thousand debt collectors.

Is there something missing in our own society’s ethics? What’s disturbing us?

That an entitled sociopath is enraged that the blonde models he sees selling products to him from billboards won’t have sex with him, despite his display of an automobile marketed to the elite class? That he thinks of human beings as commodities and ultimately decides to dispose of them?

That there’s an incredibly profitable product that can be used to murder an entire elementary school full of children in a few minutes that can be purchased at your local retailer?

That the manufacturing and profit of this rapid human exterminating product is owned by a massive private equity firm that holds twenty billion dollars in assets?

That the same deadly product increases sales after its well-paid lobbyists and marketing evangelists work overtime to double sales and relax regulations in the wake of such a gruesome tragedy.

That our government now responds only to money?

That we blame fictional fantasies for murder when we’ve already built a real society where it’s perfectly acceptable to dispose of poor and mentally ill people on the street if they fail to generate value for someone?

That a massive climate collapse threatening to exterminate many future generations of people on this planet is now underway? Our society does nothing to stop this, because doing nothing is more profitable in this system.

When our environment is gone we can just buy a new one, right?

The flurry of cash each major mass shooting will generate in gun sales, lobbyist money, media coverage, and campaigns funded will ensure there will be more real life horror coming soon to your local malls, schools, movie theaters, and television screens. This is the logical result of the system we’ve built.

We’ll do nothing to save people from any of these coming horrors, because doing nothing allows a handful of people in our society to live a much better, more comfortable quality of life.

Charles Koch’s house. Be honest. You’d sell everyone in your country down the river too for that.

In that void where the true value of a living human being should be, we’re too afraid to look and admit the dark and ugly truth: In our society, everything… our government, our art, and our own lives, has a price tag.

Is this really the society we wanted to live in?

American Society has always been this way. Why stop now?

Hey congress, there’s a lobbying group with a plan to encourage small business and solve unemployment…

When the American market opened for business, it had humans for sale in it. Purchased with legal contracts enforced by the United States government. Why are we so morally certain, now, that was wrong?

How is it we decided that these mythical Founding Fathers might be ordinary fallible humans? Humans who might’ve faced their own limitations when trying to engage some important questions of the value of our own humanity. Are we absolutely certain we don’t want to roll back that slave market regulation and let the invisible hand of the market decide?

It takes a bold society to understand why human life may transcend political and economic ideology.

It takes an even bolder group of humans to accept that their society may be running on an outdated ideology in desperate need of an upgrade.

Why can’t we seriously change whatever this ideological thing is we’re calling our government and our economy right now? Is anyone still happy with this system? I mean apart from the obvious group of craven ideological true believers running it.

Everything improves with competition.

Pictured: Wasteful spending that generated no profit and lead to nothing useful except the Internet and our entire technology revolution

The best thing communism ever did for us was give an example of what our society had to be better than. We had to compete. Compete for society living standards, thriving middle class, scientific innovation and landing on the moon. But now our old arch-nemesis has gone. So there’s nothing left to challenge us.

Communism’s systemic flaws resulted in a mass concentration of power in the hands of elites and the complete devaluing of human life. But how much farther from that has this version of state run capitalism gotten us?

Isn’t it odd how every time you hand over the power to a centralized group of humans, entranced in their ideology, then remove all competition…

power is invariably abused to exploit the rest?

But are those are only options? Are we Americans all out of ideas on organizing our society? Is this just how we’re going to live now?

But this is the price of American freedom.

By the rate we’ve been paying for freedom, we must be the most free people ever.

This is the cost of freedom. That’s what we all agreed to right? Sacrificing even our own children every day into society’s meat grinder to keep the freedom engine running.

Are we really getting that freedom product we’re paying in blood for?

That freedom is supposed to be how we keep our government from becoming one of those disturbing third world countries. Countries where a corrupt undemocratic oligarchy run by a few wealthy elites can arbitrarily throw powerless and poor people into prison and spy on the private lives of everyone living inside its boarders.

Nothing like the freedom embracing society we’ve been gruesomely sacrificing our own children’s lives for.

Unless there was a loophole in the freedom contract we signed.

Try standing your ground against this.

Did we check the fine print?

The contract stipulated a “well regulated militia.” Why would the system stop us from building our own private armies complete with all the modern military hardware we can buy?

What if somehow the powerful government system found it could still easily prevent people living within its borders from purchasing weapons that stood any fighting chance against a massively mechanized military equipped with automated drones, advanced chemical agents, and laser guided missiles.

You want to embrace the revolutionary spirit of America this 4th of July? Ask your Senator why we can’t buy shoulder fired missiles at our nearest big box retailer.

Did we get fooled? Are we paying an extraordinary high price in the blood of our fellow citizens for a freedom that doesn’t really exist?

Why can’t we do this in the Senate?

We can bring our assault weapons into the local burrito chain, why not the Halls of Congress? Sure, some Senators will die in mass shootings, but that’s the price of liberty over safety isn’t it? Why wouldn’t our love of liberty and freedom to carry extend right into the heart of our government’s power?

Are some human lives worth protecting more than others?

This is not to embrace some kind of violent revolutionary fantasy of changing our system, but rather to shake free of that silly illusion for a second.

There is absolutely no product the American system is letting you purchase at the local store that is a threat to anyone but you and your neighbors.

If a product actually threatened the security and power of the United States government, you couldn’t buy it, sell it, own it, or even share instructions on how to make it in this country without risking a long vacation to a dark hole where they don’t do media interviews.