In this article we will look at what causes terrible acts of violence in modern technological society, but with a different perspective from my previous article. As in the previous article, we will focus on the attempted assassination of Trump and the mass murders at the Las Vegas music festival as our main examples. As of now, no motivation for either one of these horrific actions has been discovered. To the extent that any mention of these murders has ceased appearing in the news media long ago, it would appear by extension that most people in law enforcement have pretty much given up on ever finding the motivation of the shooter in the Las Vegas massacre. But the attempted assassination of Trump is a very important recent news story, and everyone in law enforcement with any sort of connection to the investigation is desperately trying to discover what was the motivation behind the action of this lone wolf gunman. The belief is that if the motivation is found, then society can gain some control over the circumstances that create lone wolf killers and, thus, try to diminish the possibility of them appearing again.
However, the truth is that people can look until they’re blue in the face and they still won’t discover the motivations behind lone wolf gunmen. And this is because not all causes of actions within human interactions are set off by motivations. A motivation implies that a person is having a thought process that leads to making a personal organic imprint on his own mind and/or on the surface of another person’s mind. The thought process is generated as a result of the many different influences past and present from within the perpetrator’s mind that contribute in some fashion to the imprint that is taking place. Events and experiences from throughout a perpetrator’s life could have their impact as memories in the form of lasting organic stimuli that have been stored in the mind. It is these memories that act as the foundation for the influences that lead to the creation of organic imprints.
But what happened at Trump’s rally was not the result of a perpetrator making and receiving a complex personal organic imprint. Rather there was a focused abrasive stimulus, a mark, that triggered a response in the perpetrator. The stimulus was a random simple impersonal mark that affected the perpetrator unconsciously. The stimulus temporarily shocked the perpetrator out of his numbness and generated a lot of rage, a lot of intense organic stimuli inside him. As a result, he needed a target person upon whom to release this rage without getting blown up emotionally in the process himself. Furthermore, he needed time to plan the murder in order to make sure it had a successful outcome. It wasn’t simply a matter of the abrasive stimulus of the random mark being left on the perpetrator and then there was an instantaneous reaction of the attempted assassination.
But the key to the full expression of the mark, of the trigger that propels the mark, is that somehow the perpetrator had been previously primed to have an inordinately strong reaction to it. The priming is the result of his long-time immersion in the experiential numbness that is so much a part of modern technological society. The cumulative effect of this long-time exposure to the numbness is that the person suffers from conative anesthesia: the numbing of the will. And, as a result, the person is transformed into a kind of a zombie who craves to become more active again in his life, more involved in the external world. And one way that this is possible for him is precisely that the numbness does leave him open to the effects of random triggers. The difference between this random trigger and the influence of the voluntary interactions with the people around him is that we can dissect a situation and understand it better when we have some control over it. But the problem is that when people are immersed in numbness, their capacity for voluntary interactions is diminished and they require the random triggers to pull them out of the numbness, even if it is only temporarily. Without the random triggers, they hover over the external world in an experiential vacuum and float along in an increasingly oppressive solitude. It is my belief that as modern technology becomes more all-pervasive, the number of zombies will simply grow. Right now, to a greater or lesser extent, we all have this predisposition to become a zombie.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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