Things like this, I try and make sense of these kind of people, and I stumbled over this and wanted to both share it and put it somewhere so I can pull it up later. It likely doesn't help much, if at all...but I'd rather some kind of explanation than none.
"Amok is a Malay word for the homicidal sprees occasionally undertaken
by lonely, Indochinese men who have suffered a loss of love, a loss of
money, or a loss of face. The syndrome has been described in a culture
even more remote from the West: the stone-age foragers of Papua New
Guinea.
The amok man is patently out of his mind, an automaton oblivious to his
surroundings and unreachable by appeals or threats. But his rampage is
preceded by lengthy brooding over failure, and is carefully planned as a
means of deliverance from an unbearable situation. The amok state is
chillingly cognitive. It is triggered not by a stimulus, not by a tumor,
not by a random spurt of brain chemicals, but by an idea. The idea is
so standard that the following summary of the amok mind-set, composed in
1968 by a psychiatrist who had interviewed seven hospitalized amoks in
Papua New Guinea, is an apt description of the the thoughts of mass
murderers continents and decades away:
"I am not an important man... I possess only my personal sense of
dignity. My life has been reduced to nothing by an intolerable insult.
Therefore, I have nothing to lose except my life, which is nothing, so I
trade my life for yours, as your life is favored. The exchange is in
my favor, so I shall not only kill you, but I shall kill many of you,
and at the same time rehabilitate myself in the eyes of the group of
which I am a member, even though I might be killed in the process."
The amok syndrome is an extreme instance of the puzzle of human
emotions. Exotic at first glance, upon scrutiny they turn out to be
universal; quintessentially irrational, they are tightly interwoven with
abstract thought and have a cold logic of their own."
-From How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker
