In almost every case, they dress their anger in the clothes of ideology: white supremacy, jihad, hatred of abortion, or anti-government paranoia. Stuck in perpetual adolescence, they see only their own imagined virtue amidst irredeemable corruption...

This is the battle cry of the narcissist, and we’ve heard it before. Western societies are producing more and more of these Lost Boys, the fail-to-launch young men who carry weighty social grudges. Some of them kill, but others lash out in other, more creative ways: whether it’s Edward Snowden deciding only he could save America from the scourge of surveillance, or Bowe Bergdahl walking away from his post to personally solve the war in Afghanistan, the combination of immaturity and grandiosity among these young males is jaw-dropping in its scale even when it is not expressed through the barrel of a gun.

There are others: John Walker Lindh, “the American Taliban,” spent his teen years hanging around in Internet chat rooms before became a jihadi at 20. Timothy McVeigh, a bullied little boy, planned his terrorist attack on a federal building after quitting the Army in his twenties. John Salvi, another loner, shot up an abortion clinic at 22. The list could go on.These young losers live through heroic fantasies and constructed identities rather than through work and human relationships: on the Internet, Snowden was “Wolfking Awesomefox,” which almost defies parody, while McVeigh thought of himself as a modern Paul Revere. Their lives, until the moment of their individual tragedy, are full of desperate attempts to spackle over the gaping hole of insecurity that should have been filled by the arrival of manhood sometime after high school.

Jihadis, of course, are the object lesson in this kind of deformed male identity. For all their faux piety and supposed distaste for Western immorality, the young men from North America and Europe who gravitate toward jihadism are often gleeful consumers of forbidden Western delights, and they have a particular obsession with rape, pornography, and an adolescent fixation on the subjugation of women. Terrorist organizations overseas are happy to accommodate this need: it’s not a coincidence that almost every time a jihadi nest gets raided, there’s plenty of porn to be found. Even Bin Laden had a voracious appetite for it.

It seems unarguable, however, that young black males who prey on their own society share one essential trait in common with the white losers who act out and harm strangers: they are not men in any sense of the word that connotes responsibility, restraint, self-discipline, or the other traditional masculine virtues.

The argument here is not that Bergdahl and Snowden are potential killers, or that all introverted or awkward young men threats to society. Indeed, any man who has never gone through phases of introversion and awkwardness is unusual. In fact, sometimes extroverted young men are monsters: in the case of the Boston bombing, the older Tsarnaev brother fits the bill of the creepy, disappointed narcissist, while his younger brother, now sentenced to death, really does seem to be nothing more than an aimless pothead who knew how to have a good time, but who could not bear to disappoint his weird brother.