In light of the shooting in Atlanta, I keep going back to Felix's commentary from the "Run Hide Fight" review episode.
His basic premise was, our mass shooting culture is a byproduct of our dominant ethos of empire. The idea that you can just kill a bunch of people in a foreign country and most people are okay with it, and if you participated in it, you can even be celebrated. All of it cheapens the value of human life. It's specifically become more of an issue as we've increasingly outsourced our wars and the people who fight in them, rendering the Empire more and more invisible. Just because it's invisible doesn't mean that ethos goes away, but it's actually turned against our own people.
I always though that was a really good explanation, but I would love to hear some of you expand on the idea or hear your own theories.
In the wake of the Neoliberal proclamation of the end of class struggle, the only social categories remaining are winner and loser. No more capitalists and workers; no more exploiters and exploited. Either you are strong and smart, or you deserve your misery. The establishment of capitalist absolutism is based on the mass adhesion...to the philosophy of natural selection. The mass murderer is someone who believes in the right of the fittest and the strongest to win in the social game, but he also knows or senses that he is not the fittest or the strongest. So he opts for the only possible act of retaliation and self assertion: to kill and be killed.
From Bifo's Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. Awesome study of this exact phenomenon by a well renowned Italian Marxist, I highly recommend it. Takes the standard Marixst critique of late capitalism/neoliberalism and extends it to the mass shooting headlines. The book is extremely bleak in its conclusions (a preview: "Now, it is finally crystal clear: resistance is over. Capitalist absolution will not be defeated and democracy will never be reinstated. That game is over.") but is very insightful into getting into the minds of these mass killers and examining the phenomenon through a Marxist lens.
In the wake of the Neoliberal proclamation of the end of class struggle, the only social categories remaining are winner and loser. No more capitalists and workers; no more exploiters and exploited. Either you are strong and smart, or you deserve your misery. The establishment of capitalist absolutism is based on the mass adhesion…to the philosophy of natural selection. The mass murderer is someone who believes in the right of the fittest and the strongest to win in the social game, but he also knows or senses that he is not the fittest or the strongest. So he opts for the only possible act of retaliation and self assertion: to kill and be killed.
This is beautifully put and pretty much exactly what I've been thinking. It's no wonder the columbine kids wore t-shirts that said natural selection.
There are literally more guns than people in the USA. Combine that and neoliberal rule with imperialism starting to be turned inwards and you get mass shootings.
The media loves the spectacle. They love to see the little people turning against one another. And they love to see all the profit they can make reporting on and glorifying the shooters. It's no surprise that the media themselves are the ones who push these shooters to take up arms with their fearmongering, race baiting, and targeting of those who are at their lowest with rancid hateful lies.
Stochastic terrorism is anything but stochastic. It is highly intentional terror that is no different from the racist police forces that terrorize communities. It's all intentionally utilized to keep the public scared and demoralized while the victims end up dehumanized or dead.
And so, mass shootings keep happening in the US because they are useful for the American establishment and ruling class. And they will keep happening as long as they have said utility.
I think the whole rational consumer myth does distract from how much humans are motivated by a desire for attention
There'sa lot of guns and a lot of fucked up people. It's gonna happen sooner or later.
I basically agree with Felix there.
To elaborate, I suggest you peruse this essay (pdf link)
https://trueleappress.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/cesaire-discourse-on-colonialism.pdf
which was written by a black Frenchman, Aimé Césaire, shortly after WWII. I'm going to include a fairly lengthy excerpt here but I suggest you read the whole thing because it is very well written.
CW: descriptions of imperialist violence
First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and "interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind-it's Nazism, it will. pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
In other words, when you have a society that accepts and even celebrates violence done overseas, its only a matter of time before that violence gets turned inward. We see this even now, with our bourgeois press constantly scaremongering about China and Iran and North Korea, and then they turn around and act surprised when a bunch of little Hitlers show up and start killing Middle-eastern and Asian people
Agree with Felix. Nothing really to add other than neoliberalism makes people snap.
I mean, the way I see it, neoliberalism is just socially acceptable fascism or fascism with a friendly face. When you have fascism at home and imperialism abroad, you get a society where life is cheap and everyone is pitted against one another under the boot of capital. So it's no surprise to me that people snap, especially young white men from the suburbs who get radicalized off the internet and are socially isolated and raised in a toxic environment of suburban paranoia.
And don't forget the abundance of guns, but I guess that's more the reason we have mass shootings rather than stabbings or some other form of violence
kids have always played fighting that's just what they do, mass shootings are new
When I was a kid I would sometimes play fighting when my parents weren't around
most americans are racist and most of those racists have guns.
Proliferation of guns, lack of mental healthcare, constant exploitation and consumerism, lack of education and empathy, etc
Proliferation of guns, lack of mental healthcare, and constant exploitation.
Isolation, atomization, crushing emptyness of 'modern life' and lots a guns
but there are a number of imperialist/post-imperialist nations which, i imagine, do not have the kind of mass shooting violence which america has. i think a better explanation would take into account this american peculiarity-- this could be as simple as access to firearms, and/or that the american commitment to individualism/against the welfare state perpetuates even greater anomie/individual detachement, which there manifests from time-to-time as shooters.
a better explanation would also take into account shooter data across countries, as well as an inventory of other kinds of similar, stochastic but not with handguns violence, as well as some kind of quantitative measure of what we might expect to be influencing factors.
