A Short Note concerning the American willingness to Kill by Terry Field
From distance, the condition of American society readily explains how and why killing with guns happens as a routine experience. The note written here is intended to look at that society as if it is an insect on a pin in a glass case. If some are offended then those readers should look to why they are offended in the first instance.
America is the very definition of the achieving western materialist society. Wealth and power goods are manufactured there as nowhere else on earth. A key ingredient in this vital production is the plasticity of the people - they change functions, they change locations, they often change families, they change everything they need to in order to shape themselves to the task of immediate work demands. When adult, as a matter or routine, the children decamp often to thousands of miles away from their point source of origin.
Largely because of this the individual consumes psychiatric services on a level unknown elsewhere in the world.
Americans specialise functions unlike any other society on earth, and others try to develop the same level specialisation to enjoy similar consumption; but the price of this is isolation more often than not is severe.
The combination of pressures accepted as part of life by Americans has another effect - it makes them superficially gregarious and open to strangers like few societies on Earth. Across Europe, Asia, indeed anywhere where settled societies of traditional structure are found, friendship is a very slow burn indeed. It can take a decade to 'get to know' someone. Why? because people have, in general, relationships developed from life's early days.
Thus the American experience can produce both highly agreeable immediate relationships for those who live like Americans in terms of geographical volatility but within 'traditional' societies. But for many Americans there is a very uncomfortable realisation that when settled life in later life is experienced, the roots of traditional societies are simply absent for them.
Thus, this apparent mass murderer has a 'girlfriend' from another part of the world, plainly with a completely different 'world view', and the sense of utter dissociation by a 'gambler' in the loneliest town in a very lonely society who apparently never opened the blinds of his little house and was selectively 'social'.
The love of weaponry in America seems to feed from a sense of anger from the isolation this plastic society inflicts on so many. The social plasticity requires the 'self' to be particularly vulnerable to the 'new'. That vulnerability is rare in settled societies. Thus with a gun, the 'self' appears to be in command again. It is of course an illusion. But that does not matter to the desperately cut-off.
The clear and obvious reality here is that of 'dissociation'. An American level of 'dissociation'.
A person utterly cut off from the mutual obligation of relatively poor, immobile, mutually supportive and thus mutually interdependent societies. In most of the world, interdependence is the first lesson little children learn.
As the Japanese say ' The nail that stands up must be hammered down'. it is about the group, not the individual.
In the American experience, for the mass of the population (not all of course) the accent on personal wealth, personal independence, personal choice, personal 'dreams', all others are consumable items.
They can be none other. And that includes people.
Given this, given 400 million guns, given 320 million people, I am surprised anyone searches for a 'motive'.
Borrowing the famous phrase.
'If you seek a motive, look around you' - Terry Field
Comments?
Terry's writing strikes me as an accurate armchair psychiatric assessment of the American mind. Our emphasis on individualism and consumerism without the balance of strong relationships engenders a sense of isolation. Throw an assault rifle into the recipe and there you go. --Chris H.
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