Maybe the media only make it seem that there are more serial and
mass murders happening in our country today than in the past. But
whether the numbers are up or down, it still stuns us when people,
always men and boys, kill simply for the sake of killing, killing not
only strangers, fellow students, co-workers and their own families, but
often themselves as well. The reasons are always obscure, though
newspaper columnists and lots of other folks have their theories. I’ll
get to mine in a moment.
A recent New York Times Op-Ed
piece by Frank Rich looks at a number of recent murder sprees and
concludes that "Much of our speculation about… mass-killers is …simply
useless". The hatreds that motivate such killers cannot be eradicated
in a free country, nor "sadly, can that indefinable element [in people]
that, if only for lack of a more precise term, we call evil."
I
agree that there is no way to blame all these various events on one
simple factor like television violence, the availability of guns, or
the gap between the rich and the poor. Perhaps no matter what
enlightened social policies are followed, there will always be the
occasional emotional crash that can only be satisfied by going down in
flames while taking with you as many of those around you as you can.
But
there is a way of thinking about this problem that you don’t see in the
mass media: What about thealienation from ourselves and our community
that Marx claims is the result of organizing our lives together in the
way we know as Capitalism? Of course it is only a very vague cliché to
attribute social ills to alienation, so I’d like to try to make this
idea more vivid and therefore more useful.
But before
we talk about alienation, I want tosay something about these animals
that have evolved, culturally andhistorically, into capitalists and
workers and consumers and political leaders and activists. Many people
on the left deny thatthere is a human nature. They are right if that
means that nothing inour biological make-up determines us to be cruel
or kind,violent or peaceful, possessive or sharing. The human animal is
bynature neither good nor evil. I would say, instead, that we are
bynature both good and evil. The word for us isdangerous. In some
circumstances, we are wonderful, and inothers we are monsters, and
sometimes both at once. The hell of it is that it’s very hard to
predict which circumstances bring out the monsters and which make us
beautiful.
Civilization makes us more dangerous, as Freud pointed
in Civilization and Its Discontents. Getting along with others in
society, starting with our famies, requires every child to restrict,
channel, defer, modify, and crush many desires.
What
babies want more than anything is to beloved no matter what they do or
don’t do. As we grow up, we are expected to have reasons for what we
do, we are expected toapologize, to be places on time, and to live up
to expectations. Weoften encounter cruelty and indifference. We take
kindly to thesedisappointments, especially if we are not well loved. So
at thebottom of most hearts is a layer of resentment for thesacrifices
social life demands of us, resentment for the loss of ourhearts
desires. Political theorist William Connolly calls this"existential
resentment," and it aches for a target. Everydayexistential resentment
gets channeled into common irritation andanger at co-workers, family
members, and other drivers. It also fuelshostile attitudes and actions
against groups who are approved astargets by one’s peers. Racist belief
systems are frameworks of rationalization for venting resentment.
Some
people come through happy childhoods with small and manageable levels
of resentment. Others who got no love nomatter what they did, and those
who were physically or emotionally abused, have great storms of
resentment within. This makes them explosive, highly dangerous animals.
Any real or imagined insult, anything that assaults their dignity, may
set off some sort of violence.
Now what I want to suggest is that the social system of makes these animals more dangerous still.
Every
social system requires some sacrifice ofinfantile goals in the interest
of cooperation. Even this breedssome resentment. But capitalism is not
a system ofcooperation. It is a system of competition. Moreover, it is
a systemof competition among unequals who are taught to believe that
they areall equal in their chances for success. So it appears that
those whofail have only themselves to blame. We are invited by
advertising andby the highly publicized lives of the famously rich to
desire alwaysmore than we have. Capitalism cannot have it any other
way: it needseager consumers and willing workers. There have to be many
morelosers than winners. A culture of contempt and scorn for
losersdevelops as a way for people to represent themselves as
winners&emdash; and advertisers encourage this. Be the first to on
yourblock to own this car, or this mower, and be the envy of all
yourneighbors.
Individuals can come to feel like
losers for a wide variety of reasons; because they are
taughtself-contempt as children, because they lack the class or
racialbackgrounds associated with success, or because their
personalities, habits, talents, looks, or even their luck, don’t match
the economic or cultural patterns of making it in this social-cultural
system.
Some people who feel that they are losers do
asthe system prescribes: they blame only themselves and turn
theirresentment mostly inward. But many others come to hate the world
atlarge, as well as themselves. They rightly sense that their status
ascontemptible has been assigned to them by an unfair system they
haveno control over. The result is an infinite variety of
destructivebehaviors that wreak havoc in their own lives and those
around them.A few go so far as to declare total war on life by killing.
They get token revenge by killing some representatives of the people
they think the system favors or who have scorned them, and then they
destroy themselves. Their suicides are not aimed at avoiding
punishment, but represent instead their final break with life, for life
has they know it has recognized their hearts’ desires only with
contempt.
What could we be learning from the serial
andmass killers among us? That human beings are resentful animals, and
therefore dangerous. The way to live among dangerous animals is to
becare-ful; that is, to take good care of them. They respond well to
recognition and love. Capitalism, however, is careless of these
dangerous creatures; for it cares not for them, but only for what they
can be made to do that will profit a few ringmasters.
