{"id":910,"date":"2015-10-05T14:51:07","date_gmt":"2015-10-05T18:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=910"},"modified":"2015-10-05T21:33:05","modified_gmt":"2015-10-06T01:33:05","slug":"primal-rage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=910","title":{"rendered":"Primal Rage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Oregon<\/a>This morning, as I begin this column, ten people at a community college in Oregon were killed by yet-another loner gunman, seeking some kind of notoriety and\/or settling some ill-defined grievance; the ultimate motive is really yours to choose.\u00a0 We will never really know, besides the killer’s confused on-line postings, for he was shot to death by the police, and has now been judged by God.\u00a0 Apparently he asked at least some of his victims whether they were Christian, after which, if they answered in the affirmative, he shot them in the head.<\/p>\n

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I wonder if God asked him the same question?<\/p>\n

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Some readers may have heard of another recent mass murder, three women killed in and around the town of Wilno, not far from where I live, by a deranged individual seeking vengeance, a former paramour, apparently, of two of the women.\u00a0 This is an unheard-of event for this rural area, where a big news story is where all the missing town water went to.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I don’t often agree with President Obama, but he is correct that we are getting sort of numb to this.\u00a0 Not as numb, one may presume, as those in places like Nigeria, where another bombing took place; the suicides who strapped, or had strapped, the explosives to themselves were apparently young girls.\u00a0 The perpetrators and victims of Islamic terrorism are rather indiscriminate.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

However, I do not agree with the American president that this is primarily about guns.\u00a0 Or, at least, I propose that it is only accidentally so.\u00a0 As the glam-rock band Queen sang a few decades ago, ‘there are plenty of ways that you can hurt a man’, guns just being a rather effective means to inflict harm.\u00a0 The question really is about the root causes of violence, the anger caused by the increasing isolation of the modern individual, especially modern man, and by that, I mean today’s male, who finds himself more and more alienated from who he is meant to be.<\/p>\n

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A large part of that isolation and alienation stems from what men are meant to do with their passions, with all the roiling energy within them, whence arise these acts of violence.\u00a0 Saint Thomas enumerates eleven passions in the human soul, all deriving from the fundamental passions of ‘love’ and ‘hate’, the proper response to perceived ‘good’ and ‘evil’ respectively.\u00a0 Other emotions, such as desire, hope, daring, and fear help us achieve the good we want, or avoid the evil we do not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In more normal (and by that, I mean past) civilizations, male passions were channelled into hard work and family life.\u00a0 This turned these otherwise-unruly energies into virtues, which allowed our hardy forebears to clear forests, move rocks, clear the land for farms, dominate the animals, build homes, study, investigate and explore the world, raise children, and, when necessary, fight wars.\u00a0 Religion further helped purify and elevate all these natural endeavours.\u00a0 Passions, especially sexual desire and anger (two dominant and connected passions in man) can be purified, moderated and channelled into good uses, and, to some degree, always have been.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I need not even state that most of this has gone by the wayside.\u00a0 We now have untold millions of angry and sexually unfulfilled young men throughout this planet listless and undirected.\u00a0 Many of them perceive that they have been ‘hard done by’ in the world, by family, by women, by authorities, by whomever.\u00a0 Religion is either gone, or used as a veneer for violence and sexual dominance.\u00a0 The natural energy-releasing outlets are also by and large gone:\u00a0 Farms, factories, guilds, trades, any real sense of purpose or direction.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thus these modern men channel their passions into vicarious violent video games, pornography, and sports, but these are not really outlets.\u00a0 They are not actually fighting the wars, having sex, or playing the games on the pixilated screens.\u00a0 They are sitting on a couch in their shorts, eating crisps and burgers. But the anger and their desires remain unresolved, undirected…<\/p>\n

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Thankfully, it is the rare individual whose anger and lust spill over into the violence we have witnessed.\u00a0 Most people just want to lay low and be quiet, especially if they consider the perceived ‘evil’ (the grievance or whatever) impossible to overcome, in which case anger turns into sorrow, listlessness, passive acceptance (which explains, at one level, the basis of ‘depression’ and ultimate mental illness).<\/p>\n

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But in how many men does the anger continue to simmer in their ruminations?\u00a0 How many nurse their resentments, playing over violent and sexually deviant scenarios in their addled and unformed minds? \u00a0How many would do what these murderers have done if given the chance, the right set of circumstances, if freed from the thin and fragile constraints of civilization and authority?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, in any society, virtue, and the ‘right way’ of being a man, are still possible to some extent.\u00a0 But this becomes more difficult the less it is supported by the surrounding culture.\u00a0 As George Weigl wrote recently in First Things<\/a>, there is a crisis of loneliness, self-centeredness, abandonment of family prayer, and a loss of a vibrant cultural life is the crisis that leads to the more obvious signs of social and family breakdown<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Or, as the Holy Father put it in his homily for the opening Mass of the Synod on the Family,<\/p>\n

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The number of people who feel lonely keeps growing, as does the number of those who are caught up in selfishness, gloominess, destructive violence and slavery to pleasure and money.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The murderers are almost always themselves ‘victims’ (if one wants to call them such) of these cultural phenomena:\u00a0 Divorce, family breakdown, increasing isolation, loneliness, along with perhaps reactionary sense of misplaced righteousness and self-importance.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Some think these murders can be prevented by stricter gun control laws.\u00a0 There is\u00a0some\u00a0truth in this; we may see fewer victims.\u00a0 But there are also difficulties.\u00a0 Yes, the government does have a duty to control what weapons can be held by the public, at least to some extent.\u00a0 We don’t want people with personal nuclear bombs, and I am not sure why someone would need a fully automatic assault rifle.\u00a0\u00a0 Unless of course, he is expecting a civil war or societal collapse, but that is another story, with another whole set of problems.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But, in the meantime, a strict gun control policy, in the United States at least, would be perceived as punishing the 99.999% of innocent, law-abiding gun owners, who claim to have the constitutional right to bear arms (but there is dispute about the nature of this amendment<\/a>), to hunt and defend themselves.<\/p>\n

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Even if the government went ahead with a stricter gun-control policy, what to do with the weapons already in the hands of the people?\u00a0 There are already far more guns in the U.S. than people (but it is nearly impossible to count them all<\/a>, and there may be far more than statistics say), so that genie is pretty much out of the bottle.\u00a0 It would be a hard and bloody struggle to disarm the entire population, or a good majority of it, and would probably lead to more deaths than many years of the still-rather-rare mass murders.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But the main difficulty is that gun control does not get at the root of the problem, the unrootedness of the modern male who has no idea how to be a ‘man’.\u00a0 They remain immature boys in fully grown male bodies. I find it curious that these murderers choose victims who cannot fight back, unarmed women, defenceless students in class, even children.\u00a0 It is as though, unable or unwilling to face the real, and difficult, evil within them, to mature and overcome their own deficiencies, they lash out at false, and easy, ‘evils’ outside, thinking, this <\/em>will make things better, this <\/em>will make me who I am…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, it does not, but only exponentially compounds the evil, which, I think, is why many mass murderers commit suicide, or bring about their own death in some way. \u00a0The myriad of police officers showing up in their army gear is, alas, too often too little, too late.\u00a0 All they find are dead bodies, the murderer amongst them…<\/p>\n

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Perhaps, the violence could be prevented a long time before if someone had confronted them earlier as they drifted towards such demonic delusion. But that, ultimately, is the duty of their parents, their fathers, and those who stand in their place, teachers, employers, and even friends, who will bring them to task, even forcibly.\u00a0 Alas, that whole system, that whole culture, has just about irrevocably broken down.\u00a0 Fathers abandon their families, mothers are at work, divorce is rife, many children are raised alone, or by strangers.<\/p>\n

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Even outside the family, we stay away from each other, especially those most troubled.\u00a0 Many, perhaps most, of us seem to be on our own, and society cannot operate on the basis of loners.\u00a0 We need community, and all that entails.<\/p>\n

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I just read an article about the future automation of many manual labour jobs<\/a>, already far in progress.\u00a0\u00a0 How will society absorb millions of young men sitting around all day with nothing to do?\u00a0 Do you think they will be content sipping coffee in cafes, playing foosball, practising the cello?\u00a0 (I will write more on this).<\/p>\n

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What we should<\/em> do, as I will never tire of repeating in these columns, is strive to rebuild culture, so that men do have a chance to ‘be men’, to find their place in society, to be called to account for misbehaviour before it becomes violent, to treat women with respect, to strive for virtue, qua vir<\/em>, as a man<\/em>, to found families, and take responsibility for their life and their actions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Otherwise, our society will descend further into chaos, into the individualistic dog-eat-dog, nature red-in-tooth-and-claw insanity that we have recently witnessed, and, sadly will likely witness again all too soon…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the meantime, may God grand eternal rest to the souls of the victims, and repentance to those who so tragically took their lives.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning, as I begin this column, ten people at a community college in Oregon were killed by yet-another loner gunman, seeking some kind of notoriety and\/or settling some ill-defined grievance; the ultimate motive is really yours to choose.\u00a0 We will never really know, besides the killer’s confused on-line postings, for he was shot to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=910"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":916,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910\/revisions\/916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}