A kid like this could find hope in a better society. With outreach programs that are able to identify and target the weak and vulnerable, the mentally ill such as him.
Yes he was deeply flawed, but how difficult would it have really been to address those issues? Someone said $500 and a hooker. That's not so far off. Instead of having positive reinforcements, all he found were mostly negative ones. That's not entirely his fault, because we can do better. We can be better, and as a society lift up and protect the weak.
Is that not, after all, how we are supposed to measure ourselves?
$500 and a hooker wouldn't of helped, the kid had more then $500, and he had a BMW. As for positive reinforcement, one of his dad's friend, an expert with the ladies, offered to teach the kid how to talk to girls. There were tons of good reinforcements, and his sibling, who were raised by the same parents, were doing quite well for themselves.
I wouldn't even say the parents are to blame, because they sent him to counseling, they reported his behavior to police, and after reading his manifesto, seem like good parents. They encouraged him to make friends, they sent him to college and nice private schools. From reading his manifesto I can't really see anything they did wrong. They weren't even absent parents ala poor little rich boy stereotypes. Don't get me wrong, Rodgers hated his parents. The reason he hated his parents though are rather flimsy, he hated his mother for buying a plane ticket to England for his sister's boyfriend, and for being a women. He hated his father because the father didn't give the kid his house and because the father has sex with his stepmother. The stepmother gets a lot of hate in the manifesto but as far as I could tell she expected the kid to clean up after himself and play nice with his half-brother and friends, which drove the kid up a wall.
The problem wasn't that the kid couldn't get laid, it was the kids narcissism and inflated sense of self-worth. The kid quite 2 jobs because they were "beneath him". He encouraged his mother to "marry a rich man" and was angry that she didn't do what was best for him by marrying a rich man. He never talked to girls, expecting one to magically fall on his cock. He didn't make friends, relying on his mother making play-dates when he was small, or the school pairing him up with either room-mates or counselors for a social life, and he seemed very angry that the inferior people that surrounded him didn't magically become his friends. He was convinced that the world would magically become better if everyone did what he said and was trying to come up with a plan that would make him the undisputed ruler of all the world, controlling everybody's life and became completely and utterly depressed when he realized the cruelty and injustice of life because he would never rule the world.
There's a section in his manifesto where the kid, determined to lose his virginity before age 22, goes to a random house party. He sees a bunch of kids flirting on a ledge with a 10 foot drop and gets angry that he's still a virgin. He decides to push the girls off of the ledge! As you can imagine, people don't take kindly to being pushed off ledges, there's a struggle and he winds up being the one that falls off the ledge, shattering his leg. The kid is now livid that none of the girls that he tried to push off the ledge help him with his shattered leg! He believed that one of the girls WHO HE JUST TRIED TO KILL should have offered to sleep with him to make him feel better about his shattered foot!
The kid had issues and as of right now I don't think society has the resources to fix him. Maybe some people really would be better off taken away from society.