Mass Shootings: Part 6 - The End of Meaning

In the 1973 film A Clockwork Orange, a group a young men gallivant around town committing acts of pointless “ultraviolence.” They laugh as they beat and rape and murder victims whom they select more or less at random. Their lives are defined by nihilistic destruction, and once captured they are subjected to ultimately unsuccessful reprogramming by a state that doesn’t seem all that curious about what created these demon youth in the first place.

Though the film is set in a dystopian future Britain, novelist Anthony Burgess drew inspiration for his book from the Soviet Union. He had visited the USSR during the 1960s, and was struck by the pointless violence he saw from the teenage gangs that roamed the streets at night, who would do things like smash up cars, beat up the elderly, and shoot into random windows. The Soviet cities in which they lived were grey and lifeless, loomed over by threatening brutalist architecture and ruled by repressive “egalitarian” institutions that sought to level everything into a flat inhuman sludge. To Burgess, it seemed like these kids were punctuating a “nothingness” with their destruction. Addition by subtraction.

This was not the violence of hunger or tribal combat or blood feud. This was something that could only fester and bleed out from a deep wound in the heart of a society’s shared sense of meaning. The core of the Russian soul had been eroded by decades of assault on family and religion alongside the proliferation of a total state apparatus that reached into the deep veins of daily life where those old pillars once stood.

Much of what the Soviet Union speed-ran in the early 20th Century — destruction of the family, the imposition of atheistic materialism, ethnic destabilization, and social leveling — has been carried out in the West over the last half century or so, just at a slower pace. The social and institutional fracture has been discussed earlier on this site, but all these forces have combined to create a void at the core of the American soul. It’s impossible to identify clear points at which human societies change from one form to another, though historians do try. We can get sense of where we are in relation to what came before by positing some questions about shifting states.

What does it mean to go from a society that generally trusts its leaders and institutions, to one that doesn’t? What does it mean to go from a society with high levels of social trust within communities, to one without it? What does it mean to go from a society that believes in God, to one that doesn’t?

What does it mean to go from a society that believes in Hell, to one that doesn’t?

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In considering the eruption of extreme violence into otherwise nonviolence spaces, we should key on the concept of sublimation. Nietzsche borrowed the term from the world of chemistry, where it refers to the transition from one state of matter to another, and from his thinking through others like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung came a psychological definition, in which base human energies related to things like violence are sex are transmuted into more socially acceptable expressions. This may happen at the individual level, such as when, say, a sadist becomes a dentist, or a bully becomes a cop. But it also happens at the society level, where ritual and custom can channel toward the productive energies that might otherwise be destructive. And so the murderous competition of the ancient steppe is channeled into contact sports, primal sexual longing is channeled into great works of art, and even some nascent inclination toward cannibalism is transformed into religious ritual - the body of Christ as wafer during communion. Many such things go unremarked upon, taken for granted as we make our way through the day-to-day, and yet they consume and exert enormous power that can cause a lot of damage if it escapes the proper channels.

This is necessary because we are not so far removed from a time before civilization, and one definition of “civilization“ itself could be the extent to which sublimation within a group of people has been successful. Healthy societies offer effective means of sublimating destructive energies, especially those in their young men (that most dangerous cohort). Their sexual energies are tethered to family formation, and their potentially violent competitive nature is put toward soldiery or constructive professional pursuits. Unhealthy societies - such as the USSR and, increasingly, our own — block or scramble these channels by means of institutional dissolution or institutions built on utopian or egalitarian unreality. And so you see uncanny horrors such as the communists of the Cambodian Kmer Rouge broadcasting classical music from loudspeakers at the killing fields as they butchered their victims with farming spades, the condemned hearing the masterpieces of Mozart as they dug their own graves. The channels of sublimation can become more and more ineffective — in some cases misdirected and perverted -—and destructive energy reasserts itself at multiplying points of failure.

Making matters worse is that working systems of sublimation have long been paired with rooted frameworks of meaning. When one fails, you can likely look over and see the other failing alongside it. And this is where things take a turn toward the nihilistic.

Much of what we call “modernity” is characterized by the inability of many to establish and latch onto rooted frameworks of meaning that they can truly feel in ways beyond the performative. Some even go far to say that modernity is defined by the inability of the common person to access fixed meaning in the world. That world has been boiled down to the material, stripped of myth and absent the ancient metaphysical escape hatch. This coincides with the slow-rolling demise of traditional religion in the West, where it’s becoming more and more clear that a post-Christian age has dawned — at least among the elites and the powerful institutions. Both psychoanalysts and theologians have documented the rise of religious people who claim that they cannot feel their faith in the way they think they’re supposed to, and that this form of ancient, fully inhabited belief is all too often beyond the reach of people today. Even for those who actively seek it out, real meaning has become almost inaccessible.

The “almost” carries some portent here. Some thinkers, like German psychoanalyst Wolfgang Giegerich, believe that one perceived portal to meaning remains for even the nihilist — that found in brief moments of ultraviolet destruction. Giegerich writes of the moment of obliteration as a means of breaking through the banality of an everyday life drained of the formerly understood substance of the metaphysical and the spiritual - that some of the people committing these crimes have given up hope of any future happiness and so give up themselves and others to the void as an aberrant form of sublimated religious observance. But this is still intrinsically nihilistic, so Giegerich claims that it is “just the empty shell of religion, the abstract naked form of the sacred, and as such the legitimate form of religion as a living reality today.”

I find Giegerich’s take compelling at the intellectual level and repellent at the spiritual. And perhaps that is because I am just as lost in that interstitial zone as so many others, knowing from instinct that a need is there, the same as I know that I need to eat and drink. And yet the sustenance is harder and harder to come by, and like so many others, I both feel the stress and cannot locate it. I myself believe there is much meaning to find in the world — in the family, in love, in nature, in what we call God. But I realize that those really have become harder to attain in the modern world, that they are in fact inaccessible for many more people now than in eras gone by. If you’re facing an abyss — one into which you hope and pray you do not slide — pay attention to those who make good faith attempts to illustrate it. To back away from the ledge, you need to have an idea of what it looks like.

Nihilism is the great beast that stalks our world. Its shape can be hard to see, though it’s there. Its whispers can be very quiet, but people hear them. Even its attacks can be hard to trace back to it, and yet it destroys.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wrote that they viewed their classmates as robots and demons. They compared the hallways of their lifeless high school building to the corridors of the video game Doom, where you blast demonic zombie forces with an arsenal of small arms. Writing of his plans for the massacre, Harris wrote “It's going to be like Doom…I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy...so I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom.” He named his shotgun Arlene after a character from the game. In his last journal entry before the massacre, Harris wrote that he wished to “get a few extra frags on the scoreboard."

This is not just about video games, of course, and the boys imagined their violence beyond the virtual. Harris wrote that the massacre would “be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam, Duke and Doom all mixed together." But this was a surface level amalgam of violent reference points. A laundry list of deadly events washed of context or meaning and distilled down to their destruction and notoriety. Yes they may have immersed themselves in violent virtual worlds, but their entire conception of their world was drawn from the digital and the analog, and their massacre marked a sort of blood-drenched portal where these two dimensions crashed together. Harris and Klebold had formed a framework of reality that divided the world into the real and the unreal, the human and the inhuman - the living and the living dead.

In a society diminished of deeply felt spiritual and cultural meaning, such novel frameworks are inevitable — indeed logical — and their emergence makes bursts of violence like Columbine more difficult for anyone who doesn’t share in them to get a handle on. The rise of mass shootings coincided with the rise of bureaucratized “social sciences” that sought to meld the psychological with the sociological such that aberrant events could be transmuted into data sets usable by the ascendant technocracy. But the Columbine massacre — so thoroughly planned and explained by the killers and yet so outside the bounds of what had been considered possible — marked a tear in the hyperreal fabric of modernity that cannot be understood through a technocratic lens, and so modern America cannot begin to understand it, much less combat it. We were no longer dealing with malfunctioning individuals who cracked under the breakdown of the old world. Now fully self-aware and self-actualized individuals were actually teaming up to enact this new destruction against the new world.

Harris and Klebold were not victims of abuse nor were they addled on drugs, and they were able to fit their planning right alongside their normal lives without attracting notice. Shortly before the massacre they had gone to their high school prom and posed for photographs with their dates. They showed up to their jobs the day before, just to keep up appearances. The word “crazy” is easy to throw, but it doesn’t stick here. What the boys did possess was profound hatred — at their classmates, at their school, at a broader modern world they saw as maliciously fake and in some ways already dead. They saw the institutions that surrounded them as diseased, and their outburst of collective obliteration could be seen as similar to the way in which cancer cells are malfunctioning attempts to adapt to or eradicate inflammatory states.

Adam Lanza, while fitting the old profile of the addled loner, wrote of a similar hatred toward the perceived meaningless of modernity before he killed his mother and then murdered twenty students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. He recorded a series of video diaries in which he explained his objections to modern life and his profound sense of detachment from the spiritual and the real. He taped up his windows so no one could see inside his room, and forbade visitors to knock or otherwise intrude on his privacy.

Various mental illness have been attributed to Lanza — OCD, autism, etc. — and these may have applied. But Lanza was highly intelligent, and reasonably eloquent in his explanations for his state of mind. Like many intelligent young men, he had veered between a series of esoteric ideologies, beginning with anarcho-primitivism and then into efilism, a nihilistic antinatlist philosophy that attaches a negative value to birth. He described his worldview as “antivalue,” convinced that there was no intrinsic meaning or importance to anything and that all efforts to break free from modern unreality would lead straight back to the null. He lived in a profound state of detachment, and eventually decided that he could longer live in that state, and so chose to rip a whole in the world he so hated on his way out.

In a way, some of these hypermodern mass shooters share more in common with suicide bombers than with, say, serial killers. Serial killers are predators, and though they increased in number in the 1970s due to social collapse and a suddenly plentiful bounty of unprotected young victims wandering the nation’s highways, they have always been around. They are not generally suicidal and aside from a few outliers tend to avoid attention so that they can hunt. Suicide bombers, on the other hands, seek to viscerally impose themselves on reality, to wreck the physical world as a means of destroying spiritual enemies while simultaneously accessing a world beyond. Some have characterized the rise of suicide bombers in the 20th Century as a counterattack by the primordial against the postmodern — as an attempt to rip holes in the fake to reestablish a link between the real and the spirit realm. Mass shooters like those at Columbine did not share the religious framework, but their delineation between the fake and real and their bloody assault on what they perceived as fake or meaningless likely come from a similar primordial instinct, with no effective nonviolent sublimation to forestall disaster. Their nihilism gave them nothing to hold onto in this world, so their self-immolation became the most meaningful thing they ever did.

We all dwell in the interstitial realm now. Modernity and its attendant digital demons have opened the maw, and we’ve all fallen in. It’s a profoundly new world to which we are not adapted. There will be casualties.

Let’s return, as we must, to the hallways of Columbine High School.

It can be a frightening thing to try and slip into the mind of any other person, much less people so seemingly alien as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. But in that strange way, what makes them alien is the very fact of their normality, and much of their terror lies in how similar their experiences are to those of so many other people, even in the moments leading up to disaster. The banality of so much of what they did that day besides pulling the trigger can help ease us into this. They rolled out of bed like we do, put on clothes and shoes like we do. Looked at themselves in the mirror. Felt the morning air as they left their homes. Turned on the engine in their car. Felt the soft rumble of the road.

Many perpetrators of heinous violence — soldiers at My Lai, ISIS guerrillas in Syria, etc — have describes a phenomenon of “waking up” in the middle of the violence, as if emerging from a dream. Until the first trigger pull, they weren’t sure if they could actually do it, and when they did the haziness of the dream crashed against the hard physics of the real.

When Harris and Klebold began their violence, what did they think about? Did they experience that crash of the fake against the real when they saw their classmates bleed and die? The slaughter inside the library, where they hunted students hiding under tables and killed them without mercy, reveals no remorse or change of heart midway through the event. And yet they did let some students run by without firing on them, and they left some of the wounded alone without finishing them off. Why? Some reports described them walking around aimlessly through the hallways in the middle of the attack, chatting to each other. What did they talk about? And just before they shot themselves as the police closed in, what did they think came next? Were they afraid, or relieved?

Did they believe in Hell, if only for a moment?

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Of course I don’t know toward what world we are crawling, nor whether what waits for us there is something better and newly built, or oblivion. This series is more a collection of musings and wonderings than an attempt to explain in totality what can only be seen in fragments. To the extend they help myself or anyone else shade in more of the picture, I will see them as worthwhile.

In my heart I believe that we can and will avoid the oblivion, but that the near term will see further destruction of the ties that bound people not only to their societies but to themselves — that nihilism will continue to march and take the souls of many who drift amidst a collapsing social and spiritual structure. There is still so much light out there, but with fewer and fewer tethers to solid ground, more and more will slide into the dark, feeling no attachment to the past, and no obligation to the future. It’s an anguished state, and their shouts will become more destructive.

As the Marxist Antonio Gramsci once said as he set about lighting the old structures on fire, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

This piece concludes the series.