The simple, one sentence answer is: What could possibly tell us more about the totally failed state of our so-called society than the fact that we are the only society on earth with mass shootings, minus a handful of outliers with not even a fraction of a single percentage point of the occurrences we have? The simple one line answer is: Do I really need to answer this? But I will take more time to do this properly. The answer is in large part personal, I have children in the American public education system and this means that I have had to come to terms with the reality that every morning I am sending them into one of the most dangerous settings in American society: school, a place where they have the highest likelihood of being shot and killed. However, the answer is also larger than my personal reality. Mass shootings are the epitome of the failed American social psychology in my view. Let me explain.
The big capitalist trick, the trick of "living capitalism", and not as say, opposed to Marxism or it's manifestation, socialism, that is, not as a critique per say of capitalism, but rather as an observation of a fundamentally American non-communal society in general that is defined by consumption and self-gain (rabid so-called individualism), is the monster of "convenience". When your life becomes wholly defined by the acquisition of "convenience" so that the more luxurious the convenience the greater your success in life, then all the true wonders of our very existence lose all their joy. Life is no longer a discovery, but rather it is a task, an endless series of tasks to be completed. As Maya Angelou said of personhood, “We don’t remember what people did. We remember how they made us feel.” The experience of being American leaves us feeling endlessly tasked and thus with a feeling of tireless anxiety; everything is always in the way, “to be completed”, something to finish so that we may move on to the next task, and the next, and the next, always seeking escape from this endless litany of “things to do” as quickly as possible, a spreadsheet of to-do's that only grows no matter how much further down we scroll, breeding a culture of so-called "first-world" ennui.
In this model, the things that should bring us joy deplete us:
Work, the act of developing something that contributes to society in some larger and more meaningful way for which you may feel pride and communion with others, becomes mere labor, toiling, and as such we become, as Heidegger said "standing reserve", batteries to be used up by our masters for a paycheck to buy back some of the convenience - in the form of entertainment, supposed easing of the pain, distraction - that we perceive to have lost in those hours of toiling, in the transaction of work vs convenience, of having our "battery" depleted. We are exactly as our video games present us: little dials with life-force, "health" or whatever we choose to call it, being run up and down based on the many tasks we complete.
Learning becomes tedious, at best, and reframed and thus understood as having a purpose other than what it is, which is the pure expansion of one's knowledge of one’s being, the pursuit of the most fundamentally human desire to understand our very “why”. What greater joy is there? And yet even learning is transformed into a beast of burden by being dressed as a mere means to an end; that end being, again, a higher status in the standing-reserve cycle whereby one earns more income so that one can get back to consumption, which is the acquisition of conveniences, which presents itself as salvation from the ceaseless depletion of our battery.
Community, the basis of real human connection, the very interaction with other humans that fosters goodness, care and above all else, our greatest trait, empathy, the living and breathing transition of emotion between creatures, an actual and real energetic transference between beings is reduced to a state of threat. This is the ultimate dehumanizing condition, to have our very “superpower” diminished in such a way, our superpower being simply that we may truly feel what others feel. And who, we should ask, which few among us benefit from removing this greatest of human gifts? In this model we are trained to believe in this most fundamental tenet of the scarcity ideology, in the idea of the invisible and proverbial “pie”, the massive “battery in the sky”, a finite source from which I always want a bigger slice; and, remember, the suffering of others only highlights the truth of the convenience capitalist model, which makes me want it more and believe it more. For as I look out of the window of my $80,000 car at the person begging for food, I feel pity, at best, but the consumption-convenience model teaches me that perhaps they aren’t deserving after all. Perhaps, they just didn’t work hard enough, and at the very least it reminds me of the “game”, and that I better be clear on how to play it and to relish my convenience, in my leather trim and Bosch speakers, to focus on the contrast not the failed logic of the system that fosters this scenario, not on the true beneficiaries of this system whose $80,000 cars are $800,000 cars with chauffeurs in them. This system teaches me to go against every fiber in my body and to drive past the poor soul begging on the street. This system teaches me to feel no guilt, to become even, perhaps a little sadistic in my ways, to enjoy my conveniences that much more, begetting a society of content sociopaths who idolize the sociopaths around them, place them on altars and worship them (Bezos, Musk, Trump, Thiel et al).
And thus, in sum the cycle that purports to find the replenishment of our battery by creating the very model itself of Heidegger’s brilliantly named “standing reserve”, depletes us, as if we were in fact a battery, which we are not. It drives us down further and further away from all the things that make a life worth living, forcing them into a dungeon of gloom, moving us away from real work, a sense of purpose and accomplishment and contribution to the whole; moving us away from learning and discovery - look at the American public school day and you need look no further - for learning is the very basis of having eyes open in the first place, the desire to make sense of that which we are gifted with the ability to even attempt such an incredible endeavor; and lastly from the one thing that defines us above all others, that we are social empathetic and deeply loving and caring beings, that we live for connection; there is no surer way to kill a person quickly than to isolate them; they will be mad in a matter of minutes. This capitalist-consumption model defined by an ever increasing need for convenience requires isolation, to get away from others in the ways that are real, that matter and to fill this need with false gathering and with things; we are therefore forced away not only from our nature but from nature itself - and we wonder how we have a changing climate, a planet that is becoming unlivable. We are thus starved of the very oxygen required for the very appreciation of life itself; it is a system that pretends to find us joy in that $80,000 car with leather seats and a magnificent imported sound system of which we know more than the lives of our own children; a car we weave through traffic with such pride while the real joy of life dies quietly, suffocating in the basement of the showroom, so that we may shop in the front room for placebos that never fulfill us. We are taskrabbits, trained to find ever larger, ever shinier, ever tastier pellets and eat them until we rot to death or explode, all the while wondering why life feels so empty, so “hard” in this first world luxury, so filled with endless things to do. So, what do we do? We cheat; we lie. We take vacations and feel hopeless, under-tasked, bored. We have lost our souls. We feel nothing and will do anything to feel things, including murder. And yet we wonder why we are a society of mass shootings.
As I have said all along about mass shootings and mass shooters, it is not because the video game "told them too", not because the movie "told them too"; it is because they are crying out, in the most broken manner possible, to feel something, anything in a society that has reduced them to standing reserve and for which they cannot take it anymore. It is not the failure of the children shooting up the schools or the adults shooting up the theater or the mall or the workplace or the college campus or the event; it is the collective failure of American society. A mass shooting is the time for us to look within, and yet year after year we do not do so, ever, not in the slightest bit, and until we do, nothing will change and this is why I focus on mass shootings; they are the literal hemorrhaging symptom we do not look at and when we honestly do, everything about us must change (for the better).
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