Bit rambling, but a bit rambling. No alcohol involved, just a lot of thinking out loud.
It is quite obvious to me that many people are made uncomfortable discussing violence in music, or media more generally. Many remember with fondness, for example, the ending to “Play Misty for me”: “do you feel lucky, punk?” After all the trauma of that movie, the injustice, the failings of our system made manifest, Clint Eastwood shooting that guy is cathartic. Somehow it represents the triumph of true decency over the hand wringing moral mediocrity that somehow descended, like a veil of darkness, over our moral landscape in the 1970’s.
Heavy metal, angry metal, recalls to mind a time of membership in the metal tribe. All your friends listened to the same music, and you all waited in collective anticipation for the release of the new album by whoever you were then most enthusiastic about. What an observer who was astute would have paid the most attention to was not the content of the music, but the quality of the relationships between you that shared passion made possible.
It has often been remarked that group challenges–with war being both the most extreme and obvious example–cause cohesion among individuals that is stronger in some cases than family itself.
I have thought in the past that sometimes what connnects us is shared pain. By this I mean a sort of qualitative gestalt: not all pain is equal. The “pain” of a rich kid is different than that of a middle class kid, which is different than that of a poor kid. It is different for a Mexican and white kid and black kid. Yet much of it is also the same.
I think to a comment made by a boss I had who was in a fraternity, that the brotherhood was just never the same “after they stopped using the paddle”. Everyone who underwent that ordeal had that pain–that very specific, secret pain–in common with everyone else, and knew it.
It has often seemed to me that suburban white kids who seem to wish they were “ghetto thugs”–you know, the kid in the car wash next to you listening to some profanity laced rant at 4x what would be a coureous volume–are actually wishing they could relate to that type of pain, that of the “hood”.
It’s unclear to me how many people feel genuine, deep happiness and fulfullment. I don’t think it is very many. I get moments of joy, and am not sure what to do with it. It’s not my ambient sound. To be clear, I have very good days, and look back with them with satisfaction, and wonder why I don’t feel like this more than I do.
Inverted, one often sees reference in song lyrics to people wanting to feel pain, so they know they are alive. In one Lady Antebellum song the lyric is, I believe: “I’d rather hurt than feel nothing at all”. Nine Inch Nails:
I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
There are many examples of this. What are they really asking for? What is the goal? Is it not a remediation of confusion and loneliness?
If we relate through our pains, then masochism becomes a means of reaching out to others, on a primitive emotional level (that might actually be a good substitution word for both subconscious and unconscious). If we hurt one another, then we bond, somehow.
It is a short step from this to evil, though, which is hurting OTHERS, so YOU can feel.
Returning to my original point, ask yourself how long it takes when you meet someone new for you to start comparing notes with respect to the media you consume: what movies you like, what music you listen to. Media is so much a part of who we are. Most kids from 12 or so on nowadays have access to it 24/7, except when in school. They can watch movies, listen to radio, listen to their iPod, download YouTube videos, etc.
I’ve commented on this often, but in a plastic world, where so much is new, where ideas are new (science as paradigmatic but mutable Truth system), social trends evolve constantly, where obedience to Truth Authority but not critical thinking is taught in schools, where people move from State to State–what do you hold on to?
This is the route to “subculture”. This is how and why tribes form, of for example Nine Inch Nails (NiN) fans. Now, Reznor’s music is clearly emotionally disturbed. But it would not be fair to extrapolate from that that the culture of those who admire is NECESSARILY entirely negative. Some of these kids probably do experience genuine feelings of belonging, warmth, and, yes, happiness. There are other, better paths to this outcome, but all social systems have to be evaluated both in terms of negatives and positives.
For such a group, if for some reason they no longer had NiN to bind them together (I have said this often, but the root “religio” means “to bind”), they would fall into despondancy. Many of them cut themselves anyway, and wind up on anti-depressants, but this does not mean that in some ways the music is not positive for them.
Thus in evaluating our common culture, what makes the most sense, where I see the most strategic promise, is in trying to build and support a different set of foundational premises upon which our worldview rests. The countless little tribes out there MEAN something to the people who belong to them. They are the result of self organizing social systems, themselves the results of worldviews based on foundational premises. To achieve a better result, the path is not banning this that or the other thing, as horrible as it might seem. The path is, in my view, encouraging scientists to do actual science. To be honest, and reputable. To do their jobs properly.
As things stand, the assumptions of our Truth Elite are Materialism, Meaninglessness, and Egalitarianism-as-moral-philosophy. None of these aspects of the dominant worldview are consistent with the best empirical data we have. Yet alternatives are suppressed ruthlessly, despite the manifest shortcomings of the dominant view. This needs to change.
People of goodwill in universities need to assert themselves, and stop working for patent evil.