It happens every once in a while in our nation. An event that can only be described as “senseless” by the media, by politicians, by everyone. The assumption is that such an event stands apart because the rest of the world somehow does make sense. That is the mistake at the heart of it all.

Mass killings take place all the time in some parts of the world. They are not supposed to happen, despite a tremendous amount of evidence that they do. The unspoken reason is that we are assumed to be a different kind of people.

Our world is supposed to make sense. There is an order to things, a daily grind of people sitting in classes, hustling off to work, picking up their kids. All of these things happen for reasons, we are told, and everyone minds their own business and tends to their own interests. Obviously, problems arise with this.

For one thing, we cannot know the motivations of everything around us. We do not know all the details why a work crew has ripped up the street. We do not know how our co-workers are plotting to advance their careers. We do not know that a deer intends to cross the street directly in front of us. So much appears to be chance, even when it is carefully rational.

Not everything is coolly rational in the world we live in, either. The search for pleasure, in the form of sex or power or alcohol or chocolate, can drive people to do things that are against their long-term best interests.

What is most important, however, is the insistence that things are supposed to make sense. This cultural value begins with the person observing the world. It is inherently narcissistic because the further you go away from yourself, the less it appears to be true. A more complex and integrated world only throws ambiguity in your face, jazzing your senses out of whack.

Senselessness confronts our faith in order constantly. The result is senseless behavior, a hot anger that runs deep in the blood. The inability of one individual to make sense of their world, something that is supposed to happen easily, becomes a greater senselessness that we all are forced to deal with. Cognitive dissonance becomes cultural discord becomes personal cacophony.

Shooting rampages are not particularly more senseless than what happens to us every day. What they are is violence and rage. Insisting that everything has to make sense increases the potential for an emotional outburst. It is our cultural values, beginning with rationality and individual perception, that start it out. When we are told that everything makes sense, and it clearly does not, a hot-blooded person does not have to take a large leap to believe that senselessness is the way of our world.

The only hope is for cooler heads to understand this, too.