I am in general trying, not so much to suppress, as not to indulge my long habit of processing each thought that comes up like a bubble.
I have realized that, possibly, these thoughts are a somewhat healthy habit I have developed to substitute negative thoughts for at least relatively neutral ones.
It is an interesting (to me at least) fact of my particularly way of being in the world that thoughts of all sorts are continually percolating up in me. Some of them are good, some otherwise, and most related to whatever specific things I have going on at the moment, making them spatially and temporally circumscribed.
But I am realizing there is a way of being where my brain is NOT always going, and I DON’T always feel the need to say something about something to somebody. Just silence and presence.
If you read this blog much, you know what I am talking about. I just always feel like justifying myself for some reason. Except when I don’t. Not sure why it lands on heads one day and tails the next, but that is how it is.
Anyway, I just watched a good talk by Jordan Peterson on social media, and recollected that I woke up yesterday thinking maybe media violence explains VASTLY more than we have supposed.
Everybody on Twitter has been socialized for extreme media violence, or at least most of them. They’ve watched horror movies, crime dramas about gruesome murders, war movies, and god knows what. A good percentage have played video games for many hours a day for many years. One writer I was reading the other day talked about how some childhood friend of his that used to be addicted to Grand Theft Auto and pot is now a fully blown Communist.
This sort of transition from fuckup to uniform wearing bully is common enough in recent history.
Communists and Nazis alike appealed to their societies trash heaps. People went from addicts to Commissar and Inquisitors in months, with no training, and no limits or supervision. As I’ve noted, the Cheka liked to kill men accused of something or other (details didn’t matter any more than evidence, and obviously to be accused was to be guilty), then make sex slaves out of their wives and daughters and have drug and alcohol fueled sex parties. Why not? There were no rules. Lenin liked people capable of things like that, who had no moral scruples of any sort.
So I’ve been watching this landscape for some time, and strangely enough, in a land characterized by the most liberal political order in human history, and the most wealth and freedom, potential jack booted thugs seem to be out there in prodigious and unbelievable numbers.
Here is the point I logged on to make, though: the effects of media violence are REAL, well documented, and LASTING. Letting kids grow up watching 300 and playing Medal of Honor has consequences that can be measured and tracked, and almost no one is talking about all this any more.
The political angle is, or was, simple, from a left wing perspective: what is the connection between media violence and mass shootings, especially by young men? 10-15 years ago they felt liberal enough running articles like this, and talking about them. NPR may have done a segment on this, for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2704015/
Here is another link: https://www.encyclopedia.com/media/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/desensitization-and-media-effects
I could post links like this indefinitely. Here is the thing: watching violence leads to increased interpersonal aggression. It also leads to desensitization, which is to say diminished empathy, compassion, and overall social intelligence. It diminishes both impulse control and social connection.
These are invisible diseases out there, which have been radiating out in wave after wave for many years now. I remember when I was young how people Alan Alda and Rob Reiner would speak out against media violence. We were told to watch PBS. I always thought this was good advice My own kids DID watch PBS. They were watching Clifford the Big Red Dog when other kids were watching The Lord of the Rings. I remember vaguely traumatizing one of my kids at age 10 or so watching a Sherlock Holmes where they showed a body hanging.
But to me, horrible images SHOULD trigger something. You are not a better person if you can watch beheading videos, or graphic torture. Quite the contrary.
Obviously, as adults, we don’t always choose in the WORLD what we see, but we can obviously control our media.
If Peterson is pointing out that Twitter feeds malignant narcissism, as I think it does, I think the same can be said for violent media. How can anything that desensitizes you not also make you more superficial, lastingly callow, less engaged, less understanding, less human?
And depression is also a common outcome of all this. Depression and addiction are both diseases of disconnection, and losing the capacity to relate honestly in an intimate way with others is bound to cause long term disconnection. A mob might justly be seen as the family of people characterized by malignant narcissism. They are all pointed the same way, feeling the same things, and this feels as close to connection as emotionally distant, disturbed and traumatized people are likely to get. And if it feels good, we get more of it. Obviously.
So I would encourage this generations Alan Aldas and Rob Reiners–or for that matter the two hypocrites themselves–to get their heads out of their asses and bring this issue to the forefront.
Politically, of course, this has devolved, as all complex issues will when treated by ideologues, which is to say emotional children. The issue now is Guns Ueber Alles. Vee haff to get ze guns. Vee haff to get zee gunz.
That’s the rallying cry. But of course as we are seeing in the Netherlands and Australia and elsewhere, fighting abusive government is a different animal when the nation has been disarmed. So of course all this anti-gun stuff, which has not the SLIGHTEST interest in the cultural and societal causes of all this–which more or less literally in the rhetoric seems to believe guns shoot themselves–is just generic Communism.
And if Communism is “breaking things and lying about it”, then it is the natural home of malignant narcissists, who cannot but welcome into their ranks young kids who share their delusions.