The early indications point to Cho Seung-hui’s rage having been rooted in perceived or real humiliation, and in this he shares common ground with Columbine’s Klebold and Harris and Osama bin Laden. Although the specific causes are different, they all seek a remedy for having been humiliated or made to feel powerless, and they do it by resorting to massive violence. When someone is humiliated, he is made to feel diminished, that he is a nobody. This can happen to an individual, and it can happen to a group or community. The sting comes in being forced to see himself as less of a human being, as inferior or defective. For moderns and postmoderns it tends to be an individual thing, for premoderns, or where premodernism lingers in the modern world, it’s very often a group thing. If the group is humiliated, the individual feels it as deeply as if it was a personal affront. (Something Richard Gere encountered in India recently.)
It’s all a part of the master/slave drama. Hegel and Nietzsche spoke at length about it, but it’s as old and primitive as bulls battling for herd dominance. "Live free or Die," say the folks from New Hampshire; it’s a gloss on the older "Kill or be killed, but never submit." To submit is slavery and the profoundest humiliation. To submit is to care about one’s life more than one’s honor. Better to be dead than dishonored and humiliated. Understanding this primitive dynamic goes a long way to explaining suicide bombers and kids like Cho, Dylan, and Klebold. Being dead is being about as much of a nobody as one can be. But If
you can take out a few dozen (or three thousand) people on the way out knowing you will be at the center of media attention for weeks to come, who’s the master and who’s the slave?
This master/slave dynamic is an archetype that operates in every human soul. How it plays out depends on who’s in control–the archetype or the Self. When the archetype operates in a group, very often individuals are swept up into it and lose all sense of personal accountability or discretion. The most horrifically violent crimes are celebrated as victories for the group. It’s ugly and nauseating to everyone outside the group mentality, but not to those inside.
So I disagree with those who say it’s impossible to understand what makes somebody do something so horrifying and irrational. There is an archetypal logic to irrational phenomena like this, and the question is not about its nature, but rather about the degree to which it has taken root in an individual’s or group’s soul. One might say that it’s the demon that possessed them. And while the typical mass murderer doesn’t consciously explain his crimes by appeal to Hegel and Nietzsche, they provide an interesting phenomenology that helps us to understand it. It works in us all; it’s just that in some people it takes over and obliterates Self and its moral compass grounded in conscience.
There’s nothing that will give someone who feels himself to be a ‘powerless nobody’ the feeling of being a ‘powerful somebody’ than blowing away the person or symbolic representatives of the group who insulted him. "Happiness is a warm gun," as the Beatles sang. It’s all about trying to feel powerful when in fact you feel powerless. Klebold, Harris, Cho, and Osama have that in common, and that’s what makes people like them so dangerous. When you have no Self in the driver’s seat, when you are possessed by the irrational drive to turn the tables, you become an implacable destructive force.
The whole honor/losing face system of premodern social systems with its duels and feuds required that one’s sense of identity was completely a social construction as a substitute for Selfhood. Personal identity in such a society is primarily linked to reputation, in other words, to what other people think. If people perceive someone to be an honorable person, then he is a somebody. If people perceive him to be dishonorable, then he has "lost face." He has become diminished, and it "logically" follows that he must kill the person who has diminished him, and in doing so he restores his reputation. This is right out of the Master/Slave playbook. To be diminished is to be a slave. To diminish the other is to prove he is a master.
It doesn’t matter if in fact he did something dishonorable. What one did doesn’t matter; it’s whether it’s talked about in a way that diminishes his honor. If someone in a person’s social circle talks about what he did in a way that dishonors him, then the honor code in such societies requires that he has to kill him. If he wins the duel, then he has more personal power than the person he killed, and honor and reputation in such a system is all about personal power. This dynamic is cognate with middle school bullies, class-based snobbery, and intellectual condescension. It’s not about what’s right; it’s about who has the power to control the narrative.
Because history is written by the victorious, who tend to be the bullies, snobs, and intellectuals–or their hagiographers. It’s the mentality we see, that for instance governed media coverage of the invasion of Iraq. You don’t like the bully narrative? Meet me at dawn. Otherwise, shut up. Or be mocked as Michael Kelly mocked Al Gore’s antiwar stance in 2002.
Duels were still common as late as the 19th century. So what has changed? Are we more civilized than people like Alexander Hamilton or the courtiers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century aristocracy? Do democracies generate social systems that undermine this method of identify formation? Or is it that we have just become lumpen, self-absorbed Last Men who care more about bread and circuses than "honor." In other words have we all settled into a slave mentality?
As a Christian, I obviously don’t believe that the only choice lies between master and slave. There is also the choice to become the Self, a being restored in the image and likeness of God. Such a Self lies completely outside the master/slave system, but as a realist, I recognize how profoundly the master slave archetype shapes social reality in a fallen world. The Self in society is both self-reliant and interdependent, and the flourishing of democracy requires that its citizens be Selves in this sense. But we see in the authoritarian mindset of the current administration the crudest kind of master slave dynamic.
We see it in the way our politics has devolved into a media spectacle devoid of any real content. Contrast what we go through with the citizens listening to and participating in the Lincoln Douglas debates. Now it’s just about winners and losers. In a fallen world, we all feel the pull to be winners and the shame of being losers. The Republicans have understood this in a way that the Democrats have not. The GOP has won the branding battle in present itself as the party of strong, success-oriented winners–the Masters. And they do this while depicting the Democrats as feminized, passive, weak dithering losers.
The GOP understands that political success is not about taking policy positions that people care about, but by giving the electorate a screen onto which to project their own fantasies of being a winner, and in finding blank screens like Reagan and Bush, they have succeeded in manipulating the process with enormous success. The people want to bask in the glory of their leaders. And so it is incumbent upon politicians to give the electorate that opportunity. I doubt Karl Rove cared about Iraq the way the neoconservatives did, but he saw it as an opportunity to create a "war president" who would be precisely this kind of screen upon with we could project our fantasies of glory. And it worked. We want to bask in the president’s glory as we want to bask in the glory or our sports teams.
And when a president fails to be such a screen upon which the electorate can project its fantasies, it turns on him with a furious vengeance. This accounts almost completely for the right wing’s strategy toward Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry. The GOP strategy was to emasculate them, humiliate them, do whatever it took to make them look like weak losers. It’s at the heart of the swiftboating of Kerry. They had to take away his one strength, and they succeeded brilliantly. This dynamic also explains the hatred many people felt toward Bill Clinton. They felt diminished by him. The Republican strategy to humiliate him worked to make many Americans feel humiliated as well. A lingering premodern tribalism causes some people to identify with their political leaders in this way and to feel that the politician’s shame is theirs as well.
Our presidents are not just human beings we hire to do a job; they are our surrogates in the struggle for collective prestige. Think about how the war in Iraq was covered especially during the early months. It was a huge sporting event with Rumsfeld as the coach, and Bush the GM. Here was great opportunity to feel like winners and to bask in the glory of our team’s overwhelming victory. This has been about American grandiosity from the beginning. And reality is slapping us down for it. The humiliation of defeat is just too much to bear, we have to understand
guys like Cheney, Bush, and McCain’s intransigence about the war in
this light. The idea that they will go into the history books as world-historical losers is a shame that people like them will avoid or postpone for as long as they can.
And this brings us back to where we began. When human beings are made to feel humiliated, they burn with anger
and resentment and want to turn the tables. They are driven to
humiliate whoever has humiliated them or their group. There are always rational justifications for the irrational things they feel compelled to do. It only seems irrational to those who stand outside the compulsion. Osama blew up the
World Trade Center, Klebold and Harris shot up and planned to blow up
their High School, and Cho went on a rampage killing thirty-two people. To everyone else they appear crazy, and they are. But they don’t appear crazy to themselves. It’s all perfectly logical and justifiable.
But when countries go postal, it’s not psychopathic. No, it’s always
justified. But are the justifications for going into Iraq really that different from Cho’s
rant about how others made him do it. Is it possible that this whole ugly business has been a huge collective delusion triggered by the humiliation of 9/11? And is it so far fetched to point out that there’s a similarity between the insanity of mass murderers and the administration’s flailing violence toward Iraq and its desire to bomb Iran? Is it completely off base to point out that while this policy seems completely logical and justified to those within the administration, it is still crazy, and the rest of the world sees it as such for good reason? I don’t think so. The administration is driven by the shame demon that blindly seeks to destroy that which is the cause of its humiliation. Their so-called rational justifications for their compulsion are simply lipstick crudely attempting to cover the ugliness of their underlying motivations.
Update: Did you see this piece about McCain:
Another man — wondering if an attack on Iran is in the works — wanted to know when America is going to “send an air mail message to Tehran.”
McCain began his answer by changing the words to a popular Beach Boys song.
“Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” he sang to the tune of Barbara Ann.
Why do we accept this as normal behavior?
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