Two
in one day. Mass shootings in El Paso
and Dayton within a period of twenty-four hours. They are happening more and more frequently
now. And more and more people are crying
out in the U.S. for stricter gun laws.
As if stricter gun laws would be the only solution necessary to stop the
epidemic of mass murder from growing.
They will help but they are not enough.
Gun control doesn’t deal with what motivates the shooters. People who want to kill will find a way with
or without gun control. I want to emphasize
that I am definitely in favor of stricter gun laws, because they might make it
more difficult to carry out a mass attack.
Although there are so many guns already on the streets of the United
States. But until we try to understand
the root causes of this homicidal behavior, we aren’t going to stop seemingly random
mass homicidal violence.
This
column has taken a different approach in dealing with the causes of this
phenomenon. Basically, in the age of
modern technology and growing resulting numbness, people increasingly feel a
loss of agency in their lives. All the
machines that are designed to make life more and more frictionless and more and
more safely separated from dangerous situations are getting people into an
experiential vacuum where they are unable to get the traction they need to make
and preserve organic imprints, to feel fully alive and to prepare for death
with a surrogate immortality. Just as
television turns more and more people into couch potatoes, all the supposedly
wonderful labor-saving devices are turning people into life potatoes. And developments like the Internet of Things
are increasingly going to lead to psychological paralysis.
Different
people develop different desperate means to pull themselves out of the
numbness, the psychological paralysis.
One approach is that of a mass shooting.
If one is increasingly unable to do anything to add friction to one’s
life processes, to the means in life, one can focus on bringing friction to
one’s goals, one’s ends. One way to add friction is unfortunately to bring pain
and death to random people. One can go
to places where people are gathered: shopping centers, festivals, nightlife
areas, places of worship, and schools and just start shooting. One way to add friction is to see people experiencing
pain: bleeding, dying. A mass shooter
knows he has left an abrasive mark on the world. And the intensity of feeling is elevated by
the fact that the victims are innocent of major wrongdoing themselves, are
vulnerable, unprepared to defend themselves, and exhibit genuine surprise that
the shooting is happening. As numb as
the shooter has been, he comes to life trying to kill as many people as he can,
while the victims, those that are at least surviving temporarily, also come to
life with a heightened state of alertness as they scream, plead, run, hide and
sometimes actively try to defend themselves against this aggressor who seemingly
came out of nowhere.
In
terms of the process of shooting people, those guns that can kill the most people
the quickest are also the guns that require the most frictionless movements to
operate. Like with any mindless automatic
machine, a shooter just continuously fires an assault rifle towards a vague
target or targets. One is bound to hit
each of one’s targets with one or more of the bullets fired. It is a continuous flow of bullets as opposed
to defined discrete shots fired from a handgun or an ordinary rifle. In the case of a handgun or ordinary rifle,
one has to aim more sharply, in order to make sure one has hit one’s
target. It requires more skill, more
friction. With a handgun or an ordinary
rifle, one is more able to leave an imprint on one’s field of experience. So with one of these two weapons, one is now
able to use the process of shooting to make a mark on one’s target for the
outside world, because it requires more precise skill than the shooting of an
assault rifle. With an assault rifle, it
is just so much easier to kill so many people by spraying them with
bullets. Which is why a shooter feels a
need to kill so many people to leave a mark and prove his potency. It is a way of compensating for the lack of
skill he is showing in simply mowing down people. It is a mark made as a result more of the
capacity of the machine rather than a real organic imprint resulting from his
skills and focus.
As
people become more and more numb as a result of modern technology, they become
more and more incapable of making and preserving the real organic imprints that
they need to leave in order to feel alive and prepare for death. It becomes much easier just to make a big
noisy splash with something like a big mass killing made by a big unfocused
assault rifle. And with an assault rifle
one needs less of a sense of personal agency in order to carry out one’s
mission. Yet because an assault rifle
operates almost automatically, a shooter will try to kill as many people as
possible to make a mark with the quantity of targets if not with the quality of
process.
Many,
though not all of these mass killings, are based partly on ethnic hatred. For many years, the focus in the news media
was on Islamic terrorism fighting against the so-called colonizing though now
decadent and vulnerable Western world.
Now the focus is increasingly on white nationalist terrorism which was
certainly one of the foundational causes of the El Paso massacre and maybe also
the Dayton massacre (7 of the 9 victims were African-American). The real question is why have radical Islam
and white nationalism become activated to express themselves so aggressively in
recent years? On one hand, both groups
have experienced injections of the enemy into the lands where they live in
recent years. Western soldiers in
Afghanistan and Iraq. And let’s not forget the Jewish immigrants on lands claimed
by both Israel and the Palestinians. For
white nationalists, it is the recent transfer of large numbers of immigrants
from the Third World into the countries of the West. To some white people, this represents not
only genetic dilution, but also cultural dilution of who they are.
I
have always felt that most things that occur in the world have multiple levels
of causation. I have never tried to
imply that the sensory distortion created by modern technology is the exclusive
cause of everything bad that is occurring today. At least, I hope I haven’t given that
impression. If anything, I feel that
sensory distortion works in conjunction with other causes like ethnic hatred to
amplify them. Why is it that ethnic
hatred seems to have amplified its manifestations in recent years? As people become more and more numb as a
result of living more frictionless and more mediated lives from modern
technology, they search out potentially friction-creating phenomena in the
external world to rub up against. One of
these phenomena is the people who are physically and, more important,
culturally very different from them. Focusing
on these differences generates the abrasive emotional friction that gives them
more traction to go on living. Focusing
on these differences gives these ethnic haters a mission, a meaningful segment
for their life narratives that at least, to some extent, pulls them out of
their numbness. If ethnic hatred wasn’t
available today as a life circumstance, some other human difference would be
more focused on: hatred and attacks against women, LGBTQ people and people with
disabilities could increase. Or forms of
self-hatred, self-destruction could increase: alcohol, recreational drugs,
compulsive sex, compulsive gambling, overeating, hoarding. But in today’s world, for many people, they
feel that if they didn’t have ethnic hatred, their lives would feel totally
empty.
But
the point is that situations that can potentially generate ethnic hatred today
are quite abundant, not only in the U.S. but in other places in the world as
well. In some situations, ethnic hatred
is organized by the government as in China and Myanmar. And again, here as well, people use their targets
of ethnic hatred to gain life traction and pull themselves out of their numbness.
One last point on this
matter. Ethnic hatred is certainly not
something that is the exclusive province of modern technological society. Obviously, ethnic hatred was quite prevalent
during the time when traditional societies dominated the planet. Sensory distortion from technology was
obviously not an issue at a time when people were more closely connected to
their natural surroundings. Instead, the
intense organic stimulation present in these more traditional surroundings
generated the development of intense emotions in more tradition-oriented
people. The kinds of stimuli were more
within the range of what human nervous systems could more effectively absorb
than the kinds of stimuli coming out of modern technological society. But it was still very intense. Lack of good protection against natural
disasters, wild animals, poisonous plants and diseases as well as all the
positive stimuli from beautiful scenery, sounds, scents and textures all played
a role in stimulating intense emotions.
Anyway, whereas today people use their ethnic
hatred as a contributory factor to pull themselves out of their numbness, in
traditional more tribal societies, people used ethnic hatred to help channel
their explosive passionate flowing blendable continual emotions. This way the intense emotions could be
channeled out without the perpetrator exploding apart from expansive unfocused
emotional expressions. In today’s mass
shootings, the perpetrator is numb and uses his aggression to become emotional
and feel alive. In traditional
societies, ethnic hatred could be used to help channel one’s sense of
agency. Today, ethnic hatred is used to
help resuscitate one’s sense of agency and thus to bring one to life. It is unfortunate that people feel a need to
use such a terrible state of mind, such a terrible attitude, such a terrible belief
system in order to generate a sense of empowerment.
Now if we want to
diminish these modern mass murders, gun control should hopefully help. Yet we have to also find a way of creating a
better balance between technological stimuli and organic stimuli, between
modern technological living environments and traditional natural living
environments, between mediated experience and primary experience, and thus diminish
the numbness and the loss of agency among people today.
(c) 2019 Laurence Mesirow
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