HATRED AS IDENTITY

II.3 — Identity Reform

"Something that concerns me is how certain digital spaces turn suffering into identity. [...] This has caused the person to stop seeing pain as something to overcome and instead transform it into part of who they are. This is not an impression: the psychological literature confirms it. It has been studied as a disorder of identity itself, a psychosocial foundation where the subject no longer feels pain but rather is the pain. Gabay et al. (2020) call it Tendency to Interpersonal Victimhood; Wilmore et al. (2025) link it with the Dark Factor of Personality. Recent research on digital adolescents speaks of a 'post-identity identity,' where the self dissolves and depends entirely on external validation (Díez Bajo, 2026). And constant comparison on social media is directly associated with identity distress (Systematic Review, 2024). All of this converges in what is known as victimhood personality — a pattern where the subject perceives themselves permanently as a victim."

— Author's notes

The author proposes that the core of the radicalization process is not ideological nor political: it is identity-based. The fundamental change is not in what the young person believes, but in what the young person is.

The process follows four phases:

Phase 1: Splitting

Pain ceases to be an emotional state and becomes a constitutive trait. The person no longer says "I am sad" (an emotion one has) but "I am a sad person" (an identity one is). The emotion migrates from the verb to feel to the verb to be. That grammatical leap is the ontological leap.

Phase 2: Validation

The digital community receives this pain-identity and confirms it. It does not question it, does not treat it, does not dismantle it. It welcomes it as a credential of belonging.

"If others validate it, it becomes fully accepted by the person. This is how environmental factors — context, people, platforms — can amplify and cultivate a mental disorder that might otherwise never have developed."

External validation converts an unstable self-perception into a solid identity. What was once a suspicion about oneself ("maybe I'm worthless") becomes a socially confirmed truth.

Phase 3: Fusion

The critical moment: the negative emotion is no longer something one feels but something one is. Identity fuses with emotional content until the subject can say:

"Like 'I am hatred', so to speak."

"I do not feel hatred" but "I am hatred". The ontological declaration replaces the psychological state. The subject is no longer the bearer of the emotion; the emotion is the subject.

Phase 4: Narrativization

Thoughts that began as private, isolated, shameful become shared narratives within the community. The person no longer has dark thoughts: they participate in a shared story about the world, the enemy, the mission and the end.

"Those 'dark thoughts' that began isolated suddenly become shared narratives, and you feel like you belong among people who understand you, but for those who don't, they become enemies, symbols, NPCs."

The author's age distinction:

For older adolescents (15+), dehumanization operates through identity construction/deconstruction: the subject actively builds a new digital self, deconstructing the previous one piece by piece.

For younger adolescents (<14), the mechanism is different:

"In the case of younger children there is another first barrier: the character they are occupying, what happens to their character they understand as their own."

The author describes here a phenomenon of play-based identity occupation: the young person does not build a new identity, but inhabits a character. Violence is not an expression of the self but of the character. But the boundary blurs when "what happens to his character he understands as his own."

The dehumanization spiral is bidirectional:

Both faces of the same spiral. Dehumanization operates inward and outward simultaneously.

"The problem does not begin when someone threatens harm, but when they begin to completely lose their sense of humanity. When their radicalization reaches its emotional and existential core. They are not necessarily seeking to cause harm, they are seeking to stop feeling invisible."

— Author's notes

This phrase shifts the entire conventional framework of threat detection. The threshold is not the explicit threat (what adults look for). The threshold is the disappearance of the sense of humanity — one's own and others'. When the person no longer experiences themselves as human (but as character, as hatred, as icon), and no longer experiences the other as human (but as NPC, Chad, symbol), the moral containment mechanism has been deactivated.

Violence is not the goal. Visibility is the goal. Violence is the means to achieve it.

II.4 — The Abyss That Gazes Back

"Before, an isolated person was truly alone. Today, an isolated person can find thousands who think the same — malicious? perhaps, or maybe just equally lonely — they feel the same or feed the same destructive ideas."

— Author's notes

The author captures here a structural change in the nature of isolation:

Analog isolation (pre-2010): The isolated person was truly alone. Their dark thoughts had no social feedback. Isolation functioned as a buffer — protecting society from the individual and the individual from collective radicalization.

Digital isolation (post-2010): The isolated person is no longer alone. They find communities that validate, amplify and normalize their thinking. Isolation becomes a concentrator — instead of dispersing, it concentrates ideological energy.

"Why do I say they feed it? Because one thing is being sad, and another is starting to build an identity based on hatred, resentment, hopelessness, fatalism — and that is no longer a mood, it is a process of identity construction."

There is a step between "feeling" and "building." That step is community. The community that gives name, form and direction to diffuse discomfort. Without community, discomfort remains discomfort. With community, discomfort becomes identity.

And that identity comes complete: it not only diagnoses the world (Blackpill), but offers a place of belonging.

Belonging has a price: the dehumanization of those who do not belong.

"We forget that those around us whom we consider crazy also need to socialize, and therefore, seeking places where they can be understood and heard, they will find equally disturbed minds with whom to share dark experiences."

— Gaze into the abyss and the abyss gazes into you.

— Author's notes

The Nietzsche quote is precise. The author understands that radicalization is not unidirectional influence but reciprocal transformation between the individual and the symbolic system they inhabit. The abyss is not passive. It gazes back. And that gaze changes the one who looks.

"Social networks are normalizing extremely negative emotional states and even romanticizing them."

— Author's notes

The author mentions hybristophilia (sexual attraction to violent criminals): Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez receiving love letters in prison. Not as a curiosity, but as a symptom of an ecosystem that aestheticizes and romanticizes extreme violence.

"It strikes me how some young people seem to feel they have no future before even beginning adulthood. This is not an impression: Chilean data confirms it. ELPI 2024 shows that 75% of adolescents have anxious or depressive symptoms. SENDA 2025 found that one in three feels like a failure and 41% believe they are not good at anything. And a study in Frontiers in Education recorded that 63% of Chilean schoolchildren live with anxiety about the future, doubling WHO global averages. Hope has become scarce."

— Author's notes

The pattern repeats in multiple cases:

"In several cases a similar idea appears: 'I don't fit in', 'no one sees me', 'life has no meaning', 'I don't want to grow old'. That seems to repeat more than we imagine."

II.5 — The Irony Shield

"What concerns me is how ironic and dark humor is socially accepted to express violence. Making a very dark joke and having the whole group understand and enjoy it — there's an entry point we're not seeing."

— Author's notes

A parent:

"I always saw him as a normal kid. My son hung out with him and told me he sometimes made comments about killing or burning people. No one took it seriously, they understood them as jokes."

The author identifies the irony shield as a structural mechanism that allows radicalization to occur in public without being detected. The shield operates on three faces:

Face 1 — Social ("it was a joke" is irrefutable)

Dark humor is socially accepted as a vehicle for violence because intent cannot be fixed. Saying "it was a joke" closes any investigation. Anyone who insists on taking a joke seriously is accused of not understanding the code.

Face 2 — Psychological (protects the self from moral responsibility)

The perpetrator can explore violence without recognizing themselves as violent. "I was just joking." But the repetition of the joke normalizes the content until the boundary between fiction and intention blurs.

Face 3 — Systemic (no protocols for the ironic spectrum)

Educational institutions have protocols for explicit threats. They have no protocols for "dark humor." Detection systems are designed for the literal, not for the ironic spectrum where violence is said without being said.

"Delirium trigger: if you add an individual who does not associate with them, and a context like this is generated, the individual might try to imitate them, seek to relate for the sake of socializing, curiosity, morbidity, or because they have finally found a related group."

— Author's notes

The "delirium trigger" (the author's concept) describes the entry mechanism for individuals who do not naturally belong to these communities:

Irony acts as an emotional gateway drug. It allows exploring psychological territories that would otherwise be forbidden by the moral barrier. The problem is not the joke. It is what the joke normalizes after the hundredth repetition.

III.1 — The Signals No One Connected

"I think one of the biggest current problems is that institutions observe signals separately and fail to connect them to each other."

— Author's notes

The problem was not the absence of signals. It was their fragmentation.

Each institution saw a part. None saw the complete pattern.

The author introduces an interdisciplinary metaphor to explain this failure:

"In cybersecurity, they speak of correlating events to detect threats. Perhaps something similar is missing in the human and educational sphere."

In cybersecurity, a single failed login attempt is nothing. A hundred attempts from fifty countries in three minutes is an attack. The difference is correlation. The author proposes exactly that for the human system: a system that correlates the signals that currently float in separate institutional silos.

But there is a darker layer. The testimony of a mother of one of the young people who witnessed the attack:

"At the school there have been many cases of rights violations. Quite a few, and it's all hidden for the school's prestige, because it's actually one of the best schools in Calama. To protect the prestige, they twist the children's versions."

The school's legal representative came out to defend their management:

"He always had support from the school's psychosocial team (...). We've had to expel several students. We've applied many Safe Classrooms protocols. We've sanctioned and suspended many students. We've never been sanctioned by the Superintendent of Education."

"Adults look for explicit threats, but do not pay attention to prior emotional deterioration."

— Author's notes

III.2 — Latin America as Laboratory

72 hours after the attack in Calama, on Monday March 30, 2026, at the Escuela Normal Mariano Moreno in San Cristóbal, Santa Fe Province, Argentina, a 15-year-old student entered with a 12/70 caliber shotgun that he took from his grandfather. He camouflaged it in a guitar case. The attack began during the national flag-raising ceremony. He said "surprise" and opened fire.

1 student killed, age 13. 2 wounded.

The profile: good student, no prior disciplinary sanctions, family conflicts, informal bullying reports. Days before he had explicitly threatened his peer group: "he would bring a weapon and everyone would die".

As in Chile, the student environment dismissed the warnings. They categorized them as jokes.

The Argentine investigation confirmed direct links to True Crime Community forums (TCC): a process of passive indoctrination where explicit violence is consumed, previous cases are studied, techniques are emulated, and one progressively deepens a worldview where mass attack is a possible destiny.

The contagion effect did not stop there.

In April 2026, students from multiple Latin American countries used social media anonymously or painted graffiti on walls and school bathrooms using the phrase "Tomorrow Shooting", specifying specific rooms or floors. The phenomenon generated collective panic and forced preventive evacuations and suspension of academic activities in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.

Various minors were placed under juvenile court supervision. It was proven they were acting under internet viral challenge dynamics.

Brazil — Authorities identified a systemic increase in attacks with a common pattern:

Mexico — Criminal intelligence reports note constants:

These are not isolated cases. They are a structural Latin American phenomenon.

III.3 — Digital Emotional Health

"I think we need to start talking more about digital emotional health and not just digital security. As a society we still don't really understand the psychological impact of being permanently connected to ecosystems designed to capture emotional attention."

— Author's notes

The author proposes a framework shift. It is not about adding more content control or more surveillance. It is about recognizing that the digital ecosystem not only processes information: it processes emotions, vulnerabilities and psychological states.

"It makes me think that today privacy is not only about personal data, but also about emotions, vulnerabilities and psychological states."

— Author's notes

"I think the most important human risk of this generation is not information theft, but the gradual loss of empathy, purpose and human connection (AI LOVE RELATIONSHIPS WTF?????)."

— Author's notes

The author's emotional parenthesis — the capitals, the question marks — is not a distraction. It is the recognition that the boundary between the human and the synthetic, the real and the performed, the felt and the constructed, is blurring in real time. And that adolescents are navigating this blurring without a map.

"Perhaps the great question is not 'what was this young person consuming,' but 'what vision of the world were they building inside themselves.'"

— Author's notes

That question shifts the entire framework:

• From consumption to production (the young person is not passive)
• From content to worldview (not just the what, but how they organize meaning)
• From symptom to structure (not what they feel but how their identity organizes around that feeling)

The author closes with three words that function as coordinates:

"Digital Security — Cybersecurity — Privacy"

But she actually proposes a broader framework that contains them:

III.4 — Eight Theses

Before the abyss gazes back

Eight theses, one for each layer of analysis:

1. Violence is not an event. It is the arrival point of an identity process. Slow, silent emotional deterioration is the terrain. The attack is the flowering. Looking only at the attack is understanding nothing.
2. The algorithm does not recommend: it builds emotional trajectories. The constant repetition of content — even if each piece is innocuous — is more dangerous than isolated extreme content. The regime of repetition is the true radicalization machine.
3. Suffering becomes identity when the community validates it. "I am hatred" is not a metaphor. It is the result of four phases (splitting, validation, fusion, narrativization) that turn an emotional state into an ontological declaration.
4. Dehumanization is bidirectional. One dehumanizes the other (NPC, Chad, enemy) and dehumanizes oneself (character, avatar, icon). Both faces of the same spiral.
5. Humor is not innocent. It can be the antechamber of dehumanization. Irony is the shield that protects radicalization from detection. "It was a joke" disarms any alert system.
6. The signals were visible all along, but there was no system to connect them. The problem is not the absence of data. It is institutional fragmentation that prevents seeing the pattern. In cybersecurity this is called event correlation. In school mental health it has no name.
7. Latin America is not a spectator. It is a laboratory for a global phenomenon with regional specificities. The Calama-San Cristóbal-Tomorrow Shooting-Brazil-Mexico case shows a transmission pattern that operates across borders, languages and educational systems.
8. The question is not "how do we detect the next attacker" but "how do we dismantle the conditions that produce them." And that begins by recognizing that digital emotional health is not a luxury: it is a public health necessity.

The Descent: Evidence Board

"Perhaps the great question is not 'what was this young person consuming,' but what vision of the world were they building inside themselves"

Epilogue: 37 Seconds

The video that is no longer on YouTube survives only in screenshots.

A hooded young man. A teddy bear. A katana at the bear's neck.

Three thousand eight hundred people saw it before it was removed. Some commented. Others shared. Most kept scrolling.

The video was called "Attack at Instituto Lezaeta." It was published on March 26, 2026. It was 37 seconds long.

The next day, a 59-year-old inspector was dead. Four people were wounded. An 18-year-old was subdued in the school courtyard, waiting for Carabineros.

On his knives he had carved the names of his saints: Auvinen, Yamaguchi, Bekmansurov, Henderson.

In his notebook he had written:

"Life has no value, because no one lives to see their impact or legacy, if they have one, the best you can do is make sure you leave something in the world before you go, and I made my decision."

In his Discord manifesto:

"I do NOT wish to age, I have NO intention of aging and I will NOT age. Because life is a punishment and the sooner it ends, the better."

On his X account:

"The best way to release tension is to have a fresh corpse available to destroy and do whatever you want to it without consequences."

And in her notes, the author left behind the question that this article has attempted to address:

"Perhaps the great question is not 'what was this young person consuming,' but 'what vision of the world were they building inside themselves.'"

The 37-second video is gone. But the question remains open.

Appendices