An Impromptu Essay on Mass Shootings

It’s a strange dynamic which the United States has in respect to guns and gun violence.  We repeatedly see young white men – typically college educated – taking up weapons and unleashing a torrent of violence upon a community.  The attacks are eerily similar in perpetrator demographics, style, and in their suddenness.  The similarities are well reported on and well known, yet we as a society continually dismiss perpetrators as being psychologically ill or unspeakably depraved – the trouble here is that we categorize them as some heinous monster, something inhuman, from being stricken by some incurable and malignant psychological affliction.  We don’t see them as people, and therefore we don’t see them as members of our society; the blame for these terrible ruptures of violence then falls upon some vague problem with the individual, something well outside the realm of society’s influence, well outside the confines of ourselves.  Yet we see this view is composed of flaws – if these were truly isolated incidents, if the mass shootings were the byproduct of a single person’s flawed psychological makeup then one would assume them to be exceedingly rare (they aren’t) and committed by persons varying greatly in demographics such as age and education (also not the case).  The fact that one can so easily draw parallels between the men committing these acts hints at something amiss at the societal level.

The most easily invoked social problem with respect to mass shootings is the laxness of gun control in the United States; this certainly plays a large role, but to think it begins and ends there misses much.  The enactment of stricter gun regulations would very likely reduce the amount of these tragedies – the fact that I can at this very moment walk into a gun store and with little more than an ID and some money walk out with a handgun and ammunition should and does sound absurd.  Yet I do not want to focus on the specifics of why gun control is needed; I feel that has been addressed adequately elsewhere.  What has not been sufficiently addressed is why there are young, educated white men going on killing rampages.

Why is it that bright middle class men are engaging in these sudden bursts of violence?  We’ve established already that it’s not merely an issue of the individual, for if it were there wouldn’t be so many similarities between the occurrences.  A major clue can be unearthed by looking at the incidents themselves.  In each case, the young man sets out with no specific target in mind; there seems to be no focus on one type of person over another, the victims are generally strangers, mixed in age, sex, etc.  The shooting also occur in public, they’re in high profile places, places where it’s unlikely the shooter will know any victims and where the shooting will be maximally visible.  It seems then, based on these qualities, that the shooter is not looking to unleash his frustration upon a particular group or person, but upon society itself.  The question of course becomes what about society has driven these men to lash back so violently and so spectacularly?

Here we come to a junction that gender becomes a major player.  We have never witnessed a woman commit these acts, nor do I suspect we ever will.  The difference lies within power dynamics and typical representation of gender roles. Dominance and aggressiveness in men is cultivated and revered from a young age; a weak man refers to a man seen as indecisive, lacking influence, and who is physically and mentally incapable of both defending and imposing his beliefs in social spaces.  This is key: a man’s sense that he has fulfilled social expectations must come from society and from his interactions.  If in his interactions he finds himself largely ignored, he goes home at the end of the day frustrated and feeling weak.  A lack of reinforcement in ability and power creates dissonance between a male and his concept of his gender’s ideal.

In cases where the shooter has left clues to his motivations, we are met with another parallel: a belief that the entire world is against them.  It is not the world against these young men, but society’s inflexibility and lack of transparency in gender roles and idealizations – something that may as well be the world against them.  How, then, can a man who sees himself as being a chronic failure – weak and emasculated – rectify his position?  Particularly if he has no other concept of success with respect to gender, if he himself has never experienced a questioning of gender and expectation.  If his only framework for gender based actualization is that of society’s majority view how could he not see himself as weak and as a failure?  It is no coincidence that the shooters all take up guns, a symbol of masculinity and ultimate power (that over life and death); nor is it a coincidence that their violence isn’t directed against any specific person and they stage their displays of lethal power in public settings.  Their sense of discontent stems from such a fundamental place that they themselves are likely only partially aware of what it is they’re frustrated with.  They then engender these vague but torrential resentments in an atrocious and lethal display of power, punishing society for failing to furnish them with the deferment they were taught signified their success as men.  We as a society need to redefine what it means to be a man; ideally we need to remove the entire construct of sex-gender traits and ideals, and at the very least need to permit for greater flexibility in defining what it means to be a successful woman or man.

These shooting are tragic, yet after we have experienced so many and as a society sit by helplessly throwing our hands into the air saying “how horrific, people can be so cruel” our cries are not lamentations of the guiltless.  I hope that very soon we as a society feel threatened and exposed enough that we look internally for a solution to the repetitious displays of violence; I suspect that when we do the monster we see in the shooter will also be seen in ourselves.

Mar, 9 2015 — Duality, individuality, and society

   Over the course of my own tribulations in life and self there has been one recurrent theme, of which I now believe possesses the greatest influence on my own state of existence:    a subjective grappling between a duality of identity that takes many forms.  This dichotomy of identity has been referred to in a variety of forms; conscious & unconscious; instinct & rationality; faith & science; good & evil; and so on, the etymology isn’t of consequence.

The interaction of these polar sides to identity form the foundation of human experience — my rejection of an experience on one side cripples that side while feeding the opposing one.  As a basic example, I might deny myself a certain leisurely pleasure under the pretense that it’s unproductive, unnecessary, or otherwise unwanted.  In rejecting myself some ‘idle pleasure’ I feed the industrious side of myself while enfeebling the pleasure-seeking side.  This shapes my experience of things in ways I’m conscious and unconscious of — immediately speaking I might not recognize any real symptomatic effects apart from a difficulty concentrating on whatever it is I am trying to accomplish.  If I maintain this imbalance for a longer term, however, I will start to suffer a variety of neuroses: stress, chronic inattention, listlessness, and general dissatisfaction.  Through the repeated denial of a side of myself, I systematically starve it of vitality, inducing a sort of stored pain that can only be maintained for so long until the strength gained from the opposing side proves ineffectual.

Here it becomes critical to examine the influence culture and society has on the formation of these two identities.  Humanity has long sought to simplify the two parts of ourselves, labelling one as good another as evil, or passing some other sort of valuation of either side’s merit.  This is done through religion in part, but even more so with culture.  Western culture has, since the industrial revolution (and probably earlier) prioritized a sort of rational empiricism; exalting the greatness of man’s advances in technology, medicine, and the physical sciences.  The unintentional byproduct of this obsession in mastery of nature has been a disconnection with the subjective and qualitative aspects of the very nature we seek to master.  An individual born into such a culture unknowingly has their expectations and values shaped in the image of their culture; that is to say that the western individual seems to innately laud rationality and productivity while simultaneously devaluing instinct and emotion.  This mass ‘shaping’ (I place this in quotes because it is only a real shaping of personality inasmuch as the individual doesn’t realize it) of personality is both unavoidable and harmful.

Society, government, culture, are all averages of the current regional environment, they are a collection of individuals’ values and beliefs meshed into a singular and conceptual form.  In creating such, we seek a semblance of fairness, hoping to harm and marginalize the least amount of individuals while maintaining a structure that keeps us protected from what’s perceived as our tempestuous and ‘anarchic nature’.  However, this desire for protection often oversteps its bounds, marginalizing certain traits unfairly (race, sex, sexual preference, gender identity) which in turn serves as the foundation of mental imbalance and dysfunction for those possessing those traits.

Furthermore, in averaging the temperament of a group we wind up creating a collective consciousness that is unrepresentative of any single member of the group.  The split between a person’s two identities lies upon a continuum, meaning there is an infinite amount of variation in the nuances with which each person ideally approaches things in their lives.  When mixed into a culture (a collective averaging), there then spawns an innate dissonance that each individual feels (whether consciously or not) to the state of the culture.  This disconnection then serves to create those very neuroses I earlier described.  The individual, then, may be unconsciously perpetuating the cycles of their mental conflict, as they may be naturally more inclined (let us say the individual belongs to a western society I earlier described) to pursue things outside of the realm of industry, wealth, and science, preferring instead art, experience, and emotion — this individual, will then (unless both extremely talented and/or lucky in being provided for, or able to find financial sustenance in alternative means) struggle chronically to find an agreeable center and be unable to exist comfortably within society while still nurturing his or her natural inclinations.  This precise disconnection, I believe, demonstrates the root of many persons’ growing romanticizing of nature, fantasizing of return to simplicity and self-sufficiency, since accompanying it is a purity of self and balance that cannot be found for them in society.

Feb 1, 2015 Virginia Woolf and Harmony

A mind of none’s own.  

Virginia Woolf, now the better part of a century ago, penned an extended essay, A Room of One’s Own.  Woolf’s prose has a tendency to become distracted, absorbed in some effulgent beauty that it grapples to resolve with the utmost fidelity, and I love her for that.  There’s an audacity of mind that bleeds onto her sentences and rocks her readers with firm prods though cathartically pure sensations and emotions.  Reading, then, an essay that she tries to focus on the role of gender in writing and what it takes to be a woman writer, was a bit of an anxiety inducing prospect.  There’s an exaggeration of being that we bestow upon people whose lives influence us tremendously — Virginia Woolf is one of those people for me — and a scuffing to their deified weight tends to produce tremendous and unpleasant percussions through one’s existence; a shattering of the foolish, naïve hope that somewhere, someplace in life someone has impossibly usurped their humanness — a hope, that when broken, falls with the same mortal weight one feels upon an intimate reminder of their own humanness.

Thankfully, it does not tarnish that projection of her.  Woolf, instead, manages to create something of a Feminist Manifesto railing lucidly and without hint of accusatorial tone through the intellectually disabling history of women.  She provides a marvelous account of the circumstances that created the void of women in academia while implicitly suggesting the solution.

However, it is not the egalitarianism that interests me most about her essay, though I do find it endearing and resonant.  I, instead, am enticed by her rather poorly developed (she dedicated only a few pages at most to it) idea that a writer’s mind must be in balance; that two engendered sides — one masculine and one feminine — of each person’s brain must dethrone each other of identity and blend to androgyny.  Then, once sexless, the mind must attune itself to the flow of the world.  In essence, the mind must merge to the whole of existence, feeling the delicate shifts in reality as moments pass, punctuated by events, soaking in the sensations and subtleties found in them and translating them into words.  Writing, in short, must be real; it must focus on conveying and describing those realities of mind in the purest fashion.  Being a bit of a sucker for abstraction, I can’t help but apply her philosophy to a greater, more basic existence of life beyond the writer. 

We have, as a world, made tremendous progress in the degenderization of our minds.  Doubtless, more work needs to be done, but progress has been and continues to be made nonetheless.  Sadly, on the second account, which requires a severance from individualism, no progress has been made.  Describing the severance eludes clear and prosaic language, as such, please bear with this attempt.  There is a sense of peace most of us have felt, perhaps at times when we see the sunset in brilliant shafts of color after a long day of obscure activity; or the sense one might feel on a chilly spring morning upon seeing the sun slowly pulling itself upwards, casting a gentle and warming light over the earth, a light that reflects off freshly sprouted and dewed plants in such a way that the past evaporates to a lightly rolling cloud, a cloud that slowly billows in the bluing sky to countless shapes of possibilities and futures.  A feeling, whatever its source, that comfortably suffuses across your chest before shooting off, fusing you with the world, with the flowing of time and the rhythm of events.  It is that feeling, whatever it is, which I press myself to properly describe, where a power of unity exists; a shift that once started will press humanity forward less as masters of the universe, and more as members — bent not on domination and divisiveness, but integration and harmony.

Justice, Thoughts 1-30-15

I’m writing this in a state of extreme fatigue.  As such, there are likely to be numerous grammatical errors and non-sequiturs.  Still, I’m writing from an impassioned state, and that’s gotta be worth something, right?

For a very long time the concept of justice has been hanging heavily on my mind.  I’ve strived to see some reason, to understand why it is we as a society are so obsessed with it, but have always fallen short on some ground or another.  Justice, to me, seems obsessed with retribution; now perhaps that’s thanks to the “justice” the american legal system administers (it likely is, at least to some degree), but I’ve still been unable to separate the two — justice, it seems, ubiquitously is a means for enacting only partially qualified revenge.

Revenge is perhaps a more easily assailable concept.  In it there exists some element of blindness and coldness, for revenge, if pursued in direct proportion to the wrong, requires (to be considered fair) that the wrongdoer’s circumstance and motive was plain — that they willfully enacted some malicious event for which there were no ulterior motives or explanations than the wronging itself, a rather comical and incredulous circumstance.  No things are so plain, however hotly our emotions burn for the punishment of our miscreants.  

Perhaps this position is wrought of naiveté or an inability to cope with the things being of a different vein, but I wholeheartedly believe that people — that life in general — are/is essentially good.  It’s not the nature of the universe to do evil, and manifestations of what we perceive as evil are rarely that.  They are, instead, the result of the complex interactions between, ideologies, moral systems, physical needs, and psychological needs.  Interactions that, given the right (read wrong) circumstance, allow for any person to behave in an ‘evil’ or ‘malicious’ way.  

It is because of that exact vulnerability, the ability for anyone or anything given a malignant environment to embody some form of evil, that I believe the only just reaction is one of responsive forgiveness.  Rather than chastising or a person or forfeiting a chunk of their life to stagnancy, there should be systems with a goal of addressing and treating the issues that lead to a criminal act rather than the retributory (and ineffective) system that we currently adopt.  

Jan 6th, 2015

I’ve been reading a number of german works in the past few months, spanning in era from 18th to 20th century.  One theme that I’ve found common in nearly all the works is the stark splitting of emotion and reason.  Its presence is so ubiquitous I’ve begun to grow curious of just how common it is in german art.  I am, however, not keenly enough interested in german culture to pursue it with much vigor.  Instead, I’ve found myself deeply drawn to these metaphors and fictitious scenes in which a person finds themselves lost in a psychological purgatory between feeling and reason, spirituality and rationality.

There is a balance I once believed we must create between the two — a compromise.  As a child it takes the form of narrowing the imagination’s scope, seeing what is impossible and what is possible, then readily and correctly differentiating between the two.  This can be evidenced by a fear of monsters or night, darkness gives rise to ambiguous shapes, things that a child cannot yet readily dismiss as imaginary or impossible.  In our teens we learn to distinguish a valid feeling from an invalid one, and how to properly show the ‘right one’ while veiling the ‘wrong one’.  Again, this manifests as strange emotionality, crying or feeling rage over what is typically written off as something trivial.  Now into our twenties and generally considered an adult, one wrangles with a lingering sense of idealism.  They attempt to reconcile what they want to do with what they think they should do.

All of these stages I’ve described are of course of a person slowing carving themselves deeper towards the side of reason/rationality.  This is not always the case — there are, on rare occasions, those who seem to be born seemingly outside of this realm.  However, I’ve chosen to focus here on the path most people take, where we repeatedly dismiss the emotional and spiritual side of ourselves because of both habit, and belief that the two are incompatible.

There is, for a reason I’m unable to defend, a sense that all things spiritual are also irrational.  Perhaps this stems from the purportedly dichotomous nature of the two, but what exactly disconnects the two?  The warm embrace of awe and inspiration that one can feel when staring at a beautiful scene in nature, some fiery and crimson sunset over a beach, is able to leave me a with repose, from which we derive legitimate value for no reason other than the scene’s beauty.  Yet there is something utilitarian etched into me that struggles to dismiss these things as senseless.

This struggle between rationality and spirituality, I believe, is an illusion created by our desire to simplify.  In truth there isn’t a balance that needs to be maintained between the two — the two aren’t opposing forces and hopelessly intertwined.  They simply are what they are.  

Bringing this back towards the now distant opening, I believe what I’ve attempted to describe here is perhaps the one of the major thoughts that one of those authors (Hesse) tries to convey in his works.  Or, maybe, it is even more simply put as being the illusory struggle between things we create, and how much simpler and truer life becomes when we no longer pit things in opposition of another. 

Regardless, I’m already finding some distaste in this style of writing.  We’ll see if and where things go from here.

Jan 5th, 2015

I write this now as the first creation of the new year.  It is always strange, labelling things with a number, especially years, and particularly upon the arrival of a new number.  A year is long enough that by around March or April the number assigned to it roots itself as a seemingly permanent facet of life, and then, when the number suddenly increases by a single digit, one feels a sense that something is wrong, the 5 is wrong, it isn't a 4.  This feeling then cascades, bursting with platitudes of melancholic ephemerality that despite being tattered from overuse are able to evoke the most unsettling of thoughts; that life is ever so slowly drifting further from its beginnings — languidly wading deeper and deeper out into an ocean of time.  The numbers now show as more abstract and undefinable things.  When you're closer to something, each step away seems substantial, each year possesses more meaning, more milestones.  Now, however, at a greater distance, I’m unable to definitively say “yes, a year has passed.”  Instead, I look upon the numbers on a calendar, see that the year has increased by another value then anxiously ponder how that happened.  This owes partially to age’s effusive power and part my own mind’s fallibility when attempting to condense and assign chronologies to feelings and memories.  I should think now that those stark divisions I perceived as a child between the years, the flamboyantly overstated events that represent a clear milestone in my development, will continue to sink towards deeper and more inaccessible recesses — shining now with a faint twinkle (a pallid remnant of the once ablaze form it took) reminiscent of some impossibly far away star projected onto the light-washed night sky of a city; a star that, like many actual stars, represents some part of a constellation—an era—complete with its own ill-remembered folklore and tall tales.