04 Apr When Trends Collide
My apologies.
I travelled last week to Florida to participate in a great conference on investing and Catholic social teaching. A good time was had by all.
Now, some people who travel to Florida bring back souvenirs. Other people bring back lifelong memories. Still others bring back a suntan.
I brought back pneumococcal pneumonia. Because of course I did. So, please forgive my prolonged absence/silence.
Anyway, the effects of “Liberation Day” have eclipsed all other news for the past few days, but in time, the immediate panic will wear off, and things will return to normal – which is to say that things will return to being completely insane. Before President Trump put old Smoot and Hawley to shame, the most important and interesting thing in the news was the mental and political meltdowns that Trump 2.0 has caused among those who once called themselves “the Resistance.” Between the President’s immigration onslaught, the Vice President’s rhetorical onslaught, and the <<wink, wink>> Real President’s waste and fraud onslaught, the Left has been losing its collective mind. It’s not been pretty. Unfortunately, it’s also not unexpected, and nor is it likely to end anytime soon.
What we are seeing here – and what we are likely to see for a long time, from the Left especially but also from the Right – is the consolidation of two trends, two stories I have been addressing for a long time in these pages (and elsewhere), and that together bode of considerable social unrest over the next decade at least.
The first of these trends is – as some of you may have guessed – the rise of nihilism and attendant “heroic doubling,” which explains so many of the seemingly unrelated eruptions of aggressive anti-social behavior in the West over the last few years. I wrote the following almost a year ago about the otherwise aimless American college students who are, suddenly, socially aware of the “oppression” of the Palestinian people, but the theory applies to countless other cases. The theme is one that will be very familiar to regular readers:
Psychologists who have studied violence in young men and especially young men’s willingness to forsake everything they know, everything they’ve been taught, and everything they might otherwise believe about right and wrong, say that there is a set of shared circumstances and “revelations” that link spree killers and self-radicalized terrorists. Faced with the emptiness of their own lives, isolated from many of their contemporaries, and desperately in search of something substantive to give their lives meaning and purpose, young men—especially young men who find refuge on the internet and in social media—tend to create fantasy lives for themselves, alternate realities in which they not only find the meaning and purpose they crave but do so in heroic fashion.
For more than a decade now, the journalist and editor Robert Beckhusen has noted that the ties that bind spree shooters and self-radicalized terrorists are both numerous and consistent. Young men confronted by the social and spiritual emptiness of their lives and society default to what is often called “heroic modeling” or “heroic doubling,” which is to say that they take on a symbolic cause and kill not just to slake their own bloodlust but to exact revenge for a whole class of people with whom they believe they find common cause.
Almost exactly ten years ago, just after the spree shooting in Isla Vista, California, Beckhusen interviewed Roger Griffin, a professor of Modern History at Oxford-Brookes University in the UK and the author of Terrorist’s Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning. Griffin explained the phenomenon of “heroic doubling” as follows:
[I]n the mind of the killer, they’re not just killing someone as the sole purpose of the destruction. They’re killing someone symbolic of something more general, which is also meant to send a message to the survivors….
…what happens psychologically—the person has undergone a process whereby a rather confused, pained, ordinary self puts on a sort of mask, which turns them into an actor—or a protagonist—in a personal narrative drama. . . .
In his avatar double, he achieves the ability to run and fight. I believe that’s a very powerful metaphor for what happens in the process of heroic doubling. Because the person who’s previously felt impotent and had no agency . . . is made to feel potent and have agency returned to him by adopting this mission. So in that moment, he becomes a heroic version, or avatar, of himself.
Although the parallels are hardly perfect, over the years, I’ve found this concept of heroic doubling to be a useful heuristic for assessing the otherwise seemingly pointless embrace by American young men—and, increasingly, young women—of foolish, intellectually abhorrent, and often violent ideologies and practices.
As you watch the videos of people keying or otherwise defacing Teslas – which are somehow still piling up, despite the fact that everyone should know by now that Teslas have exterior cameras – think of these people as wannabe heroes. They see themselves as bold and brave warriors, willing to do their part to advance the cause. The fact that their “part” means destroying the private property of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with Trump or Musk or anything else political simply reinforces the notion that these people are desperate for belonging and desperate for meaning of any sort in their lives. Teslas are the current target of these pathetic souls, but they are not the only ones. Obviously, Jews are targets as well, as are women, police officers, Westerners (in general), and almost anyone who can be seen as an “oppressor” to be fought by valiant “heroes.”
The second theme is one I haven’t mentioned in a while but which, when combined with the above, suggests that the “violence” against Teslas is only the beginning. Not quite a decade ago, I introduced a concept that I called the “violence-bezzle,” in which I borrowed John Kenneth Galbraith’s invention of the term “bezzle.” He described the bezzle as the inventory of undiscovered embezzlement at any given time and and noted emphatically it needed to be cleansed from the system on occasion by a recession or depression. I argued that like financial corruption, societal violence needs occasional cleansing. Traditionally, wars served a similar purpose to economic depressions, which is to say that they permitted the cleansing of the bezzle. In the modern world, with the development of potentially world-ending weapons, however, real war has become more or less impossible. All of which means that the violence-bezzle builds up with no relief valve to keep it from spilling over into broader society.
Although the phrasing was borrowed from Galbraith, the theory was borrowed mostly from Hannah Arendt, who wrote the following in On Violence:
Anybody looking for some kind of sense in the records of the past was almost bound to see violence as a marginal phenomenon. Whether it is Clausewitz calling war “the continuation of politics by other means,” or Engels defining violence as the accelerator of economic development, the emphasis is on political or economic continuity, on the continuity of a process that remains determined by what preceded violent action. Hence, students of international relations have held until recently that “it was a maxim that a military resolution in discord with the deeper cultural sources of national power could not be stable,” or that, in Engels’ words, “wherever the power structure of a country contradicts its economic development” it is political power with its means of violence that will suffer defeat.
Today all these old verities about the relation between war and politics or about violence and power have become inapplicable. The Second World War was not followed by peace but by a cold war and the establishment of the military-industrial-labor complex. To speak of “the priority of war-making potential as the principal structuring force in society,” to maintain that “economic systems, political philosophies, and corpora juris serve and extend the war system, not vice versa,” to conclude that “war itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire”—all this sounds much more plausible than Engels’ or Clausewitz’s nineteenth-century formulas. Even more conclusive than this simple reversal proposed by the anonymous author of the Report from Iron Mountain — instead of war being “an extension of diplomacy (or of politics, or of the pursuit of economic objectives),” peace is the continuation of war by other means — is the actual development in the techniques of warfare. In the words of the Russian physicist Sakharov, “A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means (according to the formula of Clausewitz). It would be a means of universal suicide.”
Unfortunately, man’s inherent nature doesn’t change just because we want it to or even because technology has made its historical manifestation impractical. Man is still violent. He still has an inherent predisposition toward physical aggression. The only difference is that now, he is taught to hate those whose “values” differ from his own, even within his own society. He is taught that his internal “enemies” are far more of a threat than external ones.
And, of course, he believes that he will be seen as a hero if he does something about it.
Buckle up, buttercup. It’s gonna get bumpy.
