“I was just a boy when I sat down
To watch the news on TV
I saw some ordinary slaughter
I saw some routine atrocity
My father said, don't look away
You got to be strong, you got to be bold, now
He said, that in the end it is beauty
That is going to save the world, now”
These lyrics penned by Nick Cave over a decade ago depressingly encapsulating how I’m feeling toward the trend of mass killing. While atrocious they are all too fucking routine. Just a ordinary slaughter I want to look away from, something I can't see any beauty in. Random carnage that doesn’t provide with anything. How do we save the world from this uninspired evil.
There have been no shortage of false answers. Violent movies and video games. The wrong music. Whatever art some of us find disturbing. Should we be more selective in our media diets? I would make that case. I absolutely think there is some sort of correlation between the information we subject our psyches to and our overall mental health. I don’t think, however any amount of objectionable content can be a catalyst for this type of random violence. Furthermore, who will play arbitrator over what is acceptable and what is depraved. One person's cultural filth is another person's cathartic expression. How far will we be bowledrized in the name of collective safety. How much safer will any of us really be. Not much would be my bet.
Perhaps guns are the problem. Modern firearms certainly make it easier to kill people more efficiently. Without these Faustian tools it would be harder for people to engage in carnage, but certainly not impossible as people have started using vehicles as weapons. Furthermore the idea that someone who is disturbed enough to kill so randomly, are safe if they just don’t possess a gun seems pretty insulting. If we could eliminate rapid firing guns though should we for public safety. Perhaps, but living in a country with the highest per capita prison population I think we all should be somewhat skeptical of being out armed by the military and police. I feel despite the good intentions of many in our legal system, at its root is just an elaborate way to extract slave labor. If we really want to entertain the idea of ridding our culture of guns we need to address our reliance on prison labor. The slavery this country was built on was predicated on European trading guns to African tribes for African slaves. Those tribes that were able to acquire gun were able to conquer neighboring tribes providing a source of cheap labor for European and Americans. This trade made monsters out of men, destroyed lives, created a hell that still echoes today in our prison system. Only now we arrest people, interrogate them till they plea bargain to some lesser crime and by bureaucratic magic enslaved them to prison labor. Guilt or innocence notwithstanding. It's my belief the tragically simple source of these horrors was merely an imbalance of power. If guns were more evenly distributed in Africa at the time would it have been infected with slavors. Till we figure out a way of life that doesn’t require slave labor I have to endorse any second amendment paranoia.
I’m also doubtful we as a culture could have enact a successful gun ban. Americans love an underground unregulated market. There's always someone you know who knows a guy type of situation. Could this make us more vulnerable. That is a possibility too. I don’t have much patience with people who think they will unleash their inner Rambo if they were in the middle of this, but I can see how with a lot of luck the right person(s) with the right firearms can make all the difference.
But none of this addresses why so many people are committing mass murder. Why are so many often young people throwing their lives away only to inflict the greatest possible pain to people they do not even know. The statistics on how prevalent this is can vary greatly depending on how we precisely measure such an event. Some sources count every time a gun goes off on school ground a school shooting. So by this rational someone accidentally firing a gun in a school parking lot, not injuring anyone counts as a school shooting. I don’t think it should be accessible for people to be that careless with guns but I think it's disingenuous to count these acts of idiocy with the horrors of children being shot down. On the other end of this spectrum a mass killing can be defined as when four or more people are killed in a single event. So again if someone shoots a bunch of people and kills two people this may not count as a mass killing.
One thing that does seem to be agreed upon though is this seems to be an American problem. This violence is not rooted in human nature but is an expression of pathology within a culture. Joe Coleman, an artist who creates bibliographic portraits of infamous murders, and his parents is quoted as saying “ every society gets the criminal it deserves” By this I think he means that we are creating the substrate for undesirable activities to grow in. If we really want to rid ourselves of a problem we first must ask the uncomfortable questions of what are we doing that make these problems possible and probable in the first place. This i believe will give us better agency over our destiny. There are other cultural we can look to that dealt with similar phenomenon. This may be an American problem, but it might not be an exclusive American problems.
The word berserk originally from the Norse meaning bear shirt, described warriors who would go on a killing frenzy in the middle of battle. Since this was contain in the theater of war, at least from the Norse perspective this activity was not seen as a sociopathic act, but of a heroic deed. However its culturally framed it, both a modern day mass killer and a Norse berserker would almost be certain of forfeiting their lives to kill a perceived enemy. A berserker would be with fellow soldiers, but be removed from his tribes, removing them from any taboo that would prevent him from engaging in such activity. I'm using masculine pronouns since mass killers seem to be mostly men, and Most vikings would most likely be men. It's easy to see the stress of viking warfare. The isolation, hunger, fear of violent death. In what ways are we creating this level of stress within our modern convenience at all cost culture.
In what way does does Viking culture from over a thousand years ago reflex upon our modern day culture. My speculate is being a viking warrior would would feel empty pretty fast. I have no real idea, nor does anyone else, what the morale was like aboard a long ship. I can't help but feel the hunger and death that must have stallawayed on such ambitious pillaging missions had to eat away at any sense of purpose these soldiers had. Was going beserk a attempt to find a meaning in life that they were unable to attain in life. Perhaps a moment of sanity. Modern life for the best position of us can seem mechanized. What jared me about mass killings is all the preparatory work involved. Why would someone put so much work into something so cruel. But I also understand people like projects, they like being on an adventure. While dark and immoral and unethical on every fucking level I can think of , I can see where someone could find a mental release in the parts of the brain that want to strategize. This, just as it could have been 1000 years prior, is a desperate way of creating purpose.
In the late 1700 Captain Cook, while exploring indonesia wrote about Malaysian “running amuck”,where a person would become violent without cause, often causing multiple casualties. This seems to take place outside of war so it does resemble modern day mass killings more than berserkers. Its was the Malaysian belief the attacker was possessed with ancestral spirit symbolized by a tiger called the Huantu Bellian. Could the Huantu Bellian be this cultures way of expressing the epigenetic trauma that was pass down to it. Because it was seen as an act of possession attackers were seen as much of the victims as everyone else so they were not punished. Whether there were people who exacted revenge off the books, who didn’t buy into this mythology is something I do not have any information on. This phenomenon does seem to decrease as the English colonized this area, as they defiantly punished people for running amuck, whether they were possessed or not. Since many mass killers are killed and the rest certainly are imprisoned for their lives we really can’t up the punishment. Ok we can torture more, and I have giving that some thought I don’t think it would decrease this cultural madness, and would just create a precedent where we allow torture which will likely spread to the most pedestrian of crimes.
What I do think we can learn from this island culture is acceptance. It wasn’t any easier for a Malaysian living 300 years ago to deal with the senseless loss of loved ones through acts of unprovoked violence. They didn't have an invasive media who fed off of their collective anxiety, and defecated out commercial in their brains as we seem to have, but people talk, there are gossip networks everywhere. To To 18 century English colonizer blaming a tiger demon for random people for random reasons killing random people must have been the height of superstition. If I look deeper I do see the cultural wisdom of binding two really shitty aspects to their lives : getting attacked by tigers and this neural misfiring that often results in dead bodies. How prominent were tiger attacks, I don’t know but I do strongly suspect just one would scar my perception of reality for life. Living with tigers mean living with fear of tigers. If one has to carry this fear maybe putting problematic aspects of your culture that you don’t know how to fix into this mental container can be a wise tradition. If this cultural shift in logic turns two problems into one does that not create a better quality of life for these people?
In the 80 and 90s the postal service gained notoriety for employees to “go postal” and shoot up their workplace. Again doing this means death or the rest of your life in jail. Why would someone give up their life for a moment of selfish catharsis. One theory says frustrations with the way postal eservice dealt with managerial complaints. I speculate that the post office has to be somewhat of an old growth bureaucracy to do its job. I imagine even when everything goes well it's a tedious process filled with anxiety. I also speculate there is in the USPD as there is in all social structures a fair amount of corruption, insuring things are not likely to go as smooth as they can. Whether this is a major reason or a tertiary reason I don’t know but I would believe it would have had to play some part in this madness.
Jobs are unnatural to any human.Some of us have them for now at least. We always had work to do, but cutting up all that needs to be done and passing out different section to different people providing then with a role, a costume, a cultural identity, a badge of status they will carry for life is unheard of throughout human history. It has only appeared recently in regards to our evolutionary history. People were simply lacked the tools we have today to create the communication web to allow for a globalized world. The concept of a “job” was created to solve the new but real problem of how we organize ourselves so we don’t war with each other. It’s a noble first attempt to solve this riddle. Jobs allowed for a certain level of wealth real and perceived that we probably would not have if people were not centralized in some way. But organizing ourselves in such unnatural ways does carrie a price.
The postal service seems to be at the end of the job spectrum where one give up much control. You have the same schedule everyday, you wear the same uniform, see the same people. Some people i'm sure could find comfort in that, but I see how that could incubate pathologies. I receive far more junk mail I toss in the bin before it gets a chance to enter my home. I wish I could subscribe purpose to most of my mail but they could toss it out before they carried it around for how many miles. If this come across mean I worked a temping job in a print factory where I saw nothing but media mail.I be lying If I say I would have found that job satisfying if we printed things people read, but it would have been less soul crushing for sure. Purpose matters. Everytime I see a school shooter I have to wonder again why someone would give up their life so selfishly. How disempowered does someone has to be for them to take such a measure. School were design though with the express intent of removing people from their purpose. It has been and largely still is a way to train people to go have jobs that lack purpose.
What I believe is so terrifying about these crimes is the randomness. Other types of crime horrible as it may be at least has rules we can learn to have better chances of being safe. Maybe we don’t do in a certain neighborhood because of gangs. Fair ? No. But there is a pattern we can use to make a choices. How do any of us avoid being a victim of a mass killing. Avoid any and all gatherings. There no pattern to figure out, no agency we can take. I believe we can look how crimes are influenced by the criminals who enact them, much like the way we can see how the artist expressive themselves in their art. Is the sense of powerlessness I have about all this, what these killers want me everyone to feel. Do they want me to feel a sense of pointlessness to it all. Is this cycle of disconnection what the malaysians mean by the Huantu Belian
