“You get to a point where happiness to you is like, you know, neither here
nor there.” Raoul Moat, seeking psychiatric help before his murder spree and
suicide.
Moat’s followers are at least some of the following things: angry, bored,
unfulfilled, violent, unemployed, injured, abused or abusive, misogynistic,
skint, frustrated, in search of affordable psychiatric care that doesn’t
exist, and lonely. They are also sick of a world that favours people born
rich and clever and beautiful, and they’re capable of a species of malice so
profound that we ought to think about why there are so many of them… Since
we know they weren’t born so hateful, we might want to ask: what brought
them to here?
None of us can securely say we didn’t help make Moat and his followers so
monstrous. None of us can securely say we haven’t fuelled the malignancy
and sorrow of people who hate the fact that life is fundamentally
capricious, who hate that the world rewards people born with special luck
and privilege.
As soon as Moat’s story began, I was certain of a few things. I was certain
he was in agony, and since nobody chooses agony, I felt sorry for him… I
knew that he would have suffered without any skill for suffering, and that
his suffering had snapped him. I knew that, without a gun, he would have
gone on hurting women and children and we’d never have learnt his strange
name, or how he came to get this name from a father he never met.
I hope Moat’s fans won’t snap and won’t get hold of guns and kill. But I’m
pretty certain they’ll go on meting out hurt, like I sometimes do. They’ll
cause trouble in ways that are more conspicuous, more likely to attract
condemnation with more spelling mistakes, and with less skill for hiding
their motives. They’ll mete out hurt just like I sometimes do when I treat
people with contempt, when I spend more money on books in a single year than
I’ve ever given to charity, or when I give short and snobby shrift to people
who work in shit jobs because they’ve said something that annoys me.
*MJ Hyland, in the Sunday Herald*