Wind-Up Toys

I hate to sound a conspiratorial note, and you’re free to disregard what follows, but it seems worthwhile to take further notice of the rash of violence last week.

In a commentary by John Whitehead at The Rutherford Institute, blame for what Whitehead calls “America’s killing fields” is laid at the feet of a variety of entities, including numerous elected officials and taxpayer-funded institutions. The more important quote appearing right at the top is this:

We have long since passed the stage at which a government of wolves would give rise to a nation of sheep. As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we now have is a government of psychopaths that is actively breeding a nation of psychopathic killers. [links redacted]

While this may read as unsupported hyperbole to some, I rather suspect Whitehead tells a truth hidden in plain sight — one we refuse to acknowledge because it’s so unsavory. Seeing that Whitehead gave it book-length consideration, I’m inclined to grant his contention. One can certainly argue about intent, objectives, mechanisms, and techniques. Those are open to endless interpretation. I would rather concentrate on results, which speak for themselves. The fact is that in the U.S., Western Europe, and the Middle East, a growing number of people are in effect wind-up toys being radicalized and set loose. Significantly, recent perpetrators of violence are not only the disenfranchised but also police, current and former military, politicians, and pundits whose mindsets are not directed to diplomacy but instead establish “taking out the enemy” as the primary response to conflict. The enemy is also being redefined irrationally to include groups identified by race, religion, vocation, political persuasion, etc. (always has been, in fact, though the more virulent manifestations were driven underground for a time).

Childhood wind-up toys are my chosen metaphor because they’re mindless, pointless devices that are energized, typically by tightening a spring, and released for idle entertainment to move around and bump into things harmlessly until they sputter out. Maniacal mass killers “bump into” targets selected randomly via simple proximity to some venue associated with the killer’s pet peeve, so victims are typically in the wrong place at the wrong time. Uniformed police might be the exception. One might ask who or what is doing the winding of the spring. The pull quote above says it’s a government of psychopaths breeding yet more psychopaths. That is certainly true with respect to the ruling classes — what used to be the aristocracy in older cultures but now is more nearly a kleptocracy in the U.S. — and members of a monstrous security apparatus (military, civil police, intelligence services, etc.) now that the U.S. has effectively become a garrison state. Self-reinforcing structures have hardened over time, and their members perpetuate them. I’ve even heard suspicions that citizens are being “chipped,” that is, programmed in the sense of psyops to explode into mayhem with unpredictable certainty, though for what purpose I can only imagine.

The simpler explanation that makes more sense to me is that our culture is crazy-making. We no longer function well in a hypercomplex world — especially one so overloaded with information — without losing our grounding, our grip on truth, meaning, and value, and going mad. Contemporary demands on the nervous system have outstripped biological adaptation, so we respond to constant strain and stress with varying levels of dysfunction. No doubt some folks handle their difficulties better than others; it’s the ones who snap their springs who are of grave concern these days. Again, the mechanism isn’t all that important, as the example from Nice, France, demonstrates. Rather, it’s about loss of orientation that allows someone to rationalize killing a bunch of people all at once as somehow a good idea. Sadly, there is no solution so long as our collective attention is trained on the wrong things, perpetuating a network of negative feedback loops that makes us all loopy and a few of us highly dangerous. Welcome to the asylum.