Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Washington Outsider

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/01/02

by Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Irina Tsukerman

Irina Tsukerman is a human rights and national security attorney based in New York and Connecticut. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in National and Intercultural Studies and Middle East Studies from Fordham University in 2006, followed by a Juris Doctor from Fordham University School of Law in 2009. She operates a boutique national security law practice. She serves as President of Scarab Rising, Inc., a media and security strategic advisory firm. Additionally, she is the Editor-in-Chief of The Washington Outsider, which focuses on foreign policy, geopolitics, security, and human rights. She is actively involved in several professional organizations, including the American Bar Association’s Energy, Environment, and Science and Technology Sections, where she serves as Program Vice Chair in the Oil and Gas Committee. She is also a member of the New York City Bar Association. She serves on the Middle East and North Africa Affairs Committee and affiliates with the Foreign and Comparative Law Committee.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a contributor to The Washington Outsider. Also, he is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing(ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and the Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This past year was marked by violence: major wars, killings, assaults, internal displacement, and starvation. There were also individual acts of violence, including major political incidents, such as the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, in September 2025, allegedly carried out by Tyler James Robinson, who is now the accused in that case. People often avoid mentioning the names of killers, but in this session, we will.

Other attacks occurred throughout the year. In Taipei, Taiwan, on December 19th, a coordinated smoke-grenade and stabbing attack killed four people, including the attacker, and injured eleven others. In England, on November 1st, a mass stabbing aboard an LNER train between Peterborough and Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire left eleven people injured, two of them critically, but caused no fatalities. In Midtown Manhattan, New York City, a mass shooting at 345 Park Avenue on July 28th, targeting the National Football League headquarters, killed four victims before the gunman died by suicide, and injured five others. In Graz, Austria, a school shooting on June 10th at BORG Dreierschützengasse left ten people dead and at least eleven injured; the perpetrator, a former student, then died by suicide, bringing the total number of deaths to eleven.

Similar incidents — stabbings, shootings, and vehicle-ramming attacks — took place in Amsterdam, Mannheim, Munich, Örebro, Aschaffenburg, Las Vegas, and New Orleans. These include a mass stabbing near Dam Square in Amsterdam that injured five civilians; a school shooting at an adult-education centre in Örebro that left eleven dead, including the gunman; a child-targeted stabbing attack in Aschaffenburg that killed two people and injured three; and vehicle-ramming or vehicle-borne attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas around New Year’s, with significant casualties. Many of the attackers were men. Intimate partners further radicalized some, but most acted alone, self-radicalized or influenced within informational bubbles that promote hatred toward Jews, women, or other groups.

What are your thoughts on this past year of incidents, and on the distinguishing traits of these perpetrators, given that such attacks occur in many countries with access to guns or knives, and where access is restricted, vehicles are used instead?

Irina Tsukerman: Even in countries with strict gun control, mass violence persists, which indicates an underlying impulse toward aggression. Focusing solely on access to weapons does not explain the mass stabbings in Taipei or the vehicle-ramming attacks. Political and ideological motives are relevant, but assuming they are not always the primary driver, the question remains: why are so many people committing violent acts in public?

Does media glorification of mass killers encourage attention-seeking individuals? Are deeply insecure people turning to violence to gain recognition? Are people with mental health issues not receiving adequate treatment? That seems unlikely, because Western societies have never been more focused on therapy, psychiatric care, and medication. Therapy, as such, barely existed before the nineteenth century and was limited to the privileged; psychiatric medication is also relatively recent. However, we are seeing widespread loss of self-control and psychological breakdowns among people without substance-use disorders, resulting in harm to others.

These attacks now have a distinctly public dimension: not merely property damage or isolated outbursts, but repeated stabbing sprees or shootings in public spaces. Several factors may converge. First, desensitization to violence through cultural exposure — films, video games, and news cycles that constantly highlight violent incidents — has increased; in the past, people were exposed to far less graphic material.

Life is stressful, and expectations are high. Parents are expected to live highly child-centred lives. Individuals are expected to earn more, to compete for social acceptance, and to prove themselves. There is a growing combination of narcissism and insecurity, intensified by social media, which fuels fixation on public approval, often unrelated to genuine accomplishment.

That can be a significant psychological stressor, not only for teenagers and children, but also for adults who are already dealing with the ordinary pressures of life — earning a living, coping with political and economic uncertainty, and managing dysfunctional family and relationship dynamics. In general, there is a high degree of dysfunction in our society that resists precise labelling. Trying to put broad explanations into a neat box — for example, saying that men are more violent because society gives them more permission to be violent — does not necessarily lead to solutions. There may not be a single reason behind these different incidents.

What I do see at the group level is a general lack of self-control, a loss of motivation to maintain focus on meaningful aspects of life, and far less tolerance for difficulty — even among people who are comparatively privileged in Western societies.

As a footnote, let me confirm your rhetorical question. I was born in Kharkiv, and I have lived in the United States since the age of ten. So yes, I carry sensibilities from both cultures.

Jacobsen: I have been to Kharkiv twice, including during the war. We stayed there for two weeks. It is a frontline city. You can eat a McDonald’s hamburger at 9 p.m., and then the air-raid sirens go off, and explosions may or may not be happening around you. The contrast is jarring. You have a dark sense of humour, which helps. It is a beautiful city — my favourite in Ukraine.

When you reference this privileged status, you tend to approach the subject differently than the standard North American discourse, which often treats privilege as a secular version of original sin that must be confessed and absolved. You do not take that position, and instead lean toward a more rationalistic account of what privilege means. What are you getting at?

Tsukerman: Our society has developed tremendously since, for example, the Middle Ages. We have seen unprecedented advances in medical care, prosperity across developed countries, personal freedoms, individual choice, and family lifestyles — all on a scale that is historically unparalleled for so many people. At every stage of life, people want more, demand more, and remain dissatisfied with something, which is natural and partly beneficial. You cannot improve society without expecting further development.

However, as our society has progressed, tolerance for the obstacles involved in that progress has decreased. There is an expectation that solutions to ordinary problems should be easy to obtain. Wanting to improve life is natural, but there is a diminishing tolerance for the work required to reach those improvements. No human achievement has come without sacrifice, effort, resilience, and persistence — along with complications and setbacks. Scientific breakthroughs often require years of experimentation; modern medical care is the product of centuries of trial, error, refinement, and perseverance.

However, today, relatively minor issues can have disproportionately stressful psychological effects. This lack of resilience — this tendency to demand more while investing less — is the form of privilege I am referring to.

Jacobsen: You are describing privilege framed as entitlement, yes?

Tsukerman: Exactly. Yes.

Jacobsen: How does this shape or fracture societal expectations?

Tsukerman: It is good to have high expectations and higher standards. The fact that today we can afford things that were once only available to elites — the fact that we have leisure time, that we can send children to school and engage them in extracurricular activities — represents significant historical progress. Average middle-class children, and even children from lower-income families in developed societies, have access to educational resources on a scale unimaginable a century ago.

It is worth pausing to appreciate how many people have benefited from these developments. One hundred years ago, many children did not finish school at all, much less have the opportunity to attend college or learn a trade later in life, when they were more mature and able to enjoy their childhood before assuming adult responsibilities.

What worries me is the growing inability to keep pace with societal improvements in terms of attitude, psychological preparedness, and the mindset needed to shape the outcomes one wants in life. There will always be unpredictable external factors beyond human control — climate events, wars triggered by aggression elsewhere, corruption driven by human nature, emergent diseases, and financial crises. However, how people respond to these difficulties remains within individual control. What seems to be lacking is a framework to transmit mental preparation and foundational skills that guide younger generations toward resilience and functional adulthood.

By success, I do not mean a specific income level or an idealized life, because everyone has different goals. Rather, the ability to overcome challenges healthily and functionally, to contribute to society, and to maintain personal meaning without collapsing in the face of a shock.

Jacobsen: I have not come across a sufficiently convincing solution either. As a journalist, I see this topic resurfacing continually, in health reporting, skills development, and debates about social cohesion. It has entered the mainstream partly because governments are concerned about population replacement and tax bases, and partly because gender friction and intergenerational frustration make the problem visible. Older generations see their own children struggling in ways they did not anticipate. Public figures such as Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway have been discussing these issues widely — Galloway even appeared on Oprah, who remains one of the most skilled interviewers alive.

So yes, it is very much in the air. I think what you are getting at — and what I share — is the sense that there is no single solution. Two arguments, however, have struck me as persuasive even though they approach the same phenomenon from different angles and reach different emphases.

The first argument is that many people struggle to reach adulthood milestones at an appropriate pace. From this perspective, individuals simply are not organizing their lives effectively enough, and the timeline to maturity looks inappropriately slow compared to previous generations.

The second argument holds that modern life is far more complex — technologically, socially, professionally — with constantly evolving virtual and real-world environments. The sheer volume of information, norms, and adaptive requirements means that functioning “appropriately” requires absorbing far more implicit rules than before. From this standpoint, delayed timelines might reflect environmental complexity rather than personal deficiency.

Both arguments have merit at a high level, though each can be refined with detail. What are your thoughts?

Tsukerman: Human beings are extraordinarily adaptive. Evolution designed the human mind and body to function across diverse conditions. Societies have consistently moved toward greater complexity — politically, economically, and socially — beginning with advanced communication and continuing as the frontal cortex of our species developed. Complexity has increased generation by generation, and people have adapted through periods of accelerated globalization, rapid industrial and technological revolutions, crises, and social upheavals. I am not suggesting these periods were easy; they were never easy. Some individuals have always been psychologically fragile and overwhelmed by rapid change or by dysfunctional social and political environments.

However, throughout history, people have survived and have not destroyed one another entirely, even when communication was primitive and community life was harsh. They found ways to apply themselves, to prosper, and to build continuity across generations — ultimately leading to the present moment. My point is not to trivialize modern challenges, but to emphasize that they are not insurmountable in principle. Previous generations overcame difficulties no less severe — and often far more so: the bubonic plague, trench warfare, the Holodomor in Ukraine, and genocides around the world. Their circumstances were not easier than those faced today in developed societies, and yet those societies did not collapse. They endured.

The central question, then, concerns expectations, morals, and values. How do people perceive the world around them? What do they prioritize? Moreover, how do they respond when expectations and values no longer align with reality?

There has been an immense cultural focus on achieving happiness, yet what that entails remains undefined. This has led to a profound mismatch between satisfaction, joy, and meaning. A person may live a tough life that is nonetheless profoundly meaningful, with a strong sense of appreciation for that meaning, especially when the individual defines their own parameters and creates their own sense of purpose. In such cases, difficulties and obstacles become secondary to one’s moral choices. A meaningful life can also include joy — moments of internal satisfaction when one’s choices align with one’s expectations and desires.

Satisfaction, however, relates to feeling content with one’s current circumstances, and it is natural not to be content at every moment. If someone were in a constant, unchanging state of satisfaction — like a Zen monk permanently suspended in meditation — most people would likely drift into apathy rather than growth. Human beings need to search for meaning, avenues of self-application, and stimulation.

The question then becomes: What is the constant pursuit directed toward? Is it simply money, fame, social approval, physical attractiveness, status, knowledge, or professional accomplishment? Or is it meaning grounded in moral purpose — the application of one’s values to improve life, including the lives of others?

If one chooses to focus on that moral dimension, life may become more satisfying overall, even when other desires remain unmet. This is because meaning derived from one’s own values is something within personal control. When a person contributes to others in ways that are both meaningful and aligned with their own abilities, and when they follow a path chosen by internal moral standards rather than external pressures, then challenges become less frustrating. Even under difficult circumstances, one can still derive satisfaction from one’s own society. 

Society is failing children by failing to introduce an ethical dimension alongside basic critical thinking, literacy, health literacy, and financial literacy from an early age. The ability to make one’s life meaningful — even when confronted with difficulties beyond one’s control — is a crucial foundation. The absence of this foundation contributes to confusion generated by new technologies, social dilemmas, complicated communication environments, and evolving social obligations. In reality, none of these pressures is fundamentally new compared to the crises previous generations endured.

To illustrate, I want to give an example that has always made me stop and think when confronting difficulty. My family’s stories from life in the Soviet Union — during World War II and throughout the prolonged decades of post-war hardship, political repression, and economic scarcity — left a lasting impression on me. My grandparents, and later my parents, managed to find sparks of joy in everyday life despite living under a punishing state that did not value human life.

What astonished me was that, even under conditions where the instinct for self-preservation should dominate, they were able to share their limited resources — basic foods and necessities — with neighbours. They exchanged what little they had, found common language with others, and showed compassion. They offered joy through helping others, even when those around them were not necessarily friends: some were potential informers, some were petty or envious, some were self-centred or unreliable.

Nevertheless, they managed to show cooperation, selflessness, and compassion, which in turn invited respect, camaraderie, and assistance — within a system deliberately structured to divide people and isolate them, to render them dependent and afraid. Their choices preserved their humanity in conditions designed to erode it. 

Despite living under a government that restricted personal agency and attempted to shape behaviour within narrow parameters, the choices my family made might seem, at first glance, to increase stress: in addition to caring for their own needs, they chose to care for others. However, these acts of generosity actually made life easier. They generated goodwill, lowered aggression and tension, and encouraged reciprocity. When people witnessed genuine kindness, they were more likely to respond in kind or at least maintain positive dynamics, and less likely to lash out. These choices created friendships and sustained relationships, despite the government’s efforts to fracture society through informants, distrust, and punitive pressure.

We sometimes drifted away from that mindset. If people under those conditions could show small kindnesses, find inventive ways to overcome government-imposed obstacles, and use barter and trade to support one another, why can we not manage our own problems with less antagonism, selfishness, and self-destruction? When I see parents at children’s sports games losing control of their emotions, I wonder: if someone cannot handle a child’s game, how will they handle war, famine, or serious illness? The short answer is that many do not — they fall apart.

Jacobsen: We are facing a symptomatology of lack. In Los Angeles, for example, someone becomes enraged in traffic, has access to an unregistered gun, and shoots another driver, perhaps a nineteen-year-old killing a forty-year-old over nothing. In other cases, there is extreme poverty or lack of freedom, which we might want to rationalize as structural, but often it is simply neglect.

However, under the circumstances you described in the Soviet Union — conditions of severe deprivation — people were still able to show kindness. So we now have a situation in which life becomes cheap in wealthy societies, to the point of petty murder, while people living in profound hardship have historically demonstrated generosity, as in the scene in the original Aladdin film where the protagonist breaks bread to share with a hungry child.

What ties these examples together?

Tsukerman: Positive examples matter most. In families where children generally see constructive dynamics — even amid conflict and difficulty — they will often imitate those patterns. No matter what they encounter elsewhere, they are more likely to follow the examples set by family members, mentors, and major influences than those of strangers, even if they consume large amounts of media.

Some of these skills can also be directly taught. Biologically, a nineteen-year-old will generally have less impulse control than a forty-year-old, but if a forty-year-old has behaved like a nineteen-year-old for decades without learning self-regulation, age alone will not generate maturity. If someone never learned basic behavioural skills, they may still lash out later in life. These competencies must be taught intentionally.

Part of the challenge today is structural. In public schools, classrooms often have 35 or 40 students. Teachers cannot realistically devote time to teaching individualized behavioural strategies while simultaneously managing a large group and delivering the curriculum required by educational standards.

Conversely, even a small private school with class sizes half those of public schools cannot compensate for poor behavioural models at home. If a family does not value ethics, cooperation, or restraint — if the only focus is prestige, credentials, and advancement — then class size and teacher attention will change very little. A child will imitate the behaviour modelled at home, and at a young age, it is not easy to discern which examples are worth following. Ultimately, I believe family influence outweighs all other environmental factors. That does not mean outside influences cannot offer better pathways, but those influences must still be taught and reinforced.

Jacobsen: You get the sense with some people that they are one-dimensional. They may possess critical thinking, logic, and high cognitive ability — the hardware is there — but something essential is missing.

Please continue.

Tsukerman: The question is: why do positive examples not prevail? Why do cultural spaces so often become defined by those focused on status, force, and short-term gains rather than by those who embody generosity, restraint, and integrity?

Part of the explanation is that people who want to be left alone — including those who quietly live out good ethics — feel no need to proselytize. Meanwhile, those whose ethics are grounded in coercion, dominance, or force feel compelled to impose their values socially and broadly. They shape culture by insisting on being heard.

When I see commentary clips from Russian citizens with family members in the military, many express pride and uncritical support. It reminds me of commentary from Americans in Midtown Manhattan during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — the perspectives differ, but not by 180 degrees. Often the divergence is 60 or 70 degrees: slanted, partial, shaped by selective perception.

When I spent time in Jordan and Israel, I observed something similar. Interactions at the individual level were often polite, warm, and generous — especially in commercial exchanges — but broader social trust remained low. Personal virtues did not readily extend into generalized trust, which slows collective development despite strong individual ethics.

Jacobsen: So the individual ethic can be good, but without interpersonal trust, the virtue does not scale. It fails to multiply, and over time, that becomes the “culture.”

Tsukerman: It is a circular dynamic. When people frequently betray one another — financially, socially, professionally — and when conflicts are resolved by force, manipulation, or sabotage rather than honest engagement, a low-trust culture naturally emerges. Add a layer of governance that is corrupt, unequal in reach, or biased toward particular families or interests, and trust erodes further. People feel compelled to hustle dishonestly to survive.

I do not know how to break the cycle except by teaching basic ethics from the outset — and by making an intentional decision not to raise children who contribute to a culture that undermines others. I want the next generation to succeed on merit, to contribute something positive, and to overcome obstacles by being ethical and forthright — not by dragging others down. That requires choices at both the societal and governmental levels. Change must come from the top down and the bottom up: citizens must demand better, and governments must reinforce it. Even local efforts can begin the process.

Jacobsen: Which is why democracies are preferable to authoritarian or monarchical systems. You may occasionally have benevolent rulers, but structural change is far more difficult than simply voting out failing public servants.

Thank you very much for your time today. 

Irina Tsukerman: Thank you so much. Take care. Goodbye.

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