26/05/2022
From Peter Joseph's Mailbox (Peter Joseph is an author, social activist, documentary-producer and founder of "The Zeitgeist Movement"):
Q: Dear Peter. What is at the root of the school/mass shootings? How do we prevent? Averaging one a week now?!
A: I have been interested in the rise of this phenomenon since the 1980s, when my father worked as a postman and the news about people “going postal” hit. While other incidents of random shootings have occurred in US/Western history, the 1980s appeared as a threshold that, once past, set a new tone for America.
Causality for such a thing is systemically complex. Perhaps some of the most complex of all behavioral phenomenon as not only do you need to account for the life experience of the individual, coupled with any genetic predispositions or biological abnormalities, you have to account for the sociological condition, both regionally and globally.
And the US has a true public health problem in this regard, even if death by mass shooting is statistically low. In my writings I often discuss “structural violence” - meaning systemically linked harm and death that doesn’t immediately appear to have a controllable cause but in fact does.
This “act of god” view of things, like heart disease, allows one to overlook important correlations that very much need to be recognized from a solutions standpoint, to end premature death and suffering.
However, because death by something like heart disease gets mixed in with general disease mortality and hence isn’t seen as a result of any “violence”, the millions that exist in poverty who die of this disease (and others related) simply because they exist in the (unnecessary) condition of poverty goes unnoticed. And it isn’t just the daunting sociological complexity of these acts that make that a reality - it is the aesthetic.
While millions are now (also) dying each year from man-made pollution of the air, causing really a kind of genocide of the poor on the whole, people still gravitate toward the visceral nature of physical violence as a sign of something more ontologically important. To whatever extent this is true is debatable.
Personally, I agree with Gandhi in that “it little matters to me whether you shoot a man or starve him to death by inches.”
Yet, it is much more mentally pleasant to endure the slow process of death by pollution or disease - masking the genocidal reality of that socially produced outcome - than having a gun put in your mouth and the trigger pulled. It is this very aesthetic that haunts people and rightfully so - we can’t emotionally understand how a human being could do such a cold thing to another. So, it is this direct intent that is bothersome, even if mass murder really is quite low in priority, statistically, when it comes to saving human lives given all the other premature causes of death out there that could be ended (ie industrial pollution driven deaths, etc)
Now, technically what these repeating events mean is the social system is producing a statistically consistent group of outliers that are growing into a mental state where they have so much hate, ideological confusion and loss of self-worth, they are willing to kill others almost a random to feel strong, usually killing themselves in the end. There is also often a public display of some kind, seeking attention, reinforcing the interest to be noticed.
Given this, if I had offer a solution that attempted to cover as much ground as possible with a single action - an action that would no doubt lead to a spectrum of chain reactions that pertained to stifling or ending the kind of toxic feelings that leads to behavior, it would be the reduction of socioeconomic inequality. The science behind this line of thinking is extensive and discussed in my book .
Existing in a social condition of deep inequity, with the "honor" of wealth, fame and other forms of “status”, has a very polluting psychological quality. With the rise of social media and the competition for social notability, beauty and respect, a sickness is curated on many levels that artificially distorts self-worth.
This notable loss of worth happens in the same way a person gets a general disease over time. Just as the stress and lack of choices in poverty can lead to heart disease and premature death as a person’s life moves on (again this is a proven socioeconomic causality), the same kind of process happens with young minds, vulnerable and sensitive, who develop misanthropic mental illness. The bubble of the Internet doesn’t help, as young minds can now block out mitigating thoughts.
It should be no surprise that depression in youth is rapidly growing in America overall. And in this America, perhaps the richest and most unequal society known to date, with heavy commercial media to remind its citizens of what culture values and what it doesn’t, the correlation of mass shootings/violence and inequality is in lockstep, inching past new thresholds as time goes on.
I think Italian theorist put it best in his work Heroes: Mass Murder and Su***de :
“Su***de has increased particularly rapidly in the last 45 years—by 60 percent according to the World Health Organization. It is epidemic . . . And what else has happened in last 40 years? Neoliberal transformation . . . We are seeing an all-time high in the need to compete economically, and a general low in sensibility and human relations . . .the frequency of psychopathology is [also] on the rise.
What is the core of neoliberal ideology? Firstly, that you are alone, that you are an individual competing with everybody else. Secondly, that the real distinction among human beings is between winners and losers . . . there’s no more stable class identity, no more stable political identity—the real divide is between neoliberalism’s winners and losers. And if you are a young person who has grown up in this capitalist environment, and you understand that actually you can never be a winner, what will you do?
In some cases, you decide that you are going to be a winner for a second, for an hour, for a moment. Because you feel like a winner when you kill all the people around you and then kill yourself. And this is not just my theory; it’s not me saying all these horrible things.
It’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two young men who committed mass murder and killed themselves at Columbine High in 1999. They wrote in their diaries, which are available to read for anyone: “You gave me all this s**t, telling me I am a loser, but I will be a winner for a minute.” And so you see, it’s not so much the neoliberal ideology [that motivates mass murderers]; it’s much more the particular psychological effects of this neoliberal ideology.”
While Dr , an expert on violence, puts it bluntly:
"So, In the end, while gun control can slow the process a bit, along with other kinds of policy, the trajectory the US is on now is likely only the beginning and this will keep getting worse until the social system itself is brought into question, working to end the sickness of status by way of socioeconomic inequality and the vast loss of community/trust inherent to late-stage capitalism itself."
We have a new generation of people that see the "meaninglessness" of their existence and while 99.99% of those kids will be non-violent, the amount of damage that .01% can cause is huge and, due to the advancement in technology, will only get more catastrophic. 🤔
