A
recurring theme in this column has been concerning how the nature of the
configuration of crime changes according to the configuration of living
environments. More specifically, we
humans start out in more natural traditional living environments with some
people being stimulated by all the organic stimuli that surround them to feel a
welling up of uncontrollably intense emotion for which abrasive situations in
the external world can act as the match to activate it and channel it into
violent action. This is what I have
called a crime of passion and I use this term in a much broader sense than say
a man who kills his woman or her lover, because she or he has been cheating on
him. In preliterate societies where
abrasive situations out of the ordinary are frequently ascribed to witchcraft
on the part of certain individuals, such individuals can be the target of
explosive aggression on the part of a supposed victim of witchcraft. This does not mean that visible triggers for
these violent outbursts don’t exist. But
a revenge for the alienation of affection of one’s lover is only one of a vast
list of potential triggers. In
traditional societies, people have to protect their honor against many real and
supposed grievances. All the organic
stimulation in more traditional natural environments tends to give people the
feeling that they are being swallowed up by their living environments. A strong sense of self-definition based on a
strong sense of honor tends to give people a sense of protection against a feeling
of undifferentiation that comes from the sense of being swallowed up by a more
natural living environment. Perceived
slights from others provide a means of focusing one’s sense of self to protect
against undifferentiation. These
perceived slights can lead to the acts of aggression against others I call
crimes of passion. These perceived
slights become a vehicle for channeling all the organic stimuli that well up within
a person as a result of the influence of all the organic stimuli to be found in
a more natural field of experience.
Over
time, as modern technology has displaced and even replaced the natural
traditional components found in human living environments, the impact of these
organic stimuli in the external world on humans diminishes. The organic stimuli, which are flowing
blendable continual stimuli, are replaced by technological stimuli, which consist
of defined discrete stimuli for the actual different steps of technological
processes and the different machine figures involved as well as infinite vacuum
stimuli for the pauses between the discrete steps of technological processes as
well as the sharply defined physical spaces that exist between machines and
between machine products. Technological
living environments have very different configurations of stimuli from the more
traditional natural living environments that have vast masses of grounded
organic stimuli with imperfectly formed figures that are still grounded in the
organic backdrop of the field of experience.
In contrast today we have vast vacuum spaces filled with the free
floating fully formed figures of modern machines and the products they
create. These free floating figures may
create clutter in the vacuum spaces they occupy, but they don’t create bonded
connections as they would in a more grounded natural environment.
The
transformation in the human living environment created by modern technology
does not occur overnight. It has
occurred over centuries. And this means
that the transformation in the nature of crime has also occurred
gradually. It’s not like one day
criminals were committing crimes of passion and the next day, they were
committing crimes of numbness. As a
matter of fact, we can say that there were transitional stages leading from one
to the other. Diffuse killings led to
more focused family feuds, led to more refined individualized duels, many times
with what at that time represented modern technology, namely pistols. But there is something very mediated and
numbing about walking away from someone and then potentially killing him from a
distance with a pistol.
Duels
were not truly a crime. After all, they
were an institutionalized form of violence during certain periods of
history. A true crime of passion would
be to sneak up on someone and shoot them, or stab them without giving them a
chance to respond. But a duel does
represent a focused expression of passionate aggression, a shrinking of the
channels of expression of passionate emotion and perhaps of the amount of
internalized angry passion on the path of evolution towards the loss of passion
in today’s world as a prime factor in the expression of violent behavior. The situation is complicated, because
certainly today, particularly in some 3rd World countries, there
are, because of strong cultural predilections, still expressions of highly
emotive violence. But particularly in
much of the industrialized world – United States, Canada, Europe, among others
– crimes of numbness have become a dominant form of violent expression.
And as technology becomes
more and more pervasive in human living environments, there the expression of
crime will continue to evolve. Unless
something changes dramatically, there will be a greater and greater frecuency
of crimes of numbness. Already people
are becoming inured to a steady diet of more shootings appearing in their
newspapers and even in their lives.
In today’s world, the
crimes of physical injury are increasingly not so much channeling
uncontrollable emotion towards someone so that the emotion can be released as much
as they are trying to jolt the perpetrator out of his numbness by artificially
stimulating emotion that isn’t there, so that the perpetrator can feel
alive. And as technology attempts to
take on more and more aspects of life so that life can supposedly become more
frictionless and generally easier, people are going to sink into deeper and
deeper states of numbness. And as the
numbness settles in, a greater and greater percentage of these people are going
to disrupt society with their crimes of numbness, leading, of course, to more
and more tragic results. That is unless
people start to consciously limit their participation in consumer technology
and start trying to increase their living in primary experience and external
world reality. Trying to restore some
more traditional natural patches of living environments would also help. It would certainly be a part of a positive
start.
© 2019 Laurence Mesirow
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