MASS
MURDER
CESAR EBRAICO
My name is Cesar. I am a Brazilian psychologist, and this
speech is addressed to the President of the US, Mr. Barak Obama. It has been incited
by Mr. President’s recent declaration[1]
that the greatest frustration of his mandate is not having being able to control
the repeated episodes of mass murder which, in his own words, “has killed more Americans than terrorism
itself”.[2].
Mr. President, if you
want to be successful in your more than worthy intention of putting an end to
such deplorable acts of this domestic kind of terrorism, you should listen to
my views concerning the bowling in Columbine.
Let us refresh our memories of the episode.
Eric and Dylan
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, 17 and 18 years
old respectively, were members of upper-middle class American families. They
lived in typical large American houses (Dylan’s family had seven cars) and went
to one of the best schools in the state of Colorado, in the small town of
Littleton, a quiet place a few miles from Denver, which has all of the
attractions that large cities usually offer. They did not use drugs. They were
the children of stable couples and there were no records of their siblings
getting into trouble. Dylan’s father was a geologist and Eric’s was a decorated
Air Force pilot. At school, Eric and Dylan were not particularly handsome,
athletic or academically brilliant in a way that made them stand out from their
peers. Other students called them “losers,” a typically American insult, which undoubtedly
left them feeling resentful. One day, armed with a pistol, a carbine, two
shotguns and homemade bombs, they killed thirteen people at the school they
attended and then committed suicide.
Among the numerous stories published in Brazilian media about this
event, one in particular caught my attention, entitled “How was it possible?”[3] It
begins with these words:
“Something very wrong, very malignant, lurks in the bowels of American
society. When it comes to the surface, everyone asks how is it possible for
horrors of this kind to take place in a democratic, rich and powerful country
like the United States.”
This country,
according to the article, astonishes the world with its
“periodic outbursts of insanity… Time and again, insane people fire at
crowds… Nothing similar in terms of gratuitous outbursts of deadly violence is
found in other countries.”
Note that the perpetrators of this type of murder do not intend to
benefit from any material advantage or in any ideological way and, moreover, do
not even attempt to escape unscathed after committing the crime. Quite the opposite:
they act in broad daylight and, once the deed is accomplished, their usual
behavior is to hand themselves in to the authorities or, as in the case of Eric
and Dylan, to commit suicide. Furthermore, such massacres are too
indiscriminate to be understood as strictly personal vendettas. Often the
murderer simply enters a store or climbs a tower and randomly shoots victims
who, more often than not, are unknown to him. Even in a case like that of Eric
and Dylan, where the slaughter was committed against members of a school where
they felt despised, the shooting was too arbitrary to be considered an act
against specific people.
Finally, we can add that such crimes are habitually committed by members of a
group that, from a material point of view, have a lot to lose: 71% of
occurrences of this kind are carried out by middle class white people, while in
the case of other kind of crimes, just 36% of the perpetrators belong to this
group. In other words, from the
perspective of any palpable gain, mass shootings seem completely senseless, and
generate widespread perplexity.
Could, however, the insane behavior of Eric and Dylan begin to make
sense if, instead viewing it as a crime, we view it as a statement?.
The Urge to Speak
Let me repeat: Eric and Dylan were not sufficiently handsome, athletic
or academically brilliant to stand out from their peers, and there is no doubt
that they resented this. This is what President Clinton had to say about the
episode.
“There are a lot of other kids out there who
are building up resentment and are outside our reach.”[4]
One journalist responded to this comment by saying:
“In other words, it will happen
again!”
And again, and again, and again… A short while afterward, a similar
massacre took place. As one news
headline put it: “It has happened again…”
But let’s hold on a second! “Feeling
resentment”, is very different from, in Bill Clinton’s words, “building up resentment.” Frustrated
people, despite their dissatisfaction, are capable of keeping their
behavior sufficiently rational and organized so as to minimize the harm caused
by untoward situations; traumatized people, on the other
hand, become paralyzed in the face of disturbing stimuli, so much so that they
are not only incapable of minimizing such harm, but, on the contrary, they are
able to push their behavior to unthinkable destructive extremes. Unpleasant experiences, bad as they may be,
can be internally processed and, if they have proper access to verbal
expression, stabilize at a level which produces rational adjustments, not open
insanity; however, if such access is denied, any experience, no matter how
mild, goes through a process of accumulation, rising to the level of trauma,
with all of its unwelcome results. Although
Eric and Dylan had reasons to feel resentful at their school – as I mentioned,
they were sometimes called “losers” – it is quite apparent, given the degree of
disturbance and irrational behavior they displayed, that such resentment did
not settle at the level of frustration, but produced indisputable trauma. For
this to have happened they must have
been raised in a kind of environment that did not allow them to verbally express
their emotions. Unfortunately,
this kind of environment, as far as failure is concerned, is a deep-seated
characteristic of the American cultural environment
Blocking of verbal expression
Even if there are Koch’s bacilli –
the specific cause of
tuberculosis – present in my body, this does not necessarily mean I will suffer
from that illness, but it is impossible for me to have tuberculosis without Koch’s
bacilli being in my body. A layperson
may well say that someone caught TB because he was cold and hungry while in
prison. A competent professional would not say this, he would rather say that
cold and hunger were mere accessory
factors, lowering the person’s immunity and enabling the bacilli to
act. Without these bacilli, the cold or hunger could cause someone to die of
cold, hunger, pneumonia, influenza, but not
of tuberculosis. A lay person
might also say that Eric and Dylan’s resentment led them to murder thirteen
people. I wouldn’t say this. As someone
who has been practicing psychotherapy for almost half a century, I would say
that, for an effect of this magnitude to have taken place, besides the
resentment, a massive exclusion of their resentment from verbal expression ought also to be present. Besides feeling resentment, these boys must have also felt profoundly
rejected when they tried to talk about it and, therefore, they became
not just frustrated, they became traumatized, which led to their utterly
irrational behavior.
Wanting to get rich is quite
different from having a compulsion to do so. Compulsion implies not only a
natural attraction to wealth, but a phobia
of being poor. Similarly, a compulsion to be successful does not merely imply a
natural attraction to success, but a phobia
of failure. And a generalized phobia
of failure – rather than an understandable preference for success over
failure – is a typical feature of US
culture that consequently coerces
– not merely stimulates! – its
members to be successful.[5] Given the widespread belief that being
unhappy is the greatest of all
failures, this process leads to the generalized
obligation to be happy at all times. This in turn produces extensive
blockage among Americans – orchestrated by what I call Pretending Psychology, the overwhelmingly dominant means by which
the US tries to deal with mental care, which prevents them from engaging in the
indispensable verbal communication of
painful feelings. This kind of environment that opposes itself to the
necessary processing of unpleasant experiences is beautifully illustrated in a
song made immortal by the voice of Nat King Cole:
“Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue:
It isn’t very hard to do.”
No it isn’t hard: it’s stupid!
The denouncement of this transcendental foolishness has had some culminating
moments in Western literature. In the 18th century, it was mocked by
Voltaire in Candide. One century
later, Nietzsche virulently railed against it:
”To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly.”[6]
Less than one hundred years later,
the deplorable consequences of the obligation to be happy the whole time were
also strikingly described in Huxley’s Brave
New World and replicated in Orwell’s 1984.
However, the Americans do not seem
to have read, or taken seriously, Orwell, Huxley, Nietzsche, Freud or Voltaire.
They have read and taken Napoleon Hill seriously. In 1937, Hill, a chronic failure who only
managed to escape from his misfortunes by advising others to pretend they were
well, published his Think and Grow Rich,
inaugurating – to use an expression of Diogo Mainardi’s[7] –
the “macroscopic con” of Pretending Psychology.
Hill proposed, as an infallible formula for wellbeing, success and
personal growth, that we block our conscious access to states such as sadness,
discouragement, distress, and so on, considered “negative,” and that we
simultaneously work to induce ourselves into states such as optimism, happiness,
confidence, and so on, considered “positive.”[8] To
sum up, Hill proposed that his readers transform themselves into a vast legion
of Candides, the silly disciple of Pangloss, the philosopher of unconditional
optimism ridiculed by Voltaire. And when
one of these Candides, tired of saying that everything is all the time OK,
picks up a gun and goes on a shooting spree to express with actions the resentment that he has not been allowed to
express with words, Pretending
Psychology is obviously unable to understand why this happens!
Those who are acquainted with the
ominous effects of regularly blocking any
kind of emotion – either “positive” or “negative” – from verbal
expression will not be at all surprised that small frustrations build up until
they become mountains of resentment, all too often leading to completely
irrational explosions of hate. If, as
Nietzsche pointed out, “to attempt the
destruction of our passions is the height of folly,” American Pretending
Psychology has taken this folly to macroscopic proportions. In his sagatious book, Conversation, Theodore Zeldin surely had at the back of his mind
the insidious transformation of this typically unhealthy American way of
dealing with distress into a global disease when he perceptively observed:
“Today,
the revolution that we need lies in the way we speak about failure.”[9]
In fact, Clinton’s comment – “There
are a lot of other kids out there who are building up resentment and are beyond
our reach” – although accurate in its identification of an accumulation of
resentment, contains a big mistake: to
say that this large number of other kids are “outside our reach.” In fact, it
is not these children who are outside the reach of American culture – it is
American culture that is beyond the reach of these kids, who must have
repeatedly tried in vain to make their “negative feelings” heard by it.
How many times must Eric and Dylan
have tried to say that something was wrong? How many times did they try to say
they were suffering because they were considered losers, only to find that to
allow verbal expression of this feeling would push them even deeper into that
accursed category of human beings? How many times was their Urge to Speak frustrated, faced with the
stupid comment that, as members of the upper-middle class of the world’s most
powerful country, everything ought to be OK? How many people, like Eric and
Dylan, pick up guns and go on a shooting spree, trying to say through acts what
they are not permitted to say in words that something is wrong, that not
everything is OK, that, despite all their wealth and abundance, people have the
sacred right to suffer, to not be happy all the time, and to unconditionally put
in words whatever makes them suffer, no matter how preposterous this suffering
may seem?!
That such outbursts of violence are
just desperate, vehement nonverbal
expressions of protest against an entire community that with one hand
gives things, and with the other takes away words, is more than evident: by shooting into crowds, the deepest
intention of these trespassers is not to
kill people – who, more often than not, they do not even know – but to kill the ubiquitous and overwhelming
deafness to verbal expression of suffering, even of minor uneasiness, that
plagues the country. As mentioned before, it is middle-class white
people, rather than the least privileged, who commit crimes like those of Eric
and Dylan. The fact is, Mr. President,
that the American people are “starving in the plenty”: rich in things
they are craving for words! And, in a deplorable frequent way, they
express their revolt against such verbal
poverty by killing people at random. It is appalling that a country whose
constitution establishes freedom of speech as a sacred right has ultimately became
hostage of a kind of psychology which openly exhorts its citizens not to make
use of such a right in their day-to-day lives!
This is surely what is NOT OK!
Consequences
Pretending Psychology is one of the
main causes of another symptom which afflicts American culture: drug addiction.
How can people, even wealthy citizens of the richest nation in the world, ALWAYS PRETEND that everything is ALWAYS OK?
As soon as the hypnotic primacy of Pretending Psychology starts to fail –
which, sooner or later, always happens – the next stage is compulsive consumption. This can involve the following (not
necessarily in this order): consumer goods in general, food (hence America’s
alarming rate of obesity), alcohol, marijuana, crack, illegal and legal drugs
(such as Prozac, a clone of Soma, the pill the state distributes freely in the Brave New World to keep the people
chronically and moronically happy). Let
us not forget that 40% of cocaine production is consumed by Americans, who make
up less than 5% of the world’s population.
The Remedy
Mr. President, focusing the fight
against the aforementioned symptoms on the destruction of the arms industry, of
the mafias that produce illegal drugs and on the unstoppable discovery of
miraculously effective nutritional diets is an impotent, naïve strategy. Efforts should be focused on reducing
people’s vulnerability to the appeal of these mafias. Money spent on mental health programs aimed at reduce
this vulnerability will have an immeasurably greater return than that
used to combat those who sell guns, crack or fatty foods, and the only way to reduce
this vulnerability is cleansing the American culture from the hold of a Jurassic
kind of psychology – extolled by singers, film directors and a self-help
literature moronically inspired by Napoleon Hill – which coerce the Americans to
be artificially and permanently OK. If this cleansing is not carried out via a huge project of psycho-sanitation,
no matter the amount of guns in the market, mass murder will continue to occur. Encircled by the choir of the chronic like
those just mentioned…
Outside the United States
The situation described above brings with it an additional problem: neurosis is contagious. The United States
exports culture. The country has found foreign markets for its dreadful verbal
habits, which it is exporting together with its periodic outbursts of murderous
insanity, fatness, and drug addiction. These exports are well under way: 16
children were killed at a school in Scotland in 1996; 35 tourists were killed
in Australia in the same year; and a shooting spree at a shopping mall in São
Paulo in 1999 claimed eight victims (three dead and five injured) – and only
eight because the perpetrator, a 24-year-old medical student, was unable to
switch his Cobray sub-machine gun, capable of firing 960 bullets a minute, from
intermittent to automatic mode.[10] Given the contagious nature of neurosis, it
would be wise not only for the US but for all other nations to start to equip
themselves with the antidote: to implement
a new kind of verbal communication that allow all emotions not only the so-called positive ones - to become words. Paradoxically enough, “pathology” (from the
Greed “pathos”, emotion + “logos”, discourse) in its proper sense, is not a
problem, it’s the cure[11].
[1]
Obama’s June 18, 2015 statement at the White House, sonn after a gunman
killed nine worshipers at a church in Charleston, South Caroline: "Now is
the time for mourning and for healing. But let’s be clear: At some point, we as
a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence
does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places
with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about
it."
[2]
This article is an adaptation of a chapter of my book “A Nova Conversa” (The New
Conversation). EBRAICO, L.C, Rio de
Janeiro: Ediouro, 2004 (soon to appear
in its English version).
[3] “Como é possível?” in Veja magazine, year 32, edition 17, April
28, 1999.
[4] Ibid.
[5] A similar analysis can be made for
Japanese culture. The phobia of failure there is as ever-present as in US
culture, but while the extroverted nature of the Americans may reach a point in
which this phobia is expressed via unbearable episodes of mass murdering,
Japanese introversion tends to produce an alarming suicide rate, particularly
among teenagers and children. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the saying “Why
get an ulcer, if you can give them?” is American rather than Japanese.
[6]
NIETZSCHE, F. Op. cit., p. 129.
[7]
MAINARDI, D. “Império do Plágio,” in Veja
magazine, November 20, 1996.
[8]
Painstakingly emphasized by the widely Neurolinguistic Programming, a
technically sophisticated variation of brain-washing.
[9] Zeldin, T., in his book, “Conversation”.
[10] I was completing the originals of “The New Conversation” when, in Germany,
a student committed a similar massacre at a school from which he had been
expelled. Incompetence to deal psychologically with failure continues to be
exported on a large scale.
[11]
As the word “nosology” – derived from “nosos”, the Greek word for “illness”
– is at our disposal to make reference to mental and physical disorders, it is
quite intriguing that the term “pathology”
– derived from “pathos” – is
overwhelmingly preferred to name such states.
Implicitly equating “feeling” to “being ill” is illness itself.
