By (O)CT(O)PUS
Years ago, I was researching delusional thoughts for a study on psychotic disorders. Where do delusional thoughts come from? What drives them? Are there patterns or archetypes? Should all killing rampages be considered copycat crimes? Or something else?Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to
know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
(E. E. Cummings)
We find examples of delusional thinking across a range of psychological disorders – in dissociative disorders (multiple personality), in bipolar disorder (hypermania), in schizophrenia, in a subset of personality disorders, as examples. Delusions are often expressions of inner conflicts, drives, memories, and feelings. For lack of a better expression, I call these “cultural artifacts” because they rise to the surface from the Spirtius Mundi of culture and infuse the mind. Delusional thoughts take many forms: Astral entities, historical persons, personifications of painful emotions or traumatic memories, revenge personae, spirit guides, voices in the head, beings from an another universe – born of our culture and made manifest in shocking crimes.
Every massacre demands an explanation. Law enforcement will gather evidence and assign motives to explain the unexplainable; the public wants answers; and parents seek reassurance. Every night on cable news, talking-head gasbags will assault our senses as competing stakeholders weave false hypotheses and self-serving narratives. Perpetrators rarely live to disclose their delusions in detail; they take their secrets to the grave.
If you accept this concept of delusions as cultural artifacts, then perhaps you might approach, from a different perspective, the murderous rampages that confound and mystify us.
Let there be no doubt. Easy access to arms correlates with higher incidence rates of violent crime, and America leads the world. The U.S. has 50% of all guns in circulation worldwide and 30 times the murder rate compared with other industrialized nations. Undeniably, gun culture is the vestigial relic of a frontier mentality deeply imbedded in the American mythos. Cowboys and guns are cultural artifacts.
Perhaps there are other artifacts less visible to us. How does social stress correlate with violent crime? How do we quantify and measure social alienation and depersonalization - the kinds of torments that find a path of least resistance in delusional minds? Recently, one of our readers named democommie commented:
Poverty does not cause crime; it breeds despair. Mental illness does not cause crime; it removes inhibitions and the ability to control dark impulses. Guns do not cause crime; they enable people who despair … to attain, if only for a moment, a feeling of control, of superiority over others. That the feelings of control and superiority often result in the taking of other's property, dignity, safety and, far too often, their lives is not the result that they dreamed of. It is the stuff of nightmares.The incidence of mental illness is constant across various population groups – almost as constant as background radiation in the Universe. The rate of violent crime in the mentally ill population equals the rate of violent crime in the general population. Yet America has a far higher prevalence rate of violent crime across all population groups compared with other nations. Why? Gun makers and their merchants offer easier access to arms. Simulated violence in games and entertainment provide scripts for madmen to follow. Desperation drives motive. These are cultural artifacts.
Reductio ad absurdum. After a weeklong silence following the Sandy Hook massacre, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA responded with this prescription: Fight fire with more firepower; place armed guards in every school; arm the good guys to neutralize the bad guys. More guns! Turn America into an armed fortress with self-appointed militias and vigilantes in every city and town.
LaPierre offers not an imaginary dystopia but a real one – like a bad Mad Max movie – threatening our lives. Is this an acceptable vision for our children and future generations? If you understand the pervasive impact of “cultural artifacts” on people, then LaPierre’s prescription for fighting fire with firepower is akin to pouring gasoline on a raging inferno.
During my parenthood years, I tried to teach my children the relationship between responsibility and freedom. Responsibility earns parental trust and confidence; misconduct results in forfeitures of freedom and independence. A reasonable proposition for raising children - yet ours is a society that fails to understand this relationship. Every public controversy, every perceived loss of freedom, whether imagined or real, represents a failure of responsibility.
Which is worse: A crazed gunman who kills 20 children at a clip? Or junk food merchants that consign a generation of children to lives of obesity and diabetes? Or designers of video games that teach violence to children and consider it entertainment? Or arms dealers selling weapons of mass murder that appeal, not to legitimate sports enthusiasts, but to adult children reared on action toys, who project their self-image of manhood through the barrel of a gun? Or reckless speculators who wreck the world economy and leave millions of lives in financial ruin? Or corporate CEOs who order massive layoffs - casting entire families into panic and debt - then reward themselves with multi-million dollar bonuses. Atrocities committed in the name of easy money, fast money, and free enterprise - these have become cultural artifacts.
How often have we heard people in the news disclaim or dismiss a public controversy with: “No laws were broken.” And how often have we thought: The word ‘legal’ is not necessarily synonymous with the word 'ethical.' Legal acts, all too often considered unethical and reprehensible, have become cultural artifacts.
What preoccupies our thoughts in this forum? We write about chicanery and corruption, inequality and injustice, abuse of our public institutions, the lies and deceptions of persons who aspire to positions of power and authority over us; of town hall hooligans, legislative gridlock and deadlock, and a public held hostage by hacks and henchmen. How often have we felt bullied and abused! These too are cultural artifacts.
We may talk about the dangers of easy access to automatic weapons; about loopholes in our system of background checks and bullet holes in our mental health establishment; about the subliminal influence of violence as entertainment; about competing ideas of gun ownership versus public safety. These controversies, grave as they are, overlook other urgent questions:
How will more guns or less guns serve us when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold?” Have we fostered a culture of remorseless and ruthless sociopathy? Are incidents of gun violence signs and symptoms of a culture in crisis?
We value freedom but not responsibility. We enable excess without restraint. We practice brinksmanship but not citizenship. With each passing year, we push all standards of civility, community and accountability further into the wilderness. National conversations turn fractious and fragmented; not even the high ideals of secular democracy hold us together. Perhaps the worst monsters of society mirror the accelerated grimace of a culture grown monstrous.
Let’s talk about the cultural artifacts that crash in the mind. Perhaps we should start this debate at the beginning by reaffirming those values of a democratic republic whose mission and purpose is to secure “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The price of civilization is never cheap. We demand the rights and privileges of full membership, but refuse to pay our dues.
O' course Bill Cody didn't use a Glock, but he could have bought anything from a Gattling gun to one of the newly popular Mauser and Colt and Browning autoloading pistols every bit as deadly and some more than the plastic gun in the picture. Maybe he did, but I doubt it. Guns are much harder to come buy these days. I don't know how to make it harder unless we require licensing.
ReplyDeleteShooting exhibitions were the most popular spectator sport before we learned to watch steroidal men beat each other half to death while we get drunk and cheer. I have it on good authority (my own)that the old showman wasn't death's blue eyed boy unless death is a Buffalo.
But all kidding aside, I have no cowboy origins or fantasies and I think the love of the power firearms convey is just plain old "will to power" humanity we inherited from the other apes. I think it's more that weapons have been restricted to the gentry in Europe for so many thousands of years, it seems natural to them as it seemed natural to change that for the colonials who damned well needed them to survive.
Looking at magazines from 50 or 60 or more years ago, gun ads were everywhere with images of boy scouts holding Ithaca 49 saddle guns, red shirted men in canvas canoes shooting ducks with shotguns and deer with rifles.
After bear? You're not going to want a single shot weapon really.
You know, that's still the real world for some people. In Australia crocodile hunters use spears and ropes. In Louisiana, Swamp Men use repeating rifles or pistols and they have a much higher life expectancy. I have a feeling outdoorsmen all over this huge and empty country fear legitimately that their lives are going to be controlled by people who have no clue and no care for them or their "obsolete" lives.
I hope that's not true, but in a country where boys don't grow up reading Stuart Edward White and Baden Powell and Hemingway and Faulkner and think Central Park is 'nature:' where people's first and only exposure to firearms is in lurid TV coverage of murders, I think it may become so -- with one size fits all laws and stereotypes about people of the "gun culture."
There's a difference between being part of a culture obsessed with anger and acting it out, where people love military looking vehicles and half believe in apocalypse movies with zombies in the streets and who build underground bunkers with booby traps -- a difference between Rambo and Daniel Boone and if I can use that prejudiced term "gun Culture" I think there are several.
And how often have we heard that we need gun control without any clue as to what that might constitute, about what has been done and what effects have been had? What gun owner, what sportsmen or women can fail to ponder what might be suggested next when nearly all the rhetoric not only paints them with the same bloody brush and the same, sometimes outrageously prejudicial and always wrong language? Sniper rifles, automatic weapons, cop killer bullets and of course everything from a slingshot ball up is "high velocity"
ReplyDeleteSorry, I agree that the NRA is fond of playing word games and fallacies and fear mongering, but perhaps this is one of those times when we're nearly as bad and by looking at only one aspect of why people buy and use guns we're engineering the conclusion.
I'd like to know why there was a big surge of buying in 2011 and why it came from Democrats and women, while Republican males ownership has remained more steady in the last decade?
But I feel intimidated and drowned out by people who keep illustrating Nietzsche's observation that every word is a prejudice and don't know a Glock from a Glockenspiel.
Hardly anyone who spent his best years paddling remote lakes and rivers and spending weeks in the woods or ordinary afternoons hiking his own land likes to be described as an anachronism or a drug store cowboy because he liked having a rifle with him when a long, long way from anyone else and the same thing goes for Country Club sportsmen and professional target shooters or hunters or Biathlon contestants and if that kind of life dies, replaced by a Western clone of iron fisted Singapore in all its suffocating safety, something American will die and I want no part of that future.
ReplyDeleteNo, I'm not against gun legislation because it's gun legislation or because I'm from the NRA and I think that's true of a great many people. I resent the constant equation. I just don't want more faith put in any more fake bans and trigger locks and waiting periods and arguments about "saturday night specials" and automatic weapons that aren't and all that stuff that did nothing whatsoever but provide false security.
I just don't have faith in the naive proposals, the lack of concrete plans based on concrete data and I'm against the state of mind that assumes everything is getting worse and worse and life is more dangerous than ever - where not only is one in a million too much but the price of civilization is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I've yet to hear anyone ask why Americans' private dreams seem to be military and apocalyptic and we see it in their Hummers and AK's and their shootouts. Buffalo Bill made a living with guns and guns were everywhere, but I've not heard of school shootings by him or Annie Oakley or anyone else back over a hundred years ago.
I wanna know what's changed, why everyone is afraid and I don't want to ban first and ask questions later pardner.
First off, not everyone is afraid. In fact according the the General Social Survey gun ownership is down both on a household level and an individual level. The trouble is while fewer and fewer of us have guns the ones that do are buying more and more guns.
DeleteHere is the data as far back as 1977. Thus the reaction of most Americans, which you find hostile, is due to the fact that most of us have never been around guns (I went hunting with my grandfather who had hunting rifles and in my younger days I was robbed a couple of times while working retail).
The reality is that most Americans have no concept of the wild west/cowboys, and do not dream "military and apocalyptic."
The reality is most of us did not spend days paddling remote lakes and rivers thus your appreciation of guns is not something that most Americans share.
Most Americans have found that ADT provides an alarm system that works better than a gun in protecting their families and their home. They don't hunt, they don't understand the concept of "a sport."
You are just old Capt. Fogg (and I mean that in the nicest way) and the times are a changing. Remember, in 2004 Rove used Gay Marriage as ballot iniatives to get conservatives vote out, as a wedge issue so to ensure the re election of Bush particularly in Ohio.
Just 8 years later we have polls showing that a majority of Americans support gay marriage. Guns are going the same way.
50 years ago blacks had to ride in the back of the bus in the South and today we have a black President.
Its the dialectic and how societies change. It ain't smooth, it ain't pretty to live through, and its only heroic and logical once its written about in history books.
I do not mourn the passing of Hummers and the infatuation with doomsday cults. I do mourn the passing of the public's love of and experience with nature unless it's the place to don lycra and exercise in. Unfortunately the people who gave us conservation and national parks and game laws and hunting restrictions have been the outdoorsmen who like to shoot and hunt and fish and climb and paddle. I don't want to live in a glass and steel, paved over beehive and if that's an obsolete thought, which I'm not sure of, I want, as I said, to go home.
DeleteFrom 1969, Big Yellow Taxi:
Delete"They paved paradise and put up a parkin' lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got till it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parkin' lot"
Looks like we have been bemoaning "loss" for a long time....
Hey, moaning about lost things is half the Bible, but when our infatuation with hunting and fishing and canoeing and the wilderness is actually on the increase it seems odd to call it old fashioned. Most of our country is wide open spaces.
DeleteLions and tigers and bears! OK, no tigers, but in Florida it's alligators and panthers, wild hogs, giant snakes and yes, bears. We have the largest wilderness east of the Mississippi, or so I'm told. It's not all Disney and South Beach.
First off, I think to focus on "cultural artifacts" and then jump to the wild west and gun slingers is really a pretty cheap explanation. Forget the wild west forget nature, the call of the wild.
DeleteI mean if these kids were wearing cowboy hats and riding horses up to schools for their shoot outs that would be one thing...
The reality is we are culturally a military industrial complex society. The guns used to kill are not hunting or sports weapons but rather military assault rifles and most of these kids are dressed up in military gear.
Haven't seen one case where a kid shot up a bunch of people wearing camouflage like deer hunters. None of them had on a neon orange hunting cap.
We are a nation that wants to attack and bomb everything, we hero worship soldiers by claiming they are fighting for our freedom.
This is a NEW cultural artifact, something that started after Vietnam.
Can't wait for the first drone attack on a school.
Maybe if more parents took their kids out to hunt game or fish we might not have the problems we do today.
Tao,
DeleteI won't continue to beat the military weapons thing to death -- I'm just thankful that real military weapons aren't available. (except to Ted Nugent, somehow)
"We are a nation that wants to attack and bomb everything, we hero worship soldiers by claiming they are fighting for our freedom."
Of course I respect our military and I have to believe that nearly all are good and decent people and perhaps we see evidence from the PTSD and huge suicide rate that our leaders have put them in circumstances that destroy good people.
But, yes, right from the beginning of Bush's wars it was all about fighting for "our freedom" and soldiers became heroes every one and more strangely: "warfighters." Until recently I'd never seen crowds cheer every person in uniform as they walked past -- once last year German Air Force uniforms! We meet anyone who ever flew a typewriter or peeled potatoes in the Army and we thank him for his service. School teachers? We only care when someone shoots them, otherwise they're just greedy for pensions unionized parasites. Ever thank a cop for his service?
"This is a NEW cultural artifact, something that started after Vietnam."
And yes, I think so too. Maybe we wanted a reason to feel like saviors of the world again, raving as Nixon did about the "lights of freedom" going out if we didn't conquer Vietnam, but it made militarism popular for half the country. The other half weren't "real Americans" according to John Wayne the Hollywood hero.
Am I off base for wondering why we don't weep and mourn for the millions of men women and children we killed there? Don't shed a tear for the thousands and thousands of kids we've killed, maimed, orphaned and exiled into poverty in Iraq? The kids we didn't lift a finger to save in Africa? And what about the civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Only "collateral damage" because we're fighting for Freedom?
I won't even get started on the American children we allow to suffer in the name of "conservatism" or the Mexican born American raised children we want to throw out on their asses.
Hell yes, we're a military industrial complex on wheels and wings and as our economic influence wanes and our moral leadership returns unto its dust we rely more and more on waving our weapons and intimidating the world to make ourselves feel important and that scares the shit out of me.
"Maybe if more parents took their kids out to hunt game or fish we might not have the problems we do today. "
My sentiments exactly.
Capt, my hat's off to you. Your words ring of truth draped with wisdom. If only a majority on both sides of this issue had your clear eyed view. Well done.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I get nervous when people agree with me.
DeleteSix dead children, their principal, vice-principal, school psychologist, teachers, and school aids - the massacre in Newtown gives me no feelings of nostalgia for the good ole days. In Kingston NY, a crazed gunman sets his house ablaze, then murders the fireman who answered the call. It gives me no feelings of nostalgia or sentimentality for the good ole days, the good ole boys, or the good ole anything.
ReplyDeleteFunny what Americans consider freedom. This post is about freedom versus responsibility. Freedom to own a military-style weapon versus the freedom of innocent children to grow into adults and have full and complete lives. Responsibility is the independent variable, freedom is dependent variable. How can you have freedom without responsibility? Tell me how responsible the NRA has been over the years - riddling legislation with bullet holes, thus rendered ineffective.
If something American dies, then let it die before another American dies. IDGAS.
I'm still failing to get my thesis across here. One more time:
DeleteIt's not enough to demand gun control and gun control is not a fungible commodity with any measure as good as any other. I want to be fair to those who don't live in standard metropolitan areas and have different needs and desires.
No, I'm not against 5 shot magazines. Show me a way to make that happen, but let's keep it real and legal and enforceable and constitutional and reasonable.
Can we limit the firepower and have the public go along with it voluntarily? Can we get rid of 50 million magazines in warehouses and in private hands? Without answering that, what are we doing talking about protecting anyone? This is a very big and mostly empty country and a country that preaches the preservation of the rights of minorities. The minority who live in the wilderness, the mountains, the bayous and the tundra are Americans too and protected by the same constitution.
Is it reckless to consider what works and what doesn't -- to examine past failures and try to avoid them - to stay away from impotent or cosmetic legislation? Is it irresponsible to equate mass murderers with people who live off the land and force them to adopt a different life as we did to the former owners of America? I'm arguing for fair and equitable and pragmatic and objective and I'm not a spokesman for the NRA.
I'm just trying to ask questions. Why have we been successful with some violent crimes and not at all with others? Are things getting worse or better or have they changed at all? Have bans on handguns made a difference or do other factors predominate in analyzing crime rates? Should gun laws be site specific? should cities and states have responsibility or the Federal government alone? There are a great many questions not being addressed and I think that's reckless.
But once again, I think that people who own guns don't all fit into the same stereotypes and people who own guns are intrinsically no more likely to fit into a mold than people who own golf clubs. Who wouldn't be offended by being linked to suicide bombers or shooters -- or the NR frickin' A?
I don't buy that it's only the surfeit of guns that makes Americans so likely to slaughter either. Maybe it's a bad analogy, but Holland has the same number of males per capita as we do, but has virtually no rapes. Their murder rate has a lot to do with recent population changes and maybe we harbor more demented people than they do and maybe part of this is a health care problem.
And lastly, in my opinion, It wasn't the "military style" of that rifle that killed anyone. Drive a military Hummer or drive a Ford Excursion, what's the difference? There was no feature thereof that isn't found in other rifles and I don't understand the notion that we've solved anything by somehow making these silly things go away, nor have I yet to hear any concrete proposals to make it happen. It's one thing to bemoan the number of guns in America and entirely another to do something legal and something possible about it and still another again to think we've solved anything if we cut the number of people killed by the criminally insane by a third. It's still too much.
And I keep agreeing that the NRA is irresponsible! Does that mean the Brady lobby has been helpful? Why it doesn't matter that the legislation so many are longing for actually created a demand for "military style" things and had no provision for diminishing the number of them in private hands or on store shelves. Let's please stop asking for it back. If we want to get rid of them, let's not grandfather in anything made before 2020 or made in America, which was a poison pill put into that fraudulent ban by the gun lobby. And let's think of ways to do it that get people to give up what they have and not hide them. Otherwise we've done nothing.
And of course I do give a shit, but I also give a shit about being identified with a murderer because I don't think "military style" is any more relevant than gangnam style. I don't want any guns in the schools unless maybe it's a cop. I think some are too damned destructive to be legitimate tools for the public and I want to reduce the numbers of those as much as possible -- just like you. That's why I keep harping on specifics and not deceptive and tendentious generalities.
DeleteNo guns for teachers or principals or students and none of that has anything to do with my nostalgic feelings for antique weapons or the millions of Americans who hunt and shoot and love their children.
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI just lost another long comment (my bad). Suffice to say that I'm going to put stuff on my own blog. Whether anyone other than I read it is not really the point. I find that writing blogposts makes me go out and find a lot of stuff that I otherwise would not take the time look for.
ReplyDeleteJust a, "for instance"; this:
"Intending to restore order, one of the first things the new lawmen did was to initiate a "Deadline” north of the railroad yards on Front Street to keep the commercial part of the city quiet. On the north side, the city passed an ordinance that guns could not be worn or carried. On the south side of the "deadline”, those who supported the lawlessness continued to operate as usual, with a host of saloons, brothels, and frequent gunfights. The expression "Red Light District” was coined in Dodge City when the train masters took their red caboose lanterns with them when they visited the town’s brothels. The gun-toting rule was in effect around the clock and anyone wearing a gun was immediately jailed. Soon, Dodge City's jail was filled."
from here (http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ks-dodgecity.html)
sorta gives the lie to the notion that the Wild West was a welcoming environment to anyone carrying their handcannon or long gun. It appears in fact that those who insisted on retaining their RIGHT to bear arms were pariahs who were marginalized and quarantined--kept away from that very society that they were so responsible for making "polite".
I will be developing this theme at my place (polrant.blogspot.com). Comments are moderated because I can do that and I don't allow moronz to comment there. I welcome readers and commentors but I am not always quick to get to the comments and approve them.
I'll add this blog to my blogroll, so you may get some of the lurkers from my place.
Cheers.
the real "wild" west seems to have had little to do with the dime novels and Hollywood productions. Fortunately it didn't last long, but our love of wild empty places still endures. There are still places where mom tells you not to go out without at least a 30-30 and preferably something bigger.
DeleteShould we do the Dodge thing and keep them out of the cities, or is that something you can only do in a small town where the Sheriff or Marshall knows everyone?
Smelliest place I've ever been, by the way. I was there for a half hour before I had to get out of Dodge.
Excellent post, Octo. Your contextual use of "cultural artifacts" puts a framework on the issue of violence in our cultural that allows for examination of the elements of American culture that feed and promote perpetuation of violence. Ultimately, I think that such examination is more important than simply addressing the more narrow issue of gun control.
ReplyDelete