Norwegian prison garden with inmates and staff tending vegetables together, symbolising rehabilitation, humane justice, and restorative social policy.

“The Factory We Built: How Economic Violence, Digital Addiction, and Institutional Neglect Manufacture Mass Killers”

Written by urbanwronski

In Part 1, we examined the paradox of a godless society where emptying churches still wield outsized power; granting exemptions to discriminate in hiring, for example, while Australian media elevates religious identity above all else. Part 2 exposed how institutions weaponise this deference. Now, the lens widens: this is the story of how economic violence breeds killers, bureaucratic inertia ignores warnings, and a dopamine-driven culture numbs us to peril, until heroes like Ahmed Al-Ahmed remind us that our humanity endures.

The question is no longer how this happens, but how we stop it. The machinery of despair is not inevitable; it is designed. And what is designed can be dismantled.

The Money That Bought Isolation


Consider Brenton Tarrant and Martin Bryant. Both inherited life-changing sums. Tarrant received AU$457,000 after his father’s suicide in 2010, while Bryant gained around $750,000 from lottery heiress Helen Harvey’s estate, plus $250,000 from his father’s superannuation. Instead of securing their futures, these windfalls funded their isolation. Tarrant quit his job and immersed himself in far-right networks; Bryant, intellectually disabled and volatile, stockpiled weapons while openly threatening violence. Neighbours and family raised alarms, but their pleas were met with forms, waitlists, and inaction.

This is not just a failure of individuals. It is a failure of systems that prioritise paperwork over people, and profit over prevention. At Bondi, heroes tackled a gunman bare-handed, yet the event itself lacked basic security measures. How did we reach a point where a public Hanukkah celebration, held amid heightened threats, received no visible risk assessment? The answer lies in the quiet complicity of a society addicted to scrolling past red flags.

Alienation’s Fertile Soil

When institutional faith erodes, alienation takes root. For young men facing a future of underpaid, precarious work and purposeless consumption, the internet’s grievance ecosystems offer a twisted sense of belonging. Tarrant’s path, years of unemployment, bondless travel, and far-right indoctrination, is a map of disaffection. ASIO tracked his digital trail but prioritised reports over intervention. Bryant’s trajectory was even more brazen: cashed-up on a disability pension, he ranted murder threats to anyone who would listen. Authorities logged these warnings, filled out forms, and did nothing.

Alienation thrives where dignity is denied. Wage theft costs Australian workers up to $1.55 billion annually, while the country’s 200 richest individuals hoard over $400 billion in collective wealth. First Nations people, just 3% of the population, make up 33% of prisoners. Visa holders are denied JobSeeker or Medicare. In this landscape of institutional neglect, violence is not an aberration; it is a product.

Inequality as Accelerant

Wealth inequality doesn’t just impoverish. It radicalises. Peer-reviewed studies confirm that income inequality is a stronger predictor of violent crime than deprivation alone. The humiliation of visible disparities fuels resentment. Australia’s richest 1% hold more wealth than the bottom 70%. Homelessness presentations have surged 22% in three years, with 10,000 more Australians becoming homeless each month. Food insecurity affects 1.2 million households.

The damage concentrates on the vulnerable. First Nations poverty rates are double those of non-Indigenous Australians; Indigenous children enter detention at 17 times the rate of their peers. Temporary migrants endure housing stress and unreportable exploitation. Yet politicians respond with “tougher laws” and expanded surveillance powers, even as red flags; manifestos, threats, growing arsenals, go systematically ignored. This paralysis is neither coincidence. It is design.

The Dopamine Trap

At Bondi, heroes acted amid chaos. But earlier, crowds streamed into an unsecured event with no visible risk assessment. A father sensed unease but scrolled betting odds instead of confronting organisers. This is the triumph of the dopamine economy: sensation over scrutiny, outrage over action.

Neuroscience shows how doom-scrolling shreds concentration and erodes impulse control. Dopamine hits from outrage replace vigilance with complacency. Risk-taking becomes social capital—“edgy post, 10k likes”—while caution is pathologised as paranoia. Hate speech in feeds? Scroll past. Lax event security? RSVP anyway. Churches skip safety sweeps; MPs approve events without audits; influencers prioritise vibes over protocols.

Personal agency falls first to clickbait. Collective agency corporatises into compliance.

Grief Vultures and Fear Architects

When atrocity strikes, solidarity should rise. Instead, vultures circle. Politicians such as Sussan Ley discard bipartisan traditions, attacking opponents amid fresh grief. Advocacy groups pivot instantly: “Immigration! Islam! Woke failure!” Algorithms amplify outrage into engagement gold. Bondi parents clutch photos in media scrums, while tribal cries of “antisemitism” or “Islamophobia” drown dialogue. Canberra spins its gun-law circus, commodifying sorrow into legislative theatre.

Yet alternatives exist. And work. Norway’s rehabilitative prisons cut recidivism to 20%, compared to Australia’s 43%. Portugal’s 2001 drug decriminalisation slashed overdose deaths by 93% and HIV infections by 90% through treatment, not punishment.

These models prove violence is not inevitable; it is a policy choice.

Where Agency Begins

Reclaiming agency means demanding change:


  • Prison reform: Adopt Norway’s education-therapy model to replace Australia’s failure-mills, where $6.8 billion yearly buys 43% recidivism; profit for contractors, failure for society.
  • Drug policy: Follow Portugal’s lead: decriminalise, treat, and slash deaths and disease.
  • Economic justice: Lift welfare above poverty lines. Prosecute wage theft as the billion-dollar crime it is. Tax concentrated wealth to restore dignity and stability.
  • Community-led solutions: Trust First Nations and migrant-led programs, which outperform top-down fixes for layered trauma.
  • Event safety: Mandate risk audits before approvals. Establish hate speech hotlines with real enforcement power.
  • Attention reform: Create civic “dopamine detoxes” that reward long form thought over rage-scrolling. Impose 30-day post-tragedy partisan moratoriums, so grief isn’t instantly weaponised.

What philosopher Martin Heidegger called “authentic solicitude”—genuine care for others—demands embedding empathy into governance. Before grief fuels the next fury, we must rewire systems to prioritise people over profit, vigilance over clicks, and solidarity over spectacle.

The Factory We Built—and How to Dismantle It

Bondi, Christchurch, Port Arthur: these are not anomalies. They are the predictable outputs of a society that rewards greed, ignores pleas, and addicts us to distraction. Tarrant and Bryant were manufactured by systems we built. But systems can be rebuilt.

Will we keep funding failure-mills, hosting vulture feasts, and herding numb crowds into danger? Or will we mandate red-flag interventions, demand donor transparency, and reform attention economies to rewire caution over clicks? Norway and Portugal have shown the path. The choice is ours.

Tomorrow’s red flags flicker in your feed right now. You can scroll past; or you can act. Build cohesion. Reclaim futures. Or surrender to the scroll that stultifies your humanity.


Tomorrow’s red flags flicker in your feed. Will you scroll past—or act?

Part 3 of 3. Read Part 1 | Read Part 2

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