I’ve
decided to delve a little further into the nature of the causes of the
massacres that are all too common in today’s world. We now have the truck mass
murder that just occurred in New York to add to the list. And the church mass murder in Sutherland Springs,
Texas. Different kinds of causes have
been discussed for these massacres. In
the terms of my model, there has been discussion of defined discrete focused
specific causes which have been called figure causes, and the more nebulous
causes that come from different configurations of stimuli in one’s living
environment and which have been called here environment causes. And environment causes can be broken down
into causes coming from environments dominated by flowing blendable continual
stimuli – which are more organic ground causes – and causes coming from
environments filled with bundles of defined discrete stimuli, bundles of
abrasive friction, which are tension-pocket causes and, finally, causes from
environments filled with infinite continuous stimuli, filled with nothingness,
which are vacuum causes.
People
today are living in environments dominated by configurations of vacuum and
tension-pocket stimuli, pockets of overstimulation surrounded by
understimulation. But underneath
everything today is the foundation of an experiential vacuum which we are
pushing into deeper and deeper in order to create lives that are more
frictionless and mediated. This, in
turn, pushes us into greater and greater numbness and into experiencing more
and more the feeling of a living death.
To fight this sensory distortion, more and more of us find ourselves
modeling ourselves after complex machines, computers, robots, and avatars. But many of us are unable to do this
effectively, and many of us don’t want to do it effectively. So to pull out of this living situation, many
of us use chance encounters with other people as springboards for getting angry
and then feeling alive. Real angry, so
that we practically feel like exploding.
And then we release this built-up anger by going out and killing other
people. It doesn’t have to be
impulsive. The built-up anger can lead
to creating a plan ahead of time that will allow the perpetrator to kill as
many people as possible.
In a
physical vacuum, collisions are magnified.
Something knocks against something else and is sent flying a much
greater distance than would occur in an environment where gravitational forces
prevail. In the same way, numb people
can overreact to chance slights and feel a need to maybe attack the cause of
the slight, a particular person, but also to attack lots of innocent
people. Sometimes the particular person
who generated the slight can be overlooked and only innocent people are
attacked. The response to the slight is
an explosive event that temporarily pulls a person out of his numbness.
But
because we are dealing with chance slights here, there is practically no way
that society can control what is a trigger or a tripwire for this horrific
behavior. These are random events, just
like the kinds of events that occur often among any floating figures in a
vacuum. A vacuum environment is going to
produce random explosive events among the figures floating within it. There is no way of effectively anticipating
and controlling all these explosive events in a vacuum environment.
Perhaps
an appropriate analogy is that of some other random events that have been
recently happening. I’m talking about
the terrible wildfires that have been occurring in the Western United States
and particularly in Northern California.
These fires occur there, because the climate is so dry and, in
particular, the vegetation can become so dry.
There is so little rain. And
lightning or the slightest little spark from a campfire can set off an enormous
reaction of a raging fire. There is no
way of preventing all the random events that start fires in these very dry
areas. One can tell campers to be
careful, but the dry environment still creates a situation that predisposes the
transformations of trivial carelessness into relatively serious
conflagrations. And a person who wants
to start a fire has an easy time in this environment. Which is why such a person would be drawn to
such an environment. Finally, no one can
control for lightning. So, in short, a random event can definitely trigger a
fire, but perhaps the deeper more persistent cause of the fires that occur in
the Western part of the United States is the dry climate and dry vegetation.
By
the same token, more murderers like Stephen Paddock wouldn’t be predisposed to
commit their despicable actions, if they hadn’t been made so numb by the
experiential vacuum that surrounds them in their modern technological
environment and by all the consumer technology in which they immerse themselves. This consumer technology – movies,
television, video games computers, smartphones, tablets, and, increasingly,
virtual reality technology – puts them in worlds where their daily life experience
tends to be very frictionless and very mediated. This frictionless, mediated experience is
considered something that is very desirable, because it seems very comfortable
and very safe. It prevents people from
having to confront directly the dangers and risks of life in external world
reality. But the consequence of this
immersion in all of this ongoing frictionless, mediated experience is that
people start feeling more and more numbness, and they sink more and more into a
living death. Many people in this
situation resort to some kind of overstimulating kicks to temporarily pull
themselves out of their numbness. Dance
clubs with loud music and strobe lights, motorcycles, and drugs. But some people, who are profoundly numb,
feel a need to recur to very explosive, destructive experiences in order to
pull themselves out of this experiential situation. It is experience that can temporarily put
them solidly in the substantive external world.
All
of us who immerse ourselves in consumer technology are ultimately immersing
ourselves in an experiential vacuum that is making us numb. So many of us become so profoundly numb, that
we become like the dried-out lifeless vegetation out West that threatens to
catch fire as a result of the slightest little spark from lightning or a camp
fire or a pyromaniac. Just like the fire
brings the dried-out vegetation into a brief very intense kind of life, so the
smallest irritation, slight, or conflict can bring a profoundly numb person
into a brief very intense feeling of life by turning him into a mass murderer.
We
can’t prevent all the irritations, slights, or conflicts that a profoundly numb
person could possibly experience. But
what we can do is try to minimize the time that people spend in the screen
reality (and increasingly virtual reality) created by consumer technology. We can limit the total amount of time that
young people spend in front of a screen or in a virtual world. We can encourage them to engage the real
external world as much as possible and to participate in primary experiences –
arts, sports, community and social groups and, of course, reading hard copy books
– as much as possible. This will help to
prevent them from sinking into a dangerous profound numbness in the first
place, and help them to develop a more organic coherent sense of self that is
capable of carrying on a meaningful life narrative, making, receiving and
preserving organic imprints, having rich vibrant life experiences, and
preparing for death with a surrogate immortality.
Consumer
technology is so much a part of modern life that it would be hard to totally
eliminate it. But by significantly
limiting its use, we may be able to eliminate the zombie effect that comes from
becoming more and more like the machines we use. It is certainly worth trying this idea. We have got to stop making life, particularly
for young people, so frictionless and mediated.
Otherwise the mass murders will never stop.
(c) 2017 Laurence Mesirow