Perhaps a controversial observation: In the wake of the recent school shooting, no one is talking about how SAFE our schools are. According to the Brady Institute, every year, 7,957 children and teens are shot in the United States. Among those 1839 children and teens die from gun violence (992 of those are classified as murder). Given how much time people in that age group spend in school, it is surprising that only 20 per year (on average) die of gun violence at school. Over 97% of murders of children by gun happen away from school. This does not address the broader problem, but it highlights how our focus is driven by the narrative and not by data. (By the way, the statistics come from two sources: https://www.bradyunited.org/key-statistics and https://everytownresearch.org/report/preventing-gun-violence-in-american-schools/
Be careful with Everytown’s stats. Any shooting that happens anywhere near a school, even on Saturday nights, tends to be counted as a “school shooting” to them.
You’re right. I don’t think I made my comment as clear as I could have, and didn’t quite respond correctly. Just wanted to say what I said since there were links.
Agreed. I figured if I took stats from two organized both of whom inflated their statistics, it would be a fair way to compare. I’ve if either is off a bit, the ratio is still remarkable.
One of my takeaways from your comment is to be even sadder that so many kids die so unnecessarily. What a terrible bunch of numbers, and what a terrible tragedy for all those families.
Well written and thoughtful piece DC. I started Dave Cullen's Columbine last night so I'm only a few chapters in but it seems he is going to place some blame for future school shootings on how the media (including himself) first covered the story. The live coverage, media attention and jumping to early conclusions seems to have set a template for sick people to want to emulate. So far he has already talked about how Eric and Dylan wanted to beat McVeigh's body count. Thank god their bombs didn't work. Scary stuff.
Although I agree with you that digital technology is fucking us up in many ways, I'm not sure that a desensitisation to violence is the big issue. For most of human history we lived in very violent societies. What we would call 'normie' workers would go off to war during campaign season, witness and commit unbelievable acts of violence and then return to their jobs and societies afterwards. Even outside of warfare, most people were closely or directly involved in food production which would require the slaughter of animals. In other words, are we really more desensitisation to violence than our ancestors? Was the pre-digital industrial era just an anomaly where humans were in a brief period in between 1 long extremely violent era (most of human history, ie the norm) and our digital age which is for the most part quite peaceful and non-violent?
I might sound like a psycho (but I'm not defending school/spectacle killers) but maybe humans, or a significant minority of males, are inherently violent. In the past these people would have been valuable to their societies - warrior classes are common in many cultures. But in general these days we have no use for these people. Now combine that with:
*the rise of mass media/digital technology
*the breakdown in family and local community ('self policing')
*the move towards digital communities (spectacle killer 'fanclubs')
*abuse and overuse of pharma drugs
*the western capitalistic focus on the individual and the related risk of complete isolation
And you get a potent cocktail of bottled up, violent young men with no direction or positive outlet for this dangerous 'energy'.
I'm not suggesting that this explains all or even most of the phenomena under discussion (your post does a much better job) but I think this is worth thinking about.
The violence aspect is interesting, as you note. In some sense, we as a nation were similar to other people, especially in our frontier days - both unsanctioned and sanctioned state violence were a part of everyday life. It's probably only in the last century or so that lives in which violence was not experienced often or at all became normative. But taking this into the realm of evolutionary psychology, it makes more sense that we would have adapted as a species to witnessing and participating in violence because we're all descended from ancestors who committed acts of violence on some sort of regular basis.
You are not psycho: aggression is highly correlated with levels of testosterone, and young males have both high testosterone and poorly regulated emotional functions which leads to more acts of impulsive violence. Some might say that a society can be judged on the basis of how younger male members are treated and how they are incorporated into that society, because the consequences of a failure to integrate them can be so catastrophic for the reasons mentioned. (There was a famous investigation in the 1990s I think into a group of young male elephants who were committing random acts of violence against both conspecifics and other large mammals, and it turned out that it was because all of the larger males had been removed or poached - I can't remember the details exactly but it's very pertinent to this topic.) I can't help think about those roving young warriors described by Tacitus in his Germania (almost certainly an idealized description but with some truth mixed in) as the archetype of what the young men of previous societies used to be sent off to do: wage war against external enemies and collect spoils/honor. It used to be OK even through the World Wars to encourage this population to join the military so that they might achieve glory for themselves, their families, and their countries on the battlefield.
The warrior is undoubtedly a human archetype - some people are just meant to become warriors (Jocko, Josh Barnett, etc.), by whatever combination of nature and nurture. What do we do with them? The current ideal of the citizen has become more feminized (with some attendant benefits, to be sure), which means even less room and tolerance for these guys. Is this one aspect of the devaluation of fathers and fatherhood (in some respects due to the poorer performances from many fathers), of the glorification of single-mother parenting (we all know there's a difference between denigrating someone who has to be a single mother because of tragedy and someone who actively chooses to be a single parent), of the intolerance for free play and exploration in successive generations of children? Every aspect of human behavior is more complicated than the words we use to describe it, and sociological research is notoriously difficult to conduct/interpret, but I can't help but feel as though that this change in disposition towards young men that we've experienced in such a rapid fashion in our recent history is largely overlooked when it comes to diagnosing the illnesses which plague the current body politic.
And because I'm a sucker for quotes (after all, none of our ideas or thoughts are original to us - 'we are not our own') here's one from that paragon of scientism, Francis Bacon, which is again interesting to consider in light of the preceding points:
“No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic; and certainly to a kingdom, or estate a just and honourable war is the true exercise. A civil war indeed is like the heat of a fever; but a foreign war is like the heat of exercise, and serveth to keep the body in health; for in a slothful peace, both courages will effeminate and manners corrupt.”
Thanks for the well written response. Some interesting points raised.
'Some might say that a society can be judged on the basis of how younger male members are treated and how they are incorporated into that society, because the consequences of a failure to integrate them can be so catastrophic for the reasons mentioned.'
I have been trying to get my hands on a book DC mentioned a few years ago called 'The Myth of Martyrdom' but it is hard to find. When he mentioned it (think it was on an Unravelling episode) he talked about the parallels between school shooters and Islamic martyrs - suicide bombers. Apparently the author lays out a similar profile for both types of people, but that through different cultures the end result is different. To add to your point above, this might not just be an issue in the US/'The West'. I think we are all struggling with modernity and this struggle is manifest in different ways depending on cultural roots.
This is shameful to say as an armchair observer with no skin in the game, but I will admit that I have a sort of 'Prussian' attitude to war. I think it was von Moltke who wrote about the virtues of war - purpose, honour, courage, bravery, can all come to the surface for some participants. I think Ernst Junger was basically saying this in Storm of Steel. But I think the big problem now is we have reached a level of technology and scale of participants where war is so goddamn awful and destructive in the industrial and post-industrial era, that it is almost completely unpalatable. But our lizard brains haven't caught up with these advances yet and some of us still have this warlike psyche as you say - Jocko being the archetype. Sorry to ramble, this is just my way of saying that I fully agree with you on the challenges facing society and with what to do with young men.
Totally agree on the issue being global, in part because the crisis of modernity is a global crisis. Even most of our bad guys (Islamic fundamentalists, Antifa, white supremacists, etc.) are more 'farce' than 'tragedy' it seems; they've all been afflicted with the ills of social media, easy access to pornography, and other homogenizing ideas emanating from the West. More people than ever before (I think it's now over 50% globally?) live in cities/urban areas, so, if Spengler is right that the migration of peoples to cities marks the terminal stage of decline as people become disconnected from the natural rhythms of the land they hail from, then it seems that we're all in this together.
And I also totally agree about the advent of modern warfare being a 'great equalizer.' I think Junger talks about that leveling aspect of modern warfare, where brave men and cowards alike could be blown to bits by shells fired en masse (VDH likewise mentions something similar in some of his case studies in 'Carnage and Culture' about the fate of non-Westerners fighting Westerners). WWI is to me the most horrific example of this because so many men signed up to fight because they thought warfare was going to be the same as it had been since time immemorial, but what they got instead was months-long battles in absolutely hellish conditions in which opportunities to even meet the enemy face-to-face were often limited. So yes, I do not advocate for this type of war and think that it is anti-human in both effect and in spirit. But I think the current state of affairs does contain opportunities that are more similar to what we evolved to handle - small-scale commando raids, targeted and limited engagements with specific enemy forces as identified through intelligence, etc. I don't know if we as a species are capable of producing another Napoleon if only because, as discussed, the scale of massacre and destruction that such a spirit would unleash on the world would be something that I think most wouldn't sign on for, but we are hopefully still capable of producing Jockos for the time being.
You're very well read. Any advice for tackling Spengler? And VDH? I bought DOTW a few years ago due to the other podcast we don't speak about but the size of it is intimidating.
Thank you for the compliment - we're all students here! I still have so much to learn and therefore so much to read, as I'm sure you do.
With Spengler, I would say cheat a bit and buy the abridged version. For me it was less daunting and you get all the main themes but with roughly half the pages. If you end up becoming more interested, you can always buy the longer version for a second read-through. The abridged version is still a bear though and very dense so take your time with it. Some of it will still be a slog, but I think if you focus less on the smaller details (which are legion) and more on the bigger themes (e.g. the differences between Being and Becoming, Culture and Civilization) you'll really get a lot out of it. If nothing else it will challenge your likely heretofore passive acceptance of history as a long line of progress and people becoming 'better' (progressive visions of history are still interesting and useful, but if nothing else the picture will become more complicated).
As for VDH, his stuff is pretty straightforward. I've especially enjoyed C&C as well as The Savior Generals (the former is probably his most famous book and has both thematic consistency as well as interesting historical takes - he's a military historian so if you like that sort of stuff you'll like it just for that; SG is a bit forced because of the comparisons he's trying to make across like 2500 years of history but the history itself is presented well - you'll become an Epaminondas fan for sure). His history of the Peloponnesian War (A War Like No Other) is pretty good too, though he has stiff competition from Thucydides and Xenophon on these topics.
I finally got around to picking up the abridged version of DotW recently. It is the H Stuart Hughes version, not sure if that's the one you meant? It's only early days but I'm enjoying it already. Like you said, I'm not understanding all of it but think I'm getting the main themes anyway. Thanks again for the abridged recommendation
Hey thanks, I think you're right about the abridged version. I did the abridged Gulag Archipelago so I don't know why I didn't do the same with Spengler instead of rushing out to buy the 2 volumes!
Big fan of military history so I'm confident I will enjoy VDH.
I’m certain the influx of recent school shootings does not have any one vector of causation. People get hung up on that because our minds don’t have the bandwidth to comprehend quickly multi-variant problems, like school mass shootings.
It’s like this is where we’ve found ourselves in this societal wide Milgram experiment. And everyone is scrambling to decipher and fix the issue post haste.
To fix it, one would have to unravel quite a bit of normalcies that we’ve settled into.
Listening to Darryl & Jocko - my thoughts are that we should be careful on the benefit-cost of efforts to "fix" this problem. When governments get involved, often the net gain is negative w/ problem not being addressed. Generally speaking, more government means more government power and less freedom for people. Consolidating power is the one thing government is exceedingly good at.
Listening to you and Jocko. Great episode so far. I'm about half-way though it.
Honestly I wholeheartedly believe the "news" media at the very least deserves a very significant portion of the blame for many of society's ills. Ever listen to Don Henley's "Dirty Laundry" song? Say what you will about him/his politics, it doesn't diminish the fact that song is more true today than it ever has been, and it seems like it on a runaway trajectory. The worst part in my opinion; it feels so intentional.
I think if we just shut down the "news" as a whole and went back to print media or some other form that lacked the immediacy of Social Contagion/Media, I believe it would fix a lot of that "the first report is wrong" stuff that gets entire cities burnt to the ground.
Just my 2 Cents.
Keep up the great work DC. I'm always learning new and interesting stuff listening to you.
Henley's "Dirty Laundry" was him complaining about the tabloid coverage of him being caught with an underage girl. The words may not be wrong, but the reason for them sure was.
Yeah, that was why I worded it the way I did. Personally I find Don Henley abhorrent on so many levels. That said even a broken clock is right twice a day. <laughter> 🤙
Agreed. Henley the artist is someone I really enjoy. Clever dude, good wordsmith, really good singer. Henley the person does not seem like a good hang.
Funny, I just watched the original 1932 Scarface, which opens with a pretty defensive statement that the film's actually an "indictment" of gang warfare.
I keep reading/hearing there's little evidence increased exposure to increasingly graphic levels of violence has much effect on behavior. Then why does increased exposure to porn seem to mess so greatly with the sexual function? Because it's a real sex act being viewed, whereas with the violence people can tell themselves, "oh, it's fake/CGI?" In that case I wonder if the problem is not so much desensitization to violence as certain minds/personalities wanting to act out the movies playing in their heads, thinking everyone else will want to watch.
But what do I know? I'm the wimp hiding my eyes behind my hands during every gory movie scene, begging my husband to tell me when it's over.
I think there's a point to be made about "knowing it's fake". In my experience real footage of violence or from war zones truly hits differently, somehow your mind recognizes that it is real and that people that are being hurt and killed. I can watch war movies all day long no problem but even if the real killing is only "implied" it's absolutely haunting. There was a video from Mariupol of a Chechen soldier walking through the ruins of an apartment building and you could hear a woman screaming off-camera followed by a gunshot and silence, you could get a hundred of the best actresses of all time practicing their best blood-curdling screams for a month and not capture that emotion. On the other hand, watching the D-Day beach landing scene in Saving Private Ryan really messed me up as an 11-year-old, so there has definitely been desensitization in that respect and I suppose the same could be true if one were to decide to regularly consume real graphic violence. Although I cannot imagine how one could do that without either becoming totally numb and nihilistic or overwhelmed with sadness and anguish.
That’s true to an extent regarding people disassociating entertainment violence as being “fake/cgi”, but for the last, say, decade, it has been very, very, easy to find websites that are just mass compilations of real life graphic violence videos; from cartel & terrorist executions to convince store murders, police shootings, and even mass shooters who live-streamed themselves. There’s whole internet communities out there who treat that stuff as entertainment in and of itself, and even though they know it’s real, they treat it as consequenceless entertainment.
Shock content in the early 90s were everywhere. But it at least had some limits I fear for the teenage youth of today and the sort of stuff that gets shared of Facebook messenger, snapshot, and any other social platform of chose. It is really bad. How can Young people that go down these rabbit holes dig themselves back out and adjust to the ever dwindling ideal society. I mean to me church seems like the correct answer but I get the too little too late vibes.
On another subject does anyone else get Jerry springer vibes with legacy media. I remember when Jerry first came on TV it was like a train wreck you could look away from. The problem was they had to keep adding train cars to the wreak to out do the day before, until it became obvious to everyone that it was fake all along... I feel the same way about cnn/fox/nytimes as I do about Jerry springer and similar talk shows.
Anyone doubting that "gun control" is a failed ideology should review the peer reviewed research. Also, look up "demagoguery" and "scapegoat" in the dictionary. Many countries have had "gun control" laws for decades so it's not at all like the past when it could be considered plausibly uncertain how effective they would be. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0234457
I mean, when someone walks into a school and guns down 25 elementary school kids, I don't begrudge people their emotional overreactions, even if they're wrong.
That's fine. But we're seeing medical doctors leverage the 'appeal to authority' fallacy to shamelessly promote failed ideology. And have you ever watched one of Trudeau's flashy press conferences?
Remember when the government banned alcohol for everyone... but themselves and the rich with back ally deals*cough-cough*. That made a massive crime wave in the cities, boot legging mobsters, and a lot of gun violence, to the point of banning full-auto and creating the NFA because it got so bad... now the problem wasn’t the guns, it was that the govt created a HIGH demand of something that most everyone wanted. When the government takes away, you create a market for underground lords. Also, this ALL the kids are dying from guns, let’s look at what areas... poor black kids in inner cities are dying from guns. Why is this? I think some of us know, but that doesn’t fit the damn narrative being pushed right now. So, what to do? Jockos last Wednesday podcast was so great ideas about training at schools I thought. 20% of officers on the force are always training is a good idea too. Over 400,000,000 guns I believe, most gun crimes happen in inner cities, not little subs and the country, it happens buy gangs... you think they are waiting to get their CCH/CCW or permits to waste the other gang snuffing them and their turf? Nah. That weenie leader in Canada JT is what our leaders would love us to think about 2A, you don’t have the right to defend yourself with a gun. Well it’s it black and white in our constitution and it’s not defending myself from crooks, but our govt does have to tip toe around the people, because last time they got really stupid and slow to act... black panthers started chilling in government buildings with loaded guns. Disclaimer, I don’t even like the BP, but it’s an example, listen to Jim Joes podcast DC did, it’s weird and wild.
I appreciate your "stab" at this. I'm contemplating this and it's just not settling. I'm a little older than you and remember many of these movies though was never a 4 hour a day person, so I only totally consumed Cool Hand Luke. The others I read about.
I can't imagine those movies would have landed, if we didn't have some interest in those areas. Are the movies leading our way or are they showing directions we're considering? Much like politicians, are they actually leading or polling their public and selling their edges back to them. The Hollywood group, for all their moral degradation are not the grifters that the politicians are or at least the rules and descriptions of their products and costs are a little better laid out.
I also think of some of the nasty nursery rhymes and other boogeyman stories that I grew up with. We always had a fascination with the scary and typically my imagination is worse than images created. The influence of others on my timing, maturation, level of edge, etc. had a lot to do with my boundaries today.
Thank goodness in all that, we also had some heroic figures and examples as well. Much of their stories turned out, like the scary stories to not be true though based on some truth.
For me, years in nature helped me find a fondness for order. My nervous system has been thankful ever since.
They were definitely a product of the times... an expression of the zeitgeist, so to speak. It's interesting to note how, after a spate successful films from the New Hollywood directors in the late '60s and early '70s, you started to see a backlash ranging from more nuanced criticism to total rejection of the vision they were putting forward. In '73, Malick made Badlands, which is loosely based on the Starkweather murders, and in the film he shows how these two young people on a killing spree who were self-consciously refusing to conform to society's rules were actually a product of that very rejection, and without their even knowing it, were trying to rebuild a caricature of a normal life even during their rampage. Also in 1973, George Lucas made American Graffiti, which kicked off the '50s nostalgia craze (Happy Days came out the very next year, 1974). People looked back to the '50s as a simpler time, before the counterculture, sort of the way we use 1980s nostalgia to remember a simpler time before the internet. Besides movies like those, the art house/New Hollywood films went into steep decline, and blockbusters like The Poseidon Adventure, Superman, Close Encounters, and then of course Star Wars, that brought the movie industry back from the brink.
As George Lucas himself said in 1973: "We all know, as every movie in the last ten years has pointed out, how terrible we are, how wrong we were in Vietnam, how we have ruined the world, what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. It had become depressing to go to the movies. I decided it was time to make a movie where people felt better coming out of the theater than when they went in. I became really aware of the fact that the kids were really lost, the sort of heritage we built up since the war (he means the Second World War) had been wiped out by the ‘60s, and it wasn’t so groovy to act that way anymore, now you just sort of sat there and got stoned. I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about - from about 1945 to 1962.”
Thanks for the response! The George Lucas point takes us back to the church and the support of coaches and mentors. You know, get the off the ground, stop your whining and get back at it. Or, get back on the horse or any number of ways of saying I don't want to hear your noise, just want to see what you deliver, then I'll listen.
Maybe these bureaucratic plants who have been efforting at lowering the standards in the US have met their match with teenagers who effort even harder at lowering their standards with the "Blame it on them" mantra. That has been getting worse over the years and some people think there's value in listening to the noise. What you value persists.
Then they make movies to play to the noise and it gets louder. The dark arts government thieves use it to manipulate crowds and the politicians grift it. So yeah, there are those who want to be whole and they tell the truth and then there's the noise.
Very interested in your thoughts. I think this is a perfect topic for the Martyrmade treatment. The intersection of history, philosophy, psychology and popular culture is where you shine most in my opinion; this has it all.
Just some thoughts in advance:
- Aren't we modern humans in some ways more sensitive to violence than ever? People used to take their children to watch public executions, death was everywhere, people had large families as the death of children was prevalent, people used to kill their own livestock etc. Newspapers and television news would show death bodies even ten years ago; but these days such images (at least in the Netherlands) are deemed inappropriate. Yet alternatively, on the internet everything can be found. Things that were unthinkable a few years ago are now just 'a few clicks away'. This is a strange juxtaposition.
- As the whole world consumes television and other media (and, at least in the 'Western' world mostly American media), how come the school/spree shooter is, (though not a uniquely) a quintessential American phenomenon? Will the internet lead to a globalization of the phenomenon? There seem to be some indications in that direction, a Dutch mall-shooter posted on 4Chan about his intentions moments before the act. Is it revenge against a society that rejected them or an ultimate claim to 'fifteen minutes of fame'. In that regards it resonates with a lot that was examined in the first Human forever episodes.
It’s a good question. Maybe THE question. The only society I could find that had a high number - though it didn’t match the US - of non-political mass shootings was Russia.
Maybe the image is skewed by the focus on gun violence and not so much on violence in other forms. It could be helpful to distinguish between the reasons why someone might snap and the way that 'snap' is expressed or manifests. Both are influenced by cultural factors. In a country with a strong 'gun culture' and an abundance of firearms it makes sense for rage against society to be expressed by use of firearms. In many European countries that just isn't as much of an option. But just a couple of days ago a man ran his car into a crowd in Berlin and I remember many similar incidents like that. It could be the same snap expressed by the most violent means at hand, which can be firearms but can also be cars or perhaps explosives.
A deeper factor might be the way failure is perceived by an individual. Is your failure in life the consequence of your personal shortcomings or of a society that sets you up for failure? That perception might steer someone towards inwards or outwards violence.
It seems to me that the guns could be a red herring. I have noticed a significant increase in the (reporting on) deadly stabbings in Germany and rioting in the Netherlands over the past 2 years, mostly carried out by the typical disgruntled (young) men that by and large go on shooting sprees in the US. More and more it seems to be to be a problem of "the culture", for example:
- how families are structured, what (family) values are lived out
- the public discourse as carried out in the media, how issues are portrayed and analysed
- how politicians talk to citizens, how they treat each-other and what strategies they use to win elections
- how the democratic process itself it set up (in the US it is quite a "winner takes all", "with us or against us" popularity contest as opposed to the somewhat more coalition-building-oriented systems that are common in Europe)
In my opinion one of the biggest factors is how our primary and secondary education is set up regarding
- treating pupils as individuals with talents to discover and nourish vs. a one-size-fits-all system we have inherited from the industrial age to create obedient workers
- respecting different "levels" of education such trade school "vs." university and recognizing the value in and need for each
- teaching the core values of liberal democracy and how & why these values came to be so instrumental for our societies (in a context of the human struggle to make sense of the world and of our existence, originally through superstition, then through organised religion and then more and more through science)
Great companion to the latest Unraveling episode, which you'll be happy to note I listened to while building a shed. Actually, a fort for my kid, so I just didn't have time to plan any mass violence.
Last year sometime I postulated to my small social media family that we may very well be producing mental illness in otherwise healthy (or at least healthy enough) individuals by always indulging and engaging, and simply talking about it all the time. I am 50 years old, and have had issues with mood/anger/depression for as long as I can remember, but I do not talk about it casually. When I do talk about it I get lots of well-meaning advice, and attempts at support, but really it is all just talk, and does little to help. Now, I'm not sure we should never speak of these things, but I'm also not sure that it should be so normal that it actually loses the significance that it holds for the sufferer. We have also been normalizing behaviours in the same way, and I think we have passed some tipping points along the way. In my country we also have closed mental health institutions (the confine-you type) and seem totally ok with severely mentally ill folks wandering the streets. And I think that maybe the prevalence of such overt mental illness is blinding us to the more subtle troubles that many people are going through. It's another example of desensitization. We don't see the awkward teen as the threat that he is because downtown there is a guy who shits on the sidewalk while masturbating at passing cars.
Although I am very much a "gun guy" I would totally be open to raising the age to buy a firearm to 21. The only problem is.... when has the government and specifically the left, been able to stop themselves at a single policy? I don't think guns are more than 10% of the problem. The degradation of our society is the other 90%. Also, these perpetrators are cowards and immediately give up or kill themselves when confronted with any sort of force. We need armed guards in every school in America. We just spent 2 years helicoptering people free money, but we can't hire armed guards to protect our children?
Great episode on Unraveling. There is one observation that we made while watching the new season of Stranger Things - first 2 episodes (which are each around 1h 20min long) are made of bullying scenes. For is the feeling is the same as watching prison tv shows and movies. We in Europe are always thinking is it really that bad over there, because it's terrible. And honestly it looks like training ground for future mass shooters. Can you adress that as well like you did the medications commercials?
Europe is not immune from mass murders / mass shootings. In fact, from 1983 to 2013 Switzerland equaled and Finland exceeded the rate of mass shootings in the USA when defined as four or more dead. Belgium, Norway and Sweden were not far off either. Your perception is skewed both by the massive population of the USA and how American ideologues define "mass shooting" as three or more injured or killed. The term "mass shooting" has no fixed definition and most countries do not have an official statistic for it. See Figure 1 in this report from the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission. https://masscasualtycommission.ca/files/commissioned-reports/COMM0055671.pdf?t=1655171956
When people talk about “mass shootings” they’re almost always mean the rampage killings of as many apparently random people as possible, not targeted killings gone awry or spray and pray drive-bys. Still interesting about Sweden and Finland, though.
Yes, agreed. The US "gun control" ideologues define mass shootings as "three or more injured or killed" or a similar number to bring in the statistics of gang related shootings and confuse everyday people on what is occurring. The ideologues who are medical professionals will talk about "more guns, more death" by limiting to OECD countries and ignoring social factors like social inequality evidenced by the US GINI index that makes the US an outlier w/ other OECD countries. One study actually used a log-log graph w/ gun deaths v. number of guns and drew a line between Japan and USA w/ a cloud of other OECD countries in between. For those driven by "gun control" ideology, any data manipulation is justifiable.
As it was stated in Unraveling and in your writing, majority of the US population will not become suicidal or homicidal by what we watch, listen to, or subjected to in our environment, but my thought is where is the “off button” per se? As a parent, I feel like I’m one man against the world of influence into my children’s lives. I’m out numbered. I can’t compete nor keep up. What one person’s family values and morals are, is interrogated every minute of the day. My influence into shaping and molding my children into good, healthy, caring members of society is extremely watered down by the time I get the info to them. It’s a very thin line of balance as to how much I allow them to intake our societal views that are within my control. How much and which things to view on TV, the same goes for music, internet, and friends. People are bombarded with stimulus and noise to the point when they don’t have an electronic device, they don’t know how to handle it. It’s an electronics addiction. What I’ve noticed is that people today are uncomfortable with being alone, by themselves, without noise. I realized the more I pull away from societal norms, the more affirmation I receive that my thoughts are mostly correct. I have a flip phone, with no internet or texting, I watch limited TV and don’t go to the movies, I don’t listen to music much either. I noticed I crave the quite, to be alone with my thoughts. Most of the population will not be suicidal/homicidal, while a small percent will, but this bombardment of desensitization to harmful material in all forms is a contributing factor to what we witness today. It all feels like it’s above my pay grade and the people who do care are out voted by those who produce the harmful material. I hope I make sense. These are just thoughts I’ve had bouncing in my mind for more than ten years. Majority of the time, I keep these thoughts and worries to myself, as I realized it’s not going to change. We are a self-destructive species. I just try my best, which I fail often, not to add to this chaos, nor to allow my children to partake. Thank you and Jocko for your take on the current state of violence in our society and the world. It’s comforting to know, my similar views and thoughts are not alone.
Great Unravelling episode with Jocko today... Deep, very well thought through and heartfelt... Thank you for your work @DarrylCooper...
Perhaps a controversial observation: In the wake of the recent school shooting, no one is talking about how SAFE our schools are. According to the Brady Institute, every year, 7,957 children and teens are shot in the United States. Among those 1839 children and teens die from gun violence (992 of those are classified as murder). Given how much time people in that age group spend in school, it is surprising that only 20 per year (on average) die of gun violence at school. Over 97% of murders of children by gun happen away from school. This does not address the broader problem, but it highlights how our focus is driven by the narrative and not by data. (By the way, the statistics come from two sources: https://www.bradyunited.org/key-statistics and https://everytownresearch.org/report/preventing-gun-violence-in-american-schools/
Be careful with Everytown’s stats. Any shooting that happens anywhere near a school, even on Saturday nights, tends to be counted as a “school shooting” to them.
I think his point was how safe schools really are, considering that the vast, vast majority of kids are shot and killed outside of school.
You’re right. I don’t think I made my comment as clear as I could have, and didn’t quite respond correctly. Just wanted to say what I said since there were links.
Agreed. But if Everytown’s stats are inflated, it would mean that the real percentage of deaths in school shootings would be even lower.
Brady also manipulates their data. Don't get statistics from ideologues.
Agreed. I figured if I took stats from two organized both of whom inflated their statistics, it would be a fair way to compare. I’ve if either is off a bit, the ratio is still remarkable.
One of my takeaways from your comment is to be even sadder that so many kids die so unnecessarily. What a terrible bunch of numbers, and what a terrible tragedy for all those families.
Lol, person (in this case, little girl) goes to DC, gets possessed and becomes utterly corrupted. I feel that's a metaphor for something....
Well written and thoughtful piece DC. I started Dave Cullen's Columbine last night so I'm only a few chapters in but it seems he is going to place some blame for future school shootings on how the media (including himself) first covered the story. The live coverage, media attention and jumping to early conclusions seems to have set a template for sick people to want to emulate. So far he has already talked about how Eric and Dylan wanted to beat McVeigh's body count. Thank god their bombs didn't work. Scary stuff.
Although I agree with you that digital technology is fucking us up in many ways, I'm not sure that a desensitisation to violence is the big issue. For most of human history we lived in very violent societies. What we would call 'normie' workers would go off to war during campaign season, witness and commit unbelievable acts of violence and then return to their jobs and societies afterwards. Even outside of warfare, most people were closely or directly involved in food production which would require the slaughter of animals. In other words, are we really more desensitisation to violence than our ancestors? Was the pre-digital industrial era just an anomaly where humans were in a brief period in between 1 long extremely violent era (most of human history, ie the norm) and our digital age which is for the most part quite peaceful and non-violent?
I might sound like a psycho (but I'm not defending school/spectacle killers) but maybe humans, or a significant minority of males, are inherently violent. In the past these people would have been valuable to their societies - warrior classes are common in many cultures. But in general these days we have no use for these people. Now combine that with:
*the rise of mass media/digital technology
*the breakdown in family and local community ('self policing')
*the move towards digital communities (spectacle killer 'fanclubs')
*abuse and overuse of pharma drugs
*the western capitalistic focus on the individual and the related risk of complete isolation
And you get a potent cocktail of bottled up, violent young men with no direction or positive outlet for this dangerous 'energy'.
I'm not suggesting that this explains all or even most of the phenomena under discussion (your post does a much better job) but I think this is worth thinking about.
The violence aspect is interesting, as you note. In some sense, we as a nation were similar to other people, especially in our frontier days - both unsanctioned and sanctioned state violence were a part of everyday life. It's probably only in the last century or so that lives in which violence was not experienced often or at all became normative. But taking this into the realm of evolutionary psychology, it makes more sense that we would have adapted as a species to witnessing and participating in violence because we're all descended from ancestors who committed acts of violence on some sort of regular basis.
You are not psycho: aggression is highly correlated with levels of testosterone, and young males have both high testosterone and poorly regulated emotional functions which leads to more acts of impulsive violence. Some might say that a society can be judged on the basis of how younger male members are treated and how they are incorporated into that society, because the consequences of a failure to integrate them can be so catastrophic for the reasons mentioned. (There was a famous investigation in the 1990s I think into a group of young male elephants who were committing random acts of violence against both conspecifics and other large mammals, and it turned out that it was because all of the larger males had been removed or poached - I can't remember the details exactly but it's very pertinent to this topic.) I can't help think about those roving young warriors described by Tacitus in his Germania (almost certainly an idealized description but with some truth mixed in) as the archetype of what the young men of previous societies used to be sent off to do: wage war against external enemies and collect spoils/honor. It used to be OK even through the World Wars to encourage this population to join the military so that they might achieve glory for themselves, their families, and their countries on the battlefield.
The warrior is undoubtedly a human archetype - some people are just meant to become warriors (Jocko, Josh Barnett, etc.), by whatever combination of nature and nurture. What do we do with them? The current ideal of the citizen has become more feminized (with some attendant benefits, to be sure), which means even less room and tolerance for these guys. Is this one aspect of the devaluation of fathers and fatherhood (in some respects due to the poorer performances from many fathers), of the glorification of single-mother parenting (we all know there's a difference between denigrating someone who has to be a single mother because of tragedy and someone who actively chooses to be a single parent), of the intolerance for free play and exploration in successive generations of children? Every aspect of human behavior is more complicated than the words we use to describe it, and sociological research is notoriously difficult to conduct/interpret, but I can't help but feel as though that this change in disposition towards young men that we've experienced in such a rapid fashion in our recent history is largely overlooked when it comes to diagnosing the illnesses which plague the current body politic.
And because I'm a sucker for quotes (after all, none of our ideas or thoughts are original to us - 'we are not our own') here's one from that paragon of scientism, Francis Bacon, which is again interesting to consider in light of the preceding points:
“No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic; and certainly to a kingdom, or estate a just and honourable war is the true exercise. A civil war indeed is like the heat of a fever; but a foreign war is like the heat of exercise, and serveth to keep the body in health; for in a slothful peace, both courages will effeminate and manners corrupt.”
Thanks for the well written response. Some interesting points raised.
'Some might say that a society can be judged on the basis of how younger male members are treated and how they are incorporated into that society, because the consequences of a failure to integrate them can be so catastrophic for the reasons mentioned.'
I have been trying to get my hands on a book DC mentioned a few years ago called 'The Myth of Martyrdom' but it is hard to find. When he mentioned it (think it was on an Unravelling episode) he talked about the parallels between school shooters and Islamic martyrs - suicide bombers. Apparently the author lays out a similar profile for both types of people, but that through different cultures the end result is different. To add to your point above, this might not just be an issue in the US/'The West'. I think we are all struggling with modernity and this struggle is manifest in different ways depending on cultural roots.
This is shameful to say as an armchair observer with no skin in the game, but I will admit that I have a sort of 'Prussian' attitude to war. I think it was von Moltke who wrote about the virtues of war - purpose, honour, courage, bravery, can all come to the surface for some participants. I think Ernst Junger was basically saying this in Storm of Steel. But I think the big problem now is we have reached a level of technology and scale of participants where war is so goddamn awful and destructive in the industrial and post-industrial era, that it is almost completely unpalatable. But our lizard brains haven't caught up with these advances yet and some of us still have this warlike psyche as you say - Jocko being the archetype. Sorry to ramble, this is just my way of saying that I fully agree with you on the challenges facing society and with what to do with young men.
Totally agree on the issue being global, in part because the crisis of modernity is a global crisis. Even most of our bad guys (Islamic fundamentalists, Antifa, white supremacists, etc.) are more 'farce' than 'tragedy' it seems; they've all been afflicted with the ills of social media, easy access to pornography, and other homogenizing ideas emanating from the West. More people than ever before (I think it's now over 50% globally?) live in cities/urban areas, so, if Spengler is right that the migration of peoples to cities marks the terminal stage of decline as people become disconnected from the natural rhythms of the land they hail from, then it seems that we're all in this together.
And I also totally agree about the advent of modern warfare being a 'great equalizer.' I think Junger talks about that leveling aspect of modern warfare, where brave men and cowards alike could be blown to bits by shells fired en masse (VDH likewise mentions something similar in some of his case studies in 'Carnage and Culture' about the fate of non-Westerners fighting Westerners). WWI is to me the most horrific example of this because so many men signed up to fight because they thought warfare was going to be the same as it had been since time immemorial, but what they got instead was months-long battles in absolutely hellish conditions in which opportunities to even meet the enemy face-to-face were often limited. So yes, I do not advocate for this type of war and think that it is anti-human in both effect and in spirit. But I think the current state of affairs does contain opportunities that are more similar to what we evolved to handle - small-scale commando raids, targeted and limited engagements with specific enemy forces as identified through intelligence, etc. I don't know if we as a species are capable of producing another Napoleon if only because, as discussed, the scale of massacre and destruction that such a spirit would unleash on the world would be something that I think most wouldn't sign on for, but we are hopefully still capable of producing Jockos for the time being.
So ends my ramble!
You're very well read. Any advice for tackling Spengler? And VDH? I bought DOTW a few years ago due to the other podcast we don't speak about but the size of it is intimidating.
Thank you for the compliment - we're all students here! I still have so much to learn and therefore so much to read, as I'm sure you do.
With Spengler, I would say cheat a bit and buy the abridged version. For me it was less daunting and you get all the main themes but with roughly half the pages. If you end up becoming more interested, you can always buy the longer version for a second read-through. The abridged version is still a bear though and very dense so take your time with it. Some of it will still be a slog, but I think if you focus less on the smaller details (which are legion) and more on the bigger themes (e.g. the differences between Being and Becoming, Culture and Civilization) you'll really get a lot out of it. If nothing else it will challenge your likely heretofore passive acceptance of history as a long line of progress and people becoming 'better' (progressive visions of history are still interesting and useful, but if nothing else the picture will become more complicated).
As for VDH, his stuff is pretty straightforward. I've especially enjoyed C&C as well as The Savior Generals (the former is probably his most famous book and has both thematic consistency as well as interesting historical takes - he's a military historian so if you like that sort of stuff you'll like it just for that; SG is a bit forced because of the comparisons he's trying to make across like 2500 years of history but the history itself is presented well - you'll become an Epaminondas fan for sure). His history of the Peloponnesian War (A War Like No Other) is pretty good too, though he has stiff competition from Thucydides and Xenophon on these topics.
I finally got around to picking up the abridged version of DotW recently. It is the H Stuart Hughes version, not sure if that's the one you meant? It's only early days but I'm enjoying it already. Like you said, I'm not understanding all of it but think I'm getting the main themes anyway. Thanks again for the abridged recommendation
Hey thanks, I think you're right about the abridged version. I did the abridged Gulag Archipelago so I don't know why I didn't do the same with Spengler instead of rushing out to buy the 2 volumes!
Big fan of military history so I'm confident I will enjoy VDH.
I’m certain the influx of recent school shootings does not have any one vector of causation. People get hung up on that because our minds don’t have the bandwidth to comprehend quickly multi-variant problems, like school mass shootings.
It’s like this is where we’ve found ourselves in this societal wide Milgram experiment. And everyone is scrambling to decipher and fix the issue post haste.
To fix it, one would have to unravel quite a bit of normalcies that we’ve settled into.
Listening to Darryl & Jocko - my thoughts are that we should be careful on the benefit-cost of efforts to "fix" this problem. When governments get involved, often the net gain is negative w/ problem not being addressed. Generally speaking, more government means more government power and less freedom for people. Consolidating power is the one thing government is exceedingly good at.
Listening to you and Jocko. Great episode so far. I'm about half-way though it.
Honestly I wholeheartedly believe the "news" media at the very least deserves a very significant portion of the blame for many of society's ills. Ever listen to Don Henley's "Dirty Laundry" song? Say what you will about him/his politics, it doesn't diminish the fact that song is more true today than it ever has been, and it seems like it on a runaway trajectory. The worst part in my opinion; it feels so intentional.
I think if we just shut down the "news" as a whole and went back to print media or some other form that lacked the immediacy of Social Contagion/Media, I believe it would fix a lot of that "the first report is wrong" stuff that gets entire cities burnt to the ground.
Just my 2 Cents.
Keep up the great work DC. I'm always learning new and interesting stuff listening to you.
Henley's "Dirty Laundry" was him complaining about the tabloid coverage of him being caught with an underage girl. The words may not be wrong, but the reason for them sure was.
Yeah, that was why I worded it the way I did. Personally I find Don Henley abhorrent on so many levels. That said even a broken clock is right twice a day. <laughter> 🤙
Agreed. Henley the artist is someone I really enjoy. Clever dude, good wordsmith, really good singer. Henley the person does not seem like a good hang.
Defund the Media.
Funny, I just watched the original 1932 Scarface, which opens with a pretty defensive statement that the film's actually an "indictment" of gang warfare.
I keep reading/hearing there's little evidence increased exposure to increasingly graphic levels of violence has much effect on behavior. Then why does increased exposure to porn seem to mess so greatly with the sexual function? Because it's a real sex act being viewed, whereas with the violence people can tell themselves, "oh, it's fake/CGI?" In that case I wonder if the problem is not so much desensitization to violence as certain minds/personalities wanting to act out the movies playing in their heads, thinking everyone else will want to watch.
But what do I know? I'm the wimp hiding my eyes behind my hands during every gory movie scene, begging my husband to tell me when it's over.
That’s a great question (The porn/sexual function comparison).
I think there's a point to be made about "knowing it's fake". In my experience real footage of violence or from war zones truly hits differently, somehow your mind recognizes that it is real and that people that are being hurt and killed. I can watch war movies all day long no problem but even if the real killing is only "implied" it's absolutely haunting. There was a video from Mariupol of a Chechen soldier walking through the ruins of an apartment building and you could hear a woman screaming off-camera followed by a gunshot and silence, you could get a hundred of the best actresses of all time practicing their best blood-curdling screams for a month and not capture that emotion. On the other hand, watching the D-Day beach landing scene in Saving Private Ryan really messed me up as an 11-year-old, so there has definitely been desensitization in that respect and I suppose the same could be true if one were to decide to regularly consume real graphic violence. Although I cannot imagine how one could do that without either becoming totally numb and nihilistic or overwhelmed with sadness and anguish.
That’s true to an extent regarding people disassociating entertainment violence as being “fake/cgi”, but for the last, say, decade, it has been very, very, easy to find websites that are just mass compilations of real life graphic violence videos; from cartel & terrorist executions to convince store murders, police shootings, and even mass shooters who live-streamed themselves. There’s whole internet communities out there who treat that stuff as entertainment in and of itself, and even though they know it’s real, they treat it as consequenceless entertainment.
Shock content in the early 90s were everywhere. But it at least had some limits I fear for the teenage youth of today and the sort of stuff that gets shared of Facebook messenger, snapshot, and any other social platform of chose. It is really bad. How can Young people that go down these rabbit holes dig themselves back out and adjust to the ever dwindling ideal society. I mean to me church seems like the correct answer but I get the too little too late vibes.
On another subject does anyone else get Jerry springer vibes with legacy media. I remember when Jerry first came on TV it was like a train wreck you could look away from. The problem was they had to keep adding train cars to the wreak to out do the day before, until it became obvious to everyone that it was fake all along... I feel the same way about cnn/fox/nytimes as I do about Jerry springer and similar talk shows.
Anyone doubting that "gun control" is a failed ideology should review the peer reviewed research. Also, look up "demagoguery" and "scapegoat" in the dictionary. Many countries have had "gun control" laws for decades so it's not at all like the past when it could be considered plausibly uncertain how effective they would be. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0234457
I mean, when someone walks into a school and guns down 25 elementary school kids, I don't begrudge people their emotional overreactions, even if they're wrong.
That's fine. But we're seeing medical doctors leverage the 'appeal to authority' fallacy to shamelessly promote failed ideology. And have you ever watched one of Trudeau's flashy press conferences?
I'm sure the gun control "science" is as utterly, hopelessly, deliberately skewed by bad faith actors as COVID and climate.
Remember when the government banned alcohol for everyone... but themselves and the rich with back ally deals*cough-cough*. That made a massive crime wave in the cities, boot legging mobsters, and a lot of gun violence, to the point of banning full-auto and creating the NFA because it got so bad... now the problem wasn’t the guns, it was that the govt created a HIGH demand of something that most everyone wanted. When the government takes away, you create a market for underground lords. Also, this ALL the kids are dying from guns, let’s look at what areas... poor black kids in inner cities are dying from guns. Why is this? I think some of us know, but that doesn’t fit the damn narrative being pushed right now. So, what to do? Jockos last Wednesday podcast was so great ideas about training at schools I thought. 20% of officers on the force are always training is a good idea too. Over 400,000,000 guns I believe, most gun crimes happen in inner cities, not little subs and the country, it happens buy gangs... you think they are waiting to get their CCH/CCW or permits to waste the other gang snuffing them and their turf? Nah. That weenie leader in Canada JT is what our leaders would love us to think about 2A, you don’t have the right to defend yourself with a gun. Well it’s it black and white in our constitution and it’s not defending myself from crooks, but our govt does have to tip toe around the people, because last time they got really stupid and slow to act... black panthers started chilling in government buildings with loaded guns. Disclaimer, I don’t even like the BP, but it’s an example, listen to Jim Joes podcast DC did, it’s weird and wild.
Colion Noir just talked about this with Joe Rogan, they brought up a lot of good points.
I appreciate your "stab" at this. I'm contemplating this and it's just not settling. I'm a little older than you and remember many of these movies though was never a 4 hour a day person, so I only totally consumed Cool Hand Luke. The others I read about.
I can't imagine those movies would have landed, if we didn't have some interest in those areas. Are the movies leading our way or are they showing directions we're considering? Much like politicians, are they actually leading or polling their public and selling their edges back to them. The Hollywood group, for all their moral degradation are not the grifters that the politicians are or at least the rules and descriptions of their products and costs are a little better laid out.
I also think of some of the nasty nursery rhymes and other boogeyman stories that I grew up with. We always had a fascination with the scary and typically my imagination is worse than images created. The influence of others on my timing, maturation, level of edge, etc. had a lot to do with my boundaries today.
Thank goodness in all that, we also had some heroic figures and examples as well. Much of their stories turned out, like the scary stories to not be true though based on some truth.
For me, years in nature helped me find a fondness for order. My nervous system has been thankful ever since.
They were definitely a product of the times... an expression of the zeitgeist, so to speak. It's interesting to note how, after a spate successful films from the New Hollywood directors in the late '60s and early '70s, you started to see a backlash ranging from more nuanced criticism to total rejection of the vision they were putting forward. In '73, Malick made Badlands, which is loosely based on the Starkweather murders, and in the film he shows how these two young people on a killing spree who were self-consciously refusing to conform to society's rules were actually a product of that very rejection, and without their even knowing it, were trying to rebuild a caricature of a normal life even during their rampage. Also in 1973, George Lucas made American Graffiti, which kicked off the '50s nostalgia craze (Happy Days came out the very next year, 1974). People looked back to the '50s as a simpler time, before the counterculture, sort of the way we use 1980s nostalgia to remember a simpler time before the internet. Besides movies like those, the art house/New Hollywood films went into steep decline, and blockbusters like The Poseidon Adventure, Superman, Close Encounters, and then of course Star Wars, that brought the movie industry back from the brink.
As George Lucas himself said in 1973: "We all know, as every movie in the last ten years has pointed out, how terrible we are, how wrong we were in Vietnam, how we have ruined the world, what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. It had become depressing to go to the movies. I decided it was time to make a movie where people felt better coming out of the theater than when they went in. I became really aware of the fact that the kids were really lost, the sort of heritage we built up since the war (he means the Second World War) had been wiped out by the ‘60s, and it wasn’t so groovy to act that way anymore, now you just sort of sat there and got stoned. I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about - from about 1945 to 1962.”
Thanks for the response! The George Lucas point takes us back to the church and the support of coaches and mentors. You know, get the off the ground, stop your whining and get back at it. Or, get back on the horse or any number of ways of saying I don't want to hear your noise, just want to see what you deliver, then I'll listen.
Maybe these bureaucratic plants who have been efforting at lowering the standards in the US have met their match with teenagers who effort even harder at lowering their standards with the "Blame it on them" mantra. That has been getting worse over the years and some people think there's value in listening to the noise. What you value persists.
Then they make movies to play to the noise and it gets louder. The dark arts government thieves use it to manipulate crowds and the politicians grift it. So yeah, there are those who want to be whole and they tell the truth and then there's the noise.
Very interested in your thoughts. I think this is a perfect topic for the Martyrmade treatment. The intersection of history, philosophy, psychology and popular culture is where you shine most in my opinion; this has it all.
Just some thoughts in advance:
- Aren't we modern humans in some ways more sensitive to violence than ever? People used to take their children to watch public executions, death was everywhere, people had large families as the death of children was prevalent, people used to kill their own livestock etc. Newspapers and television news would show death bodies even ten years ago; but these days such images (at least in the Netherlands) are deemed inappropriate. Yet alternatively, on the internet everything can be found. Things that were unthinkable a few years ago are now just 'a few clicks away'. This is a strange juxtaposition.
- As the whole world consumes television and other media (and, at least in the 'Western' world mostly American media), how come the school/spree shooter is, (though not a uniquely) a quintessential American phenomenon? Will the internet lead to a globalization of the phenomenon? There seem to be some indications in that direction, a Dutch mall-shooter posted on 4Chan about his intentions moments before the act. Is it revenge against a society that rejected them or an ultimate claim to 'fifteen minutes of fame'. In that regards it resonates with a lot that was examined in the first Human forever episodes.
It’s a good question. Maybe THE question. The only society I could find that had a high number - though it didn’t match the US - of non-political mass shootings was Russia.
Maybe the image is skewed by the focus on gun violence and not so much on violence in other forms. It could be helpful to distinguish between the reasons why someone might snap and the way that 'snap' is expressed or manifests. Both are influenced by cultural factors. In a country with a strong 'gun culture' and an abundance of firearms it makes sense for rage against society to be expressed by use of firearms. In many European countries that just isn't as much of an option. But just a couple of days ago a man ran his car into a crowd in Berlin and I remember many similar incidents like that. It could be the same snap expressed by the most violent means at hand, which can be firearms but can also be cars or perhaps explosives.
A deeper factor might be the way failure is perceived by an individual. Is your failure in life the consequence of your personal shortcomings or of a society that sets you up for failure? That perception might steer someone towards inwards or outwards violence.
It seems to me that the guns could be a red herring. I have noticed a significant increase in the (reporting on) deadly stabbings in Germany and rioting in the Netherlands over the past 2 years, mostly carried out by the typical disgruntled (young) men that by and large go on shooting sprees in the US. More and more it seems to be to be a problem of "the culture", for example:
- how families are structured, what (family) values are lived out
- the public discourse as carried out in the media, how issues are portrayed and analysed
- how politicians talk to citizens, how they treat each-other and what strategies they use to win elections
- how the democratic process itself it set up (in the US it is quite a "winner takes all", "with us or against us" popularity contest as opposed to the somewhat more coalition-building-oriented systems that are common in Europe)
In my opinion one of the biggest factors is how our primary and secondary education is set up regarding
- treating pupils as individuals with talents to discover and nourish vs. a one-size-fits-all system we have inherited from the industrial age to create obedient workers
- respecting different "levels" of education such trade school "vs." university and recognizing the value in and need for each
- teaching the core values of liberal democracy and how & why these values came to be so instrumental for our societies (in a context of the human struggle to make sense of the world and of our existence, originally through superstition, then through organised religion and then more and more through science)
Douglas Murray has a very good insight into the point of "being lucky", which also works on a societal level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmS8oJ6aHjE
Great companion to the latest Unraveling episode, which you'll be happy to note I listened to while building a shed. Actually, a fort for my kid, so I just didn't have time to plan any mass violence.
Last year sometime I postulated to my small social media family that we may very well be producing mental illness in otherwise healthy (or at least healthy enough) individuals by always indulging and engaging, and simply talking about it all the time. I am 50 years old, and have had issues with mood/anger/depression for as long as I can remember, but I do not talk about it casually. When I do talk about it I get lots of well-meaning advice, and attempts at support, but really it is all just talk, and does little to help. Now, I'm not sure we should never speak of these things, but I'm also not sure that it should be so normal that it actually loses the significance that it holds for the sufferer. We have also been normalizing behaviours in the same way, and I think we have passed some tipping points along the way. In my country we also have closed mental health institutions (the confine-you type) and seem totally ok with severely mentally ill folks wandering the streets. And I think that maybe the prevalence of such overt mental illness is blinding us to the more subtle troubles that many people are going through. It's another example of desensitization. We don't see the awkward teen as the threat that he is because downtown there is a guy who shits on the sidewalk while masturbating at passing cars.
Although I am very much a "gun guy" I would totally be open to raising the age to buy a firearm to 21. The only problem is.... when has the government and specifically the left, been able to stop themselves at a single policy? I don't think guns are more than 10% of the problem. The degradation of our society is the other 90%. Also, these perpetrators are cowards and immediately give up or kill themselves when confronted with any sort of force. We need armed guards in every school in America. We just spent 2 years helicoptering people free money, but we can't hire armed guards to protect our children?
Great episode on Unraveling. There is one observation that we made while watching the new season of Stranger Things - first 2 episodes (which are each around 1h 20min long) are made of bullying scenes. For is the feeling is the same as watching prison tv shows and movies. We in Europe are always thinking is it really that bad over there, because it's terrible. And honestly it looks like training ground for future mass shooters. Can you adress that as well like you did the medications commercials?
Europe is not immune from mass murders / mass shootings. In fact, from 1983 to 2013 Switzerland equaled and Finland exceeded the rate of mass shootings in the USA when defined as four or more dead. Belgium, Norway and Sweden were not far off either. Your perception is skewed both by the massive population of the USA and how American ideologues define "mass shooting" as three or more injured or killed. The term "mass shooting" has no fixed definition and most countries do not have an official statistic for it. See Figure 1 in this report from the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission. https://masscasualtycommission.ca/files/commissioned-reports/COMM0055671.pdf?t=1655171956
When people talk about “mass shootings” they’re almost always mean the rampage killings of as many apparently random people as possible, not targeted killings gone awry or spray and pray drive-bys. Still interesting about Sweden and Finland, though.
Yes, agreed. The US "gun control" ideologues define mass shootings as "three or more injured or killed" or a similar number to bring in the statistics of gang related shootings and confuse everyday people on what is occurring. The ideologues who are medical professionals will talk about "more guns, more death" by limiting to OECD countries and ignoring social factors like social inequality evidenced by the US GINI index that makes the US an outlier w/ other OECD countries. One study actually used a log-log graph w/ gun deaths v. number of guns and drew a line between Japan and USA w/ a cloud of other OECD countries in between. For those driven by "gun control" ideology, any data manipulation is justifiable.
Found the study. See Figure "A". The apparent aphorism "more guns, more death" is itself an appeal to a fluency heuristic similar to the "rhyme as reason effect". https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(13)00444-0/fulltext
As it was stated in Unraveling and in your writing, majority of the US population will not become suicidal or homicidal by what we watch, listen to, or subjected to in our environment, but my thought is where is the “off button” per se? As a parent, I feel like I’m one man against the world of influence into my children’s lives. I’m out numbered. I can’t compete nor keep up. What one person’s family values and morals are, is interrogated every minute of the day. My influence into shaping and molding my children into good, healthy, caring members of society is extremely watered down by the time I get the info to them. It’s a very thin line of balance as to how much I allow them to intake our societal views that are within my control. How much and which things to view on TV, the same goes for music, internet, and friends. People are bombarded with stimulus and noise to the point when they don’t have an electronic device, they don’t know how to handle it. It’s an electronics addiction. What I’ve noticed is that people today are uncomfortable with being alone, by themselves, without noise. I realized the more I pull away from societal norms, the more affirmation I receive that my thoughts are mostly correct. I have a flip phone, with no internet or texting, I watch limited TV and don’t go to the movies, I don’t listen to music much either. I noticed I crave the quite, to be alone with my thoughts. Most of the population will not be suicidal/homicidal, while a small percent will, but this bombardment of desensitization to harmful material in all forms is a contributing factor to what we witness today. It all feels like it’s above my pay grade and the people who do care are out voted by those who produce the harmful material. I hope I make sense. These are just thoughts I’ve had bouncing in my mind for more than ten years. Majority of the time, I keep these thoughts and worries to myself, as I realized it’s not going to change. We are a self-destructive species. I just try my best, which I fail often, not to add to this chaos, nor to allow my children to partake. Thank you and Jocko for your take on the current state of violence in our society and the world. It’s comforting to know, my similar views and thoughts are not alone.