Like with most academic disciplines, criminology has unattributable statements that are often referenced. Often, they involve a paraphrased maxim that circulates withing the discipline rather than a line that is traceable to one individual. One that circulates within criminology is, “without a motive there can’t be a crime.” However, within the criminal justice system and criminology, motive is not a required element of most crimes, whereas intent (mens rea) is. Whilst intent and motive often overlap in everyday speech, legally they are distinct: intent looks to answer the question “what did the individual mean to do?”, whilst motive looks to find out why an individual engaged in a particular act. In a shooting scenario, intent concerns what the individual wanted to achieve, such as killing or seriously harming the other individual, whilst the motive behind their actions could be many and different e.g., they could be a mugger who wants to force compliance with a demand or “punish” someone for failing to comply; they could have found their partner in bed with someone else and acted out of jealousy etc. In many cases motives aren’t clear, and the person committing an offense may not be able to articulate what motivated them, which is why from a legal perspective their intent is more important than their motive. The same action can have the same intent but differ in motivation: both mercy killings and contract killings have the same intent i.e., to end someone’s life, but in one case the perpetrator does so for financial gain, whilst in the other they are motivated by compassion. However, many people believe that if we don’t know why someone behaves in a certain way, it shouldn’t be judged as a crime. In this article I want to look at why in certain situations/cases there isn’t a “why”/motive.

                Nihilism, broadly defined, is the belief that life lacks any inherent meaning, value, or moral order to it. In its philosophical form, nihilism offers an abstract position about existence and ethics, whilst in its psychological and criminological form, nihilism often appears as a lived experience e.g., a sense that nothing matters, rules are arbitrary, and human life has no intrinsic worth. When this worldview intersects with alienation, grievance, and/or a collapse in identity, it can be expressed/manifested criminogenically. This article explores how nihilistic thinking can manifest itself in real-world criminal offending, particularly that of violent crime, and why such beliefs can lower internal restraints against harming others. It should be noted that from a criminological perspective, nihilism is not a diagnosis, and neither is it a sufficient cause of crime. Rather, it functions as a framework of “meaning” that can remove moral inhibitions, justify transgression, or render consequences irrelevant. In certain contexts, nihilism operates as a psychological lubricant that allows violence to be seen and felt as permissible, and in some cases even inevitable.

Most people don’t engage in serious acts of crime not because they fear punishment, but because of internalized moral rules, that include empathy, guilt, along with the establishment and preservation of social rules and bonds etc. Nihilism weakens these internal controls because if nothing has meaning, then suffering has no moral weight, and if life has no value, then death/killing is no longer a taboo. This is closely related to what is referred to in criminology as “moral disengagement”, a cognitive process by which individuals deactivate ethical self-regulation. Nihilism provides a philosophical justification for such disengagement, with violence becoming neither “right” or “wrong” it simply is what it is. Nihilism doesn’t have to exist on its own as a reason for violence, it can also be combined with things such as grievance and anger. Many perpetrators of mass violence such as active shooters/killers articulate a blend of nihilism and grievance. Whilst motivations may vary, a recurring theme amongst such killers is the belief that the world is meaningless, corrupt, and/or irredeemable etc.

It is important to distinguish between instrumental and expressive acts of violence. Instrumental crimes are those committed to achieve a certain goal (money, escape, control), whilst expressive offenses are committed to “express” emotions, an identity, and/or a worldview. Offenses involving nihilism are more strongly and closely  associated with expressive violence. When offenders state that they “didn’t care,” “felt nothing,” or “just wanted to see what would happen,” they are often articulating some form of nihilistic detachment. This can be seen in cases of killers such as Dylann Roof, where ideological beliefs combined with a deeper sense of existential meaninglessness. Whilst Roof held racist views, much of his writing also reflected fatalism and an absence of empathy. Victims were reduced to symbols rather than people with this nihilistic perspective allowing for moral detachments and erasure. Perhaps one of the best examples of nihilistic thinking and violence comes from Guy Edward Bartkus a 25-year old who blew himself up outside an in vitro fertilization clinic in 2025, in “protest” that humans should not be brought into existence without their own consent, something he referred to as being "pro-mortalist" (how he expected this to be realized is somewhat confusing). In an online recording he stated, “I’m angry that I exist and that nobody got my consent to bring me here”.

Nihilism in offenders often emerges from a convergence of factors, including chronic social alienation, identity failure (an inability to create an image of themselves that brings happiness), and repeated humiliation/rejection etc. Over time, these experiences can erode a belief in moral reciprocity i.e., the idea that effort, kindness, or restraint will be rewarded. When that belief collapses, antisocial behavior becomes something that is easy to justify. Importantly, nihilism does not involve psychosis, and many nihilistic offenders are legally sane, cognitively intact, and capable of detailed planning concerning their acts

of violence with their danger not in being delusional, but in their detached emotional clarity. An offender’s actual nihilism often hides beneath the adoption of an ideology (this was the case with Dylan Roof). Offenders may adopt extremist beliefs not because they truly believe in them, but because those beliefs give shape to their pre-existing emptiness. In such cases, ideology is a costume that they wear whilst nihilism is the engine that moves them forward with violence persisting even when the ideological goals they are espousing are incoherent, contradictory, or self-defeating. What matters isn’t victory over something but rupturing the communities/societies they belong to.

The  psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl (the creator of logotherapy) argued that what fundamentally motivates human beings is not the pursuit of pleasure (which was at the heart of  Freud’s teaching) or the pursuit of power (as Adler suggested), but the pursuit of meaning i.e., a sense that one’s life matters, has purpose, and is oriented toward something that is greater than the self. One of his arguments was that when people experience life as meaningful, they can endure extraordinary suffering (a common misconception that many have is that he believed that suffering was necessary for development). When a person’s “meaning” collapses, even comfort and success can feel unbearable. This wasn’t  merely academically theoretical as Frankl developed it through his experiences and observations as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, where he observed that psychological survival often depended less on physical strength and more on whether a person could find and locate a reason to go on living etc. In the absence of “meaning”, nihilism can be used to fill the vacuum.

By early 2025 a new term started to be used to refer to a certain act of violence that appeared to lack any clear or obvious motivation. In the spring of 2025, federal prosecutors started to refer to the case of a Wisconsin teenager who murdered his parents earlier that year as part of a larger plot that was intended to start a civil war which involved assassinating public figures as being, “nihilistic violent extremism”. This involved acts of violence that may have been motivated by certain extremist ideologies but were intended to bring about a collapse of society, without an idea of what should replace it. Nihilism as an ideology, emerged gradually in the 18th and 19th centuries as a reaction to collapsing sources of meaning and authority in Europe, especially concerning religion, monarchy, and metaphysical certainty. The Russian writer Ivan Turgenev popularized the term in his 1862 novel “Fathers and Sons”, where a nihilist was seen as somebody who rejected religion, their traditions and inherited values etc. In its early days nihilism was something that was anti-authoritarian and destructive (against Tsarist and Religious authority), but not necessarily pessimistic. It was a refusal to accept things which hadn’t earned their meaning. This idea was then picked up by Friedrich Nietzsche who argued that Western civilization was entering a nihilistic era because the foundations of meaning had collapsed, especially that of Christian morality. He believed that the adoption of Enlightenment Reasoning had failed to replace the idea of God. Whilst reason could explain how things worked, it didn’t explain why things mattered.

It may well be that parts of the United States appear to be moving through a nihilistic phase, but this is not happening in a uniform or absolute sense. What we are seeing in certain parts of the country is a fragmented, uneven nihilism i.e., a weakening of shared meaning and moral authority in some domains, alongside intense meaning-making and moral certainty in others. A society enters a nihilistic phase not when people stop caring, but when shared sources of meaning, legitimacy, and trust collapse faster than replacements for them can take hold. In some parts of the US there is a collapse of institutional trust, with public confidence in government, academia and science etc., declining rapidly. The country is also experiencing a type of moral fragmentation with different groups holding incompatible moral frameworks coupled with an absolute certainty that they are right etc. This can result in some individuals having difficulty finding “meaning”, becoming nihilistic and engaging in acts of mass/public violence.