GUNZ AND KULTURE

By (O)CT(O)PUS

Years ago, I was researching delusional thoughts for a paper on psychotic disorders. Where do delusional thoughts come from? Are there patterns or archetypes? Should all killing rampages be considered copycat crimes?  Or something else?

We find examples of delusional thinking across a range of psychological disorders - dissociative, bipolar, personality, and psychotic 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 events or persons, personifications of painful emotions or traumatic memories, revenge personae, or voices in the head – all 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 continue to confound and mystify us.

Perhaps there are other artifacts less visible to us. How does social stress correlate with violent crime? How do we quantify and measure alienation and depersonalization - the kinds of torments that find a path of least resistance in the delusional mind?  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 – 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 merchants offer easier access to arms. Simulated violence in games and entertainment provide scripts for delusional reenactment. Desperation drives motive. These are cultural artifacts.

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.

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 – creeping into our lives. Is the ubiquity of guns 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 trust and confidence; the penalty for misconduct is more parental supervision and less independence. A reasonable proposition for raising children, I thought. 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 who consign  children to lives of obesity and diabetes? Or designers of video games who market violence to children and call it entertainment? Or arms dealers selling automatic weapons 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 game investment markets and leave millions of lives in financial ruin? Or a corporate CEO who orders massive layoffs - casting entire families into panic and debt - then rewards himself with a million dollar bonus. Crimes of violence against people 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 irresponsible 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 political 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 equate freedom with excess and excess with freedom. We enable overindulgence without self-restraint.  We practice brinksmanship but not citizenship. With each passing year, we drive 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 bind us together.  We covet freedom but spurn responsibility.  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.