Poverty of the Soul

At a Hindu ceremony held on April 19th, on the Virginia Tech campus, 33 candles were lighted, including one for Mr. Cho, who shot himself after his deadly killing spree.

“He also was a lost soul,” said Kusum Singh, who helped organize the Hindu ceremony to memorialize G. V. Loganathan, 52, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Minal Panchal, 26, an architecture student from Mumbai, India.

Is it simply the lack of love and belongingness that allows extreme psychological poverty to arise in some cases, which leads to crimes such as murders and mass killings? Do happy and loving people ever go on a killing spree? Extreme psychological poverty exists in all nations - and perhaps even more so in richer nations, as they get obsessed with material well-being.