I differ. I don't think it's cultural or alien at all. It's very human and there is no healthy or neurotypical explanation for this. Humans produce some amount of these types every generation and they are all unique because of randomness, some are quite intelligent and others are vapid copy cat memers.
I think they all had a moment when they realised they could not live any longer.
The exclamation point was formed well before they discovered a message they considered worthy. If not this one, then they would find another message to serve and so on. They start to look for meaning in death instead of life.. The point is that there are exclamation marks running around looking for messages and pipelines.
There are far better ways to convey a message than the suicide of a healthy person. We should never encourage this sort of behaviour. They should either seek help to change this or keep it to themselves. Suicide and politics should never cross.
I don't agree by a wide margin. By asserting a psychological model, "exclamation marks looking for messages" without a single example to support it. It's a compelling sounding theory but you're just declaring it. It's a "I just think it is that way" or "source is I made it up"
Don't get me wrong their are killers that do that, completely unhinged psychos. For some reason I'll be doing your side of the argument for you, let's take the first school shooter, not only the first one but a woman and for a meme of a reason, "I hate mondays".
1979 Cleveland Elementary School Shooting.
Used a 10/22 a little squirt gun of a rifle.
But when you look a little deeper into her history and background you find she was 16, likely severely abused at home, and the Monday thing may have been post-hoc deflection.
The message might not always be clear but the act is trying to express something they have no words for or have been ignored over.
Your whole argument boils down to "suicidal people find causes rather than causes creating suicidal people" and that's exactly to my point of just seeing these people as simply suicidal.
A suicidal person has many options in the way they choose to kill them selves. For a suicidal person to land square on a soft target such a a school say something. They didn't go into a police department and start running down cops ( which does happen and even the most delusional person understands that they will end up dead.) They wish to inflict a trauma on society that they feel have wronged them in one way or another. You can look up 100's of videos of people walking down on a cop with a knife or gun and just keep saying " shoot me shoot me". We have a few shooters that did pick hard target that I knew they would die.
Micah Xavier Johnson. Ex military and smoke a few cops and then forced the police into a stand off where they had to strap a bomb onto a drone and blow him up with it. His message was anti cop anti white anti government and he showed what he was willing to do.
Males make up about 80 percent of deaths by suicide.
whether or not you like it they all carry a message they wanted to get across, doesn't make the message profound, right, or even important. Every suicide is a psychic tare into reality, a ripple they want others to feel or not feel it's not a neutral act or behavior.
And it's definitely not a America only thing. School shooting happen in other countries and oddly enough most of them look up to the Colombian shooters who them selves where troubled young me. In China it manifests in school stabbings
Knife or axe-attacks on children are distressingly common.
newrepublic.com
"There are far better ways to convey a message than the suicide of a healthy person. We should never encourage this sort of behaviour.
They should either seek help to change this or keep it to themselves. Suicide and politics should never cross."
You've inverted my point, the suicide is the exclamation point to the message, not the message itself. Clearly these people were not heard by the people around them, not noticed by there friends and family, and tend to feel they have no other option for expression.
No one is encouraging that behavior we all shun it the moment it happens except online degens that see this and form a hero worship around these people.
It is in the end a declarative action not a passive one. If they wanted to hurt people they feel have hurt them or make people feel they way they felt. And what youre doing is exactly what I wanted against with the hardening of the heart.