It’s strange: I will at times feel utter clarity on things, then when I try to type it, it gets fuzzy. Words really are poor tools, but they are all we have in most times and places. I’m not sure, but I don’t think I think mainly in words. I see/feel things, then describe them, always with a loss.
The salient point I wanted to make about the murders in Norway this past week is that I think it would be worth creating a continuum between those who believe in collective guilt, and those who believe in individualism.
Necessarily, if one says it is “societies” fault that person X is failing, then society is culpable. If a crime has been committed, then society commited the crime. The point people miss is that this does not in the slightest diminish the importance of the crime, or the horror with which certain people view the “crime”, so much as relocate the locus of blame and following anger and hate from the actual person, to an amorphous entity created in the abstract, but “collected” in the real world.
In a properly developed Leftist collective, to be accused is to be guilty. To believe otherwise would be to imply the collective were capable of error. Needless to say, you do not give your heart, mind and body to an error-prone entity, so it is much easier to reconcile the punishment of the innocent with justice, than to extricate oneself from a cocoon which protects you from anomie.
What this fellow did was no different in principle than Bill Ayers attacking American soldiers, who at Fort Dix were no doubt in large measure drafted. To be clear, it was incompetence–not a lack of malignancy–which prevented that bombing from being the most serious and deadly in American history.
This was no different in principle from Hitler singling out the Jews, or Lenin the “bourgeoisie”, or Pol Pot and his sociopathic children the “intellectuals.”
In all cases, generalized abstractions were applied to concrete individuals. Have there been examples of greedy Jewish bankers? Of course. There have also been greedy German bankers, and greedy Indian bankers. Are most Jews guilty of anything? Of course not.
Were the “bourgeoisie” guilty of crimes against the people? Some, perhaps, particularly noblemen who took their estates by force at some point in remote history. But the factory owner, or windmill owner, or successful merchant? People like that CREATE wealth. The factory owner employs people. The windmill owner likewise. Both produce products needed by “the people”. The merchant helps create markets for them and others, helping build the general economy.
Yet scenes reminiscent of Kristallnacht happened over and over in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik victory. Homes were broken in to by the Cheka, the men shot, the women raped, and everything that moved taken away. Some of the women they even consolidated in brothels, where they would have vodka and cocaine parties.
This guy in Norway, whatever his name was, saw these children as abstractions. They were not real to him. They were guilty because of their membership in some group. Admittedly, they were likely all leftists.
But first and foremost, they were human beings. You convince human beings. You channel your anger into coherence and understanding. That is what I do. The madder I get, the harder I think, and more work I put into educating myself.
Self evidently, what B. did will be counterproductive to conservatism generally. We already face a foe with a prodigious capacity for propaganda and deception. This makes me angry. But see above: the proper reaction is to think, understand, and then educate others. We cannot beat them with raw power. Their system is predicated on power, and they know how to aggregate it. If we aggregate it for them, the momentum will soon enough slip into any form of human government but that of liberal democracy, the rule of law, and political freedom.
I found it interesting if unsurprising that he was a Dexter fan. I have posted on this before. It is a recurring topic for me, but here is one of my longer treatments of that show and media violence in general: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2010/09/dexter-murder-and-mass-media_23.html
I think this question that I asked there is a good one: “are you starting with the desire for justice, or the desire to harm others, and a need to justify it”?
Ted Kazynski (close) was a bright guy. He was not obviously psychopathic. I have no doubt he could hold a close to normal conversation with most people. Yet something was so separated from other human beings that he could and did treat them as interchangeable objects.
Tonight I watched two typical kids of middle to upper middle class backgrounds park their parent’s Volvo or something similar, and come in to the sushi bar I was at. One of them had a T-shirt on it that said “I require to be immersed fully in human waste”. Not so pleasant an image for a restaurant. Sade, of course, has many images like that, which I personally have not chosen to inflict on anyone in any of my writings.
I looked at them. The thought that occurred to me is that anyone who would consciously choose to put objectionable images in other people’s minds–to attack them qualitatively–is someone lacking both empathy, and the capacity for innocent happiness.
Watch kids interacting with their telephones and computers. They are interacting with people via the medium of objects. There is something different between the physical presence of someone, and their text messages. Yet this causes or facilitates some of the zombie behavior–the living death of lacking the capacity for genuine pleasure.
Again, this Norwegian grew up in what was obviously a reasonably well balanced home. His radicalization happened within the context of playing violent video games–many modelled on training software developed by the military to desensitive soldiers to killing–and watching shows like Dexter, which don’t just glorify violence, but also an incapacity for human feeling, and following taste for the darker “pleasure” of sadism. This is the metaphor of the vampire, who is dead, but keeps moving by literally sucking the life out of others.
As I think about it, perhaps the best comparison is that of Columbine. Rich kids, saturated in both violence and self pity, treating the world as a unified whole, and their own freedom of action as a curse.
Few thoughts. I had more, but I am tired.