Facing the Killer: On Murderous, Suicidal Rampages in the U.S.

Sandy Hook. Columbine. Aurora. Tucson. Blacksburg. Fort Hood. The names of these places ring out in popular memory as the sites of seemingly random, heinous atrocities that seem to occur with increasing frequency these days. Gun-related violence and death is a hot-button issue at the moment, and for good reason, as the U.S. leads the advanced capitalist world in a trait that is singular in its stupidity: allowing “the market” to work its magic by disseminating, unchecked, huge numbers of guns to an extremely unequal, class-riven and deeply racist society that also worships violence, murder, and mayhem in its popular culture. In this context advocating gun control is the only sane thing to do. However, it would be a mistake to say that the U.S. just has a “gun problem,” because the U.S. has a murderous, rampaging killing-spree problem.

Let me be clear. Every day dozens of people are killed in this country, mostly minority youth and mostly in the poorest and most economically devastated neighborhoods of the major cities. This chronic social crisis only appears in the establishment press as statistics, or else as an ongoing, existential situation that can only be managed but not really addressed. Its root causes and conditions are clear and have been extensively documented. But this ongoing disaster is not the topic of this post, which is another horrendous phenomenon in which the U.S. also leads liberal societies: the individual, suicidal, heavily-armed murder frenzy that seems to be happening about once a month now, on average.

Adam Lanza; Jared Lee Loughner; Seung-Hui Cho; Stephen Holmes; Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. I could go on but it's unnecessary. They stare back at us through blank expressions in mug shots, school pictures, or family photographs that circulate through the media and that seem to vaguely hint, but only hint, at a capacity for cold, calculated mass murder. The difficulty in understanding seemingly irrational atrocities of such enormity, and of potentially comprehending the motives behind them, is unfortunately an old topic. However confused she may be as a political theorist, Hannah Arendt knew enough to see that Eichmann, during his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, was going to be a tough nut to crack. And the revelation, after the Second World War, of the true extent of Nazi war crimes was so traumatic that it set off an intense debate about whether or not one could – or should – even try to explain such heinous crimes, a debate that continues to this day. But it seems to me that to chalk up what the Nazis did to “pure evil,” to some metaphysical force that lies dormant within humanity and is inscrutable in its essence, would be literally the biggest cop out in history (I am aware that some people still make this argument). It seems to me that we are in a very different but still analogous situation with the unconscionable acts of our home-grown mass murderers, insofar as we have to ask: what on earth is driving these people to do this?

Of course there is no easy answer, but the fact that this is so doesn't mean we shouldn't try. And there's definitely plenty of bullshit to go around on the topic. Idiots, for example, argue that the phenomenon is completely explainable by the killers' obviously deranged mental states. While the people who commit these crimes are obviously of unsound mind, to reduce the entire problem in such a way is to absolutely psychologize it and remove any possibility for social explanations. Further, it can't even begin to explain why these mass killings seem to be happening so much more frequently these days. Other, academically accredited idiots suggest that, hey, modern civilization looks pretty good if one compares it with violence levels in previous forms of civilization, so let's stop all the hand-wringing and give thanks for the civilizing achievements of modern liberal democracy. Such quietism is not only indefensible but is frankly absurd in the face of the sheer enormity of these atrocities.

Philosophers, I'm afraid, aren't much more helpful than evolutionary biologists in this regard. Predictably, the folks at the NYT's “The Stone” blog have mostly turned the issue into a philosophical debate about gun control, rather than an inquiry into possible explanations for why this is happening. The only attempt at some kind of cultural or social explanation in that series, by Christy Wampole, tries to account for these events as essentially a reactionary form of identity politics, suggesting that they are pointing to some kind of crisis in white, heteronormative masculinity. While there may very well be a crisis in white male identity in U.S. culture today (see here), it seems exceedingly tendentious to suggest that this is somehow the motivating force behind these massacres. Why, for instance, would such a crisis manifest itself in this specific form? This is unclear in the article. However, it is worth mentioning that Wampole at least recognizes that gun control debates and arguments for reform – as important as they are – don't address the underlying problem, which is why this keeps happening over and over again. Fighting for tighter gun control is of course important, but we should not let that fight displace the question of why we have this problem in the first place.

Popular thinking about social problems in the neoliberal age evinces a peculiar pathology that is historically specific. As previous posts on Permanent Crisis have argued, social life at different stages of capitalism has been characterized by distinct ways of imagining or apprehending the social whole, or of envisioning the relationship of oneself to that whole. The neoliberal age can be characterized as pervaded by the imaginary of the individual aggregate, or by the idea that the “social whole,” such as it is, is essentially composed of atomized, self-sufficient egos who are connected to one another primarily through the medium of individual choice. This is a key characteristic of the foremost types of knowledge production in our society, whether in the realm of social science (rational choice theory, orthodox economics), government (the reduction of the citizenry to an aggregate of “consumers”), or the public sphere, insofar as the latter is remade into a fragmented assortment of marketing niches that encourage people to translate public issues into the language of private interests. The neoliberal age, in other words, is marked by a recrudescence of the desiring, autonomous, rational individual of classical liberalism as the basic cellular unit in a society integrated by “the market.” This inextricable coupling of the liberal individual and the market, in its neoliberal form, is the effective dissolution of “society” as a social category, as in Thatcher's dictum, “Society does not exist, only individuals do.”

Thus the neoliberal social imaginary is animated by a manner of thinking that condemns it to obscure or misrecognize the irreducibly social and historical dimensions of things, particularly when they go horribly wrong. Indeed the production of this misrecognition is itself an integral aspect of the neoliberal form of society. But this recent wave of shooting sprees cannot really be accounted for without at least some attention to the ways in which they are specifically social products, and to the degree that this is true, to continue ignoring that aspect of it will condemn us to blindly reproducing it. One way to get at this problem is to actually pay attention to what these people say about what they're doing and why they're doing it.

The motivations behind the recently deceased Christopher Dorner's one-man war against the LAPD, for example, were exhaustively detailed in a “Last Resort” letter he left behind. While the letter shows that the guy was clearly undergoing some kind of mental collapse, it also is an astonishingly lucid account of the reasons for his deep hatred of the LAPD, particularly its viciously racist, unaccountable culture of violence and opportunistic corruption that victimizes the very people who live in the communities it supposedly “protects.” Here is Dorner on the LAPD:

The department has not changed since the Rampart and Rodney King days. It has gotten worse. The consent decree should never have been lifted. The only thing that has evolved from the consent decree is those officers involved in the Rampart scandal and Rodney King incidents have since promoted to supervisor, commanders, and command staff, and executive positions… Are you aware that an officer… seen on the Rodney King videotape striking Mr. King multiple times with a baton on 3/3/91 is still employed by the LAPD and is now a Captain on the police department? … As a commanding officer, he is now responsible for over 200 officers. Do you trust him to enforce department policy and investigate use of force investigations on arrestees by his officers?

(For background on the infamous Rampart division, see here.)

In passages like these Dorner is really only pointing out what everyone should already know: that the LAPD is permeated by an insular, self-serving culture of racist oppression. Dorner describes at length the unhinged white-supremacism of the people he worked with on a daily basis, recounting times when he physically confronted other officers about their anti-Semitic or anti-black attitudes. White supremacy has historically been central to the raison d'être of the LAPD as an organization, but would you know this or even have a sense that it is what Dorner was talking about if all you read about the issue is Buzzfeed's “Everything You Need To Know About the Former LAPD Cop on a Killing Spree”? The article tells you precisely nothing you need to know for understanding why this is actually happening.

Here is Dorner again:

I am an American by choice, I am a son, I am a brother, I am a military service member, I am a man who has lost complete faith in the system, when the system betrayed, slandered, and libeled me. I lived a good life and though not a religious man I always stuck to my own personal code of ethics, ethos and always stuck to my shoreline and true North.

The patterns of identification here are not irrelevant: Dorner “chooses” to be an American, he's a son, a brother, he participates in various identities, one of which is an individual who has lost all faith in “the system” that has betrayed and alienated him. The system, in fact, has become completely irredeemable in his eyes, leaving as the only solution its purification through violence. Elsewhere, he talks about how his actions are a “necessary evil” to correct these endemic conditions of corruption, to effect “substantial change” in the LAPD. The reason Dorner draws the conclusion he does is there seems to be no other option for him, no other mode of redress for the enormity and depth of the problem. The structural function of the police in upholding a racist regime of urban domination is clearly recognized, yet his conclusion does not consider the possibility of mass mobilization as an agency of social change, because for him the individual is primordial – it is the fundamental cell of social life. If what neoliberalism constantly tells us is taken to be wholly true – that individual choice is all that matters and that society is simply the aggregate of all individuals – then genuinely collective solutions to endemic social problems are effectively off the table. So one votes. Or, if one's circumstances are desperate enough, one lashes out in extreme and spectacular acts of violence.

None of this is meant, of course, to excuse what Dorner did, nor to suggest that we should understand events like this as a pure reflex of environmental or structural factors. But any attempt at explanation that wholly ignores these factors is partial at best and criminally one-sided at worst.

I've focused on Christopher Dorner because he's only the most recent example of what is quickly becoming a regular feature of U.S. society, and also because he left us a detailed account of his motivations that sheds considerable light on them. This is not so for every case, and indeed some of these atrocities really do seem to defy any attempt at rational comprehension – how does one even begin to account for Adam Lanza, for instance?

But this same galvanized imaginary, based as it is upon a Manichean division between a crusading individual and an endemic, alienating structure of power, can be seen at work in some of the other mass-killings that we've seen of late. Jared Lee Loughner, the Tucson shooter, was under the impression that the U.S. government was irredeemably corrupt insofar as it was backed by what he called “infinite currency,” i.e. central banking. His peculiar brand of homicidal lunacy was shaped by a crackpot, conspiratorial imaginary – the conspiracy apparently extended down into the very grammatical structures of language itself – but it's important to understand its structure, because it does have one. In his focus upon an intangible, abstract currency conspiracy as the locus of oppression and alienation, and his extremely non-coincidental targeting of Arizona's first Jewish congresswoman, Loughner represents an atavistic return of the virulent anti-Semitism that marked the era of classical liberalism. As some writers have pointed out, anti-Semitism in its various forms is a recurring misrecognition of the abstract domination of capital, which, insofar as this domination becomes identified with an intangible, Jewish conspiracy, prepares the ground for violence against actual Jewish people. There are many complex historical questions regarding the origins and persistence of anti-Semitism, but for the moment it is important to note that it is generally attractive as an ideology during historical periods marked by especially savage and unmitigated capitalist domination, such as the periods of classical liberalism and neoliberalism, and in contradistinction (only to a limited extent) with Fordism.

Dorner and Loughner are criminally insane. Their insanity takes a particular form, however, that is historically and socially specific, and that at least partially accounts for why they did what they did. The dissolution of the material bases for the kinds of collective imaginaries that marked the Fordist stage of global capitalism has given rise to a social imaginary, or an apprehension of the social, that is grounded upon the coupling of the “individual” and “the market” as the dominant ontology of social existence, and which seemingly erases the possibility of collective solutions to endemic, structural problems. Within this configuration, the experience of alienation is bound to take certain forms, and when this characterizes the experience of someone of unstable mental constitution, people are bound to get killed. 

This is a social pathology that is far from being wholly inevitable and arbitrary. Rather, it is very much an expression of the increasingly unmediated barbarism of an economic and cultural order that, for many different reasons, alienates people and makes them feel alone in the world. With a culture industry that ceaselessly glorifies violent spectacle, a constitution that appears to grant a non-alienable right to own guns, and a coalescing regime of long-term political-economic austerity that is sure to discard more and more people as superfluous, it is only a matter of time before the next Christopher Dorner or the next Jared Loughner appears once again in our midst. We can, and should, keep advocating for gun control, but the problem will not entirely go away until we change the form of society that engenders it.