How does capitalism wind up making so many of us feel like nothing? In part, it's by drowning us in an ocean of meaningless words, disconnecting our feelings from the abstract language we use and hear. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, a professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, is author of "American Soul" (Mercury Press).

Suppose for a moment that words don't count. A kid yells, "bang, bang, you're dead" but his "dead" playmate goes right on playing.

If words don't matter, what does? What matters is one's feelings, and these are inside, separate and apart from the words outside.

And the words outside are like an ocean -- full of noise, and something we could drown in.

This ocean of words floods over every hamlet, town and city every second of the day. It could be responsible for the killings in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The people who live in Jonesboro are Bible-reading people, but even all the words in the Bible are but drops in the word-ocean.

What's so wrong with this ocean of words? For one thing, they are carried mostly by the electronic media -- television and radio. It costs money to do this. And the money comes from "commercials."

Commercials are intended to sell things to viewers and listeners. They do this by speaking about needs and wants. The creators of commercials want viewers and listeners to think about their needs and wants -- preferably all the time. This encourages self-absorption. And self-absorption means forgetting about past and future, and thinking only about now. Right now.

On the radio or over the telephone, these messengers are disembodied, faceless. Even on television the faces created by commercials are indistinguishable, unreal enough that they don't have to be taken seriously.

If that is the case, then shooting into the schoolyard was like shooting into the television screen. It's all unreal -- except those feelings. The philosophers call this solipsism, the theory that only "I" exist.

We can blame this on consumer capitalism. Capitalism means money set aside to make more money -- and more money is made by creating more goods and services. Why do capitalists want to make more money? One reason is that it's the only way they know to get out of their own self-absorption.

The partner in consumer capitalism is the consumer. If consumers were to burst out of their self-absorption, the system would collapse. The unending streams of words and images, with the commercials as shock troops, that pour forth every day are intended to tighten the grip of self-absorption on consumers.

So it could be that in Jonesboro the two boys, age 13 and 11, were so self-absorbed that the only reality they knew was their feelings, their rage -- even if they knew from hunting that to shoot means to kill.

That means consumer capitalism is so powerful it can even dull survival instincts.

All animals -- even those raised in captivity -- have survival instincts. Historically, most people also had such instincts, accumulating one experience after another from earliest childhood. But modern day Americans look for quick remedies, and quickly become dependent on them.

The everyday ocean of words plays a big part in fostering dependency relationships. Have a cold? Try these pills. Buy the bottle, open it, read the notice which says if the pills don't work go to a doctor.

The problem is that when there is no dependable figure, one's survival instincts may not be there to replace them. Suppose now that for these two kids dependency on home and church was as abstract as everything else. And they had no survival instincts, no experience, to tell them, "If we pull the trigger we're finished."

This possibility is somehow more appalling than the explanation that they knew what they were doing or were overcome by rage.

If they saw everything as abstract, if they were not guided by any memory of home life or imagining about the future, then they are facing nothing but nothing. The people they shot at were nothing. Their parents, siblings, friends, were nothing. And then they realized that they too were nothing.