There
have been a number of articles recently in my column about a form of aggression
that I have called crimes of numbness.
People become so numb as a result of the frictionlessness and excessive
mediation of experience created by modern technology that they find the only
way to pull out of it is to explode out of it through random explosive acts of
physical aggression. In particular, acts
of random murder.
Something
that is less discussed is the growing amount of aggressions turned inwards
towards oneself in the United States. It
is astonishing. Methods vary but two
frequent ones are overdosing on pills and cutting one’s wrists. Then there are the more incremental methods
of self-destruction like eating disorders and drug and alcohol addiction. But the latter are not necessarily engaged in
with the conscious purpose of suicide.
People just sometimes find that their self-destruction is so impelling,
that they are drawn towards death.
On
the other hand, many of the people who formally plan to commit suicide, find a
way to sabotage their plans. Just the
planning and preparing the suicide can be so abrasively stimulating that the
actual suicide is no long necessary. I
have noticed that there are many patients in psychiatric hospitals who have
attempted suicide many times. The
ongoing attempts are explosively stimulating and are enough to pull a person
out of his technologically-based numbness.
So
what kinds of experiences are conducive to this kind of extreme desperate
self-destructive behavior. I would like
to start by saying that I truly believe there are multiple layers of causation
involved in this pathological numbness.
And yet an extremely important layer that is mostly overlooked is that
of getting involved in all the different manifestations of screen reality:
movies, television, video games, computers, smartphones, and tablets. These are all vacuumized worlds where the
immediate impact senses of touch, smell and taste all have a minimal or no
impact. Granted there are the explosive
high-impact forms of content connected to such themes as violence, hate
literature and pornography. But in spite
of the high impact they create on the surface, because they are mediated screen
reality forms of content, they are shallow and don’t have a sustained enduring
impact by themselves. It is the fact
that all these different forms of content occur behind a numbing screen that separates
people from the kinds of organic stimuli that help them feel alive. People are attract to violence, hate and
pornography on the internet, because these forms of content do temporarily
shock people out of the numbness created by experiencing the external world
through a screen. But in the long run,
it is the screen that is the new controlling factor. It is the screen that has the largest
influence in putting people into numbness.
The screen that appears to be opening us up to all sorts of exciting new
worlds and content is blocking us from a world and content essential to our
identity as human beings. Many people
react to being blocked on the outside by trying to set up extreme forms of
stimulation within.
And
again there is a desire on the part of many potential suicide victims to plan
and prepare a suicide, experience the full extent of the inner pain, the inner
tension-pocket, that comes from knowing that one is about to terminate one’s
life and then find a way to step away from the termination. Either there can be a mistake in execution,
or the potential victim can perform his act in such a way that other people
accidentally discover it before it’s too late, or the victim can actually tell
the people around him after he has performed an action before it kills him. Interestingly the involvement of the people
around him in preventing his suicide becomes a vehicle by which the potential
victim cannot make a fully destructive impact in his action, and yet he
preserves an imprint through the unforgettable memory it leaves in the people around
him. A memory that becomes permanently
connected to his life narrative and becomes a part of the collective memory of
the people around him. This memory of
the potential victim’s failed suicide attempt becomes a part of the potential
victim’s personal surrogate immortality in preparation for his real natural
death in the future. It is a negative
memory, not one connected with a positive achievement. But when a person is too numb for a positive
constructive achievement, then for many such people an extremely negative
achievement attached to one’s ongoing memory is better than no achievement at
all.
We
have been talking about 3 different ways of hovering around death: people who
plan and prepare for suicide and then commit it; people who plan and prepare
for suicide knowing that they have built into their plan an escape hatch that
prevents them from going through with it and people whose habits or life style
are of such a high risk (e.g. drugs, alcohol, anorexia, and racing cars) that
they can eventually lead to death. There
is actually a fourth way. Sometimes
people who suffer from depression can experience an event that is so
emotionally painful, so disappointing, so demoralizing that it acts as a sudden
trigger to killing oneself. The immediate
figure cause is the trigger. But the
ground cause is the depression. It is a
depression in which a person is already experiencing his life as a living
death.
In
the modern world, all these suicide and self-destructive situations have one
thing in common: they are all attempts to pull out of a numbness generated by
the extreme frictionlessness and mediation created by modern technology and, in
particular, modern consumer technology.
This is all in contrast to suicide in more traditional organic societies,
which is based on an excess of organic stimulation, an excess of emotion. Here suicide is more like an introjected
version of a crime of passion. A person
becomes filled with anger, with rage founded in a disappointment, a
demoralizing situation, an embarrassment or a betrayal. And if the person feels blocked by scruples,
by lack of fighting ability, or by lack of an appropriate opportunity, then he
turns his aggression inward.
Today
we are very focused on the violence demonstrated in mass shootings, police
shootings, and gang shootings. But go to a psychiatric hospital, and see if you
are able to get to a cafeteria there at lunch time and see the lines of
adolescents who are there for outpatient programs to deal with their
self-destructive behavior and, in particular, for attempted suicide. The numbers are astounding. But there is much less focus on them than the
people involved in mass shootings, police shootings and gang shootings. Granted that there is a common layer of
causation involved in all of them: the sensory distortion from modern
technology, and in particular, the numbness that comes from the experiential
vacuum created by the immersion in the screen reality of modern consumer
technology. Mass shootings, police
shootings and gang shootings are crimes that occur today that are caused by
numbness or more precisely by people who find the only way to pull out of their
numbness is through explosive destructive actions. People who attempt to commit suicide today are
also looking for an explosive action, but rather than feeling alive through
hurting others, they do it by turning their aggressive energies inward and
hurting themselves. Perhaps they are so
numb that they are not alive enough to expel their aggressive energies towards
external targets. Because what is being
dealt with is self-inflicted violence, it can be kept in the family and isn’t
necessarily made known to the general population. Which is why we hear so much more about mass
shootings, police shootings, and gang shootings than suicides. But suicides are so much of a danger, if not
more so, to the fabric of human society than externalized killings. Most of us are far more likely to know
someone who has committed suicide or attempted to commit suicide than people
involved in externalized killings.
Suicide is definitely a serious problem with which we have to deal, and
will need to do so for a long time to come.
To bring potential suicides out of their numbness, we have to find a way
to wean people from the addiction to modern technology. This is the starting point.
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