Taboos and the Ones Who Break Them

Last night a man went to a youth hockey game shot his ex-wife and child before turning the gun on himself. Robert “Roberta” Dorgan was a post-op transwoman. He was a body builder. On his 48-inch biceps he sported an SS tattoo with a nazi skull in the foreground. Online he had the habit of calling people he disliked Jews. He posted constantly about the pedophile cult led by Jeffery Epstein and the need to protect children. He was an amalgam of a certain part of the internet; a man who seemed to have no natural immunity to the crazy things the algorithm brings before us. He may have seemed to be filled with contradiction, but I don’t think that’s the true way to view this.

Those who position themselves as “taboo-breakers” are often less concerned with the specific content of the taboo than with the act of transgression itself. Even when successive transgressions generate obvious contradictions, these inconsistencies rarely undermine the posture of rebellion. The energy derives not from the articulation of a defensible alternative norm, but from the performance of boundary-crossing. Transgression becomes self-justifying, insulated from critique precisely because it defines itself in opposition to constraint rather than in relation to truth or internal consistency.

The impulse to transgress identity taboos can be understood as emerging from a fractured or rejected sense of self. When an individual experiences profound alienation, whether through trauma, sustained humiliation, self-hatred, or other ego-dissolving events, the structures that once anchored identity may come to feel intolerable. The self is no longer experienced as something to be cultivated or reconciled with, but as something to escape or dismantle.

Identity itself comes into question. The individual may seek to sever the symbolic ties that bind them to family, culture, history, and embodiment. What presents outwardly as bold transgression can function inwardly as a strategy of disassociation: a refusal to inhabit the self. Taboo-breaking becomes an attempt at psychic rupture.

This dynamic is extraordinarily destabilizing. A person without a stable sense of self sets to undermine shared meaning. Identity serves to define our relationship to our community and to the world. Rejection of the self, risks eroding the very fabric of our social life.

Identity is not constructed ex nihilo. It is scaffolded by symbolic systems that predate the individual. Alasdair MacIntyre says in After Virtue: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” When the stories themselves are rejected wholesale, the problem becomes not merely moral disagreement but narrative fragmentation.

When these troubled individuals have cause to question the stories they are a part of, often through tragedy, all aspects of their self are called into question, all relationships, all norms. The husband doesn’t just question his God, or his nation, but his role of father, of husband, of man. Men like Robert take the ultimate steps to sever their connection to these stories, to these roles.

Robert rejected the societal taboo in politics by supporting the civic personification of evil in our culture: the Nazis. He didn’t just adopt their views or rhetoric but tattooed their symbols on his body. He rejected his role of man by dressing as a woman, adopting a female name, and paying a skilled surgeon to invert his genitals, making his sexual function as a man impossible: a symbolic and literal castration. In rejection of his role as father and husband he shot and killed his own wife and child. Finally in the ultimate act of rejection of self, he committed suicide.

These acts are committed in response to a negative belief. A desire to reject narrative of the self. Even the acts of tattooing symbols of ideologies onto his body are done to show how thoroughly he rejects civic norms.

Carl Jung discusses In The Undiscovered Self, that when individuals are cut off from the symbolic and archetypal structures that root them in a larger story, they become both inwardly fragmented and outwardly susceptible to mass movements. “The individual,” Jung wrote, “is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life.” For Jung, archetypes are not optional aesthetic features of culture; they are organizing principles of psychic life. To reject them without integrating their contents is not liberation but destabilization. What is repressed or denied does not disappear; it returns in distorted form.

This fragmentation that can emerge from unresolved trauma or profound alienation, can manifest as highly visible transformations, whether aesthetic, ideological, or behavioral. They are attempts at self-erasure. The individual does not merely revise an identity; they seek distance from a self viewed as intolerable.

We observe this in the abused woman who shaves her head, covers her body in tattoos, and becomes hypersexual. We see this in young men who adopt extremist political ideologies, often driving senseless street violence. We see this in the trans movement, an attempt at self-annihilation, a symbolic suicide, a dead name.

In its most severe form, this trajectory collapses into nihilism. The desire to annihilate the self symbolically: to sever one’s ties to continuity, obligation, and recognition, becomes the more extreme literal version: one who contemplates suicide as not only a wish to end suffering but to negate existence itself. When grievance, isolation, and grandiosity combine, this negation is externalized, transforming inward despair into outward violence. This is the school shooter, the family annihilator, the suicide by cop.

Trans ideology is inherently self-annihilating. It attracts a group of people pre-disposed towards this view. Those people are already reeling from real traumas and alienation. Unstable selfs throwing their foundational narratives into question, in opposition to the observations and social expectations of broader society. Severe endocrine disruptions involved in transitioning does not help stabilize these people. The trend of trans mass violence, of school shootings and family annihilation is not surprising.

Friedrich Nietzsche said, “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.” Meaning moral structures are often more interdependent than they appear. The Metanarratives that describe our social life are grounding. The steady attacks and the undermining of these narratives is destabilizing on both the individual level and the civilizational level. We have not just lost Christianity, or religion more broadly, but the belief in any of our metanarratives. In nationality, culture, history, tradition they have all come into intense criticism or have been outright discarded as antiquated.

These unfortunate fractured souls are products of postmodernism in its most distilled form: a deep suspicion of metanarratives and an insistence that inherited frameworks of meaning are instruments of coercion rather than orientation. A personal tragedy, humiliation, or profound disillusionment can render previously accepted narratives about family, nation, faith, or even self as intolerable. When such experiences are reinforced by a broader culture that speaks of its own traditions primarily in terms of guilt, failure, or oppression, the impulse to abandon shared meaning structures is amplified. It leaves our culture uniquely unequipped to handle the spiritual crisis these people are undergoing.

The rejection of metanarratives does not eliminate the human need for coherence. Meaning is not so easily discarded. What often follows is an attempt to construct a substitute narrative from fragments: personal grievance, selective theory, aesthetic posture, and borrowed ideological language. These improvised frameworks frequently lack the depth, discipline, and internal consistency required to sustain a stable worldview. This is not surprising, constructing a coherent metaphysical or moral system is an extraordinarily demanding task, one for which most individuals are understandably ill-equipped.

The result can be a mounting accumulation of contradictions. Reality resists the narrative; experience fails to conform to theory. Over time, this strain may generate a sense of cognitive and existential instability. The collapse of a fragile self-constructed worldview can end in an eruption of destructive behavior, as the individual attempts to resolve unbearable dissonance through decisive, often violent, action.

When these individuals do collapse into extreme violence, combing through their social media or manifestos is mostly a waste of time. Their beliefs are poorly thought out, grasping for meaning in a fractured world. Contradictory and muddled, even their expressed motives don’t explain what is driving them. They are a self shattered, a rejection of metanarratives forced on them by a personal tragedy and reenforced by a culture that has almost nothing positive to say about itself.