Masses and Murder
This essay also available as a downloadable PDF here.
Whenever there is a mass shooting in the United States—an event so common now that those of us outside the United States often have trouble distinguishing any particular one from another that just happened—social and mainstream media is flooded with theories and proposed explanations as to what’s really behind them. Journalists and social media users trip over each other in their rush to present their own narrative, just as with any other highly mediated event (the World Trade Center attacks on 11 September, 2001, for instance, or the “Capitol Insurrection” in Washington DC on 6 January, 2021).
This is understandable, of course, because we humans need explanations for interruptions to the apparent pattern of normal life. Whether those interruptions are natural disasters such as floods, droughts, or earthquakes, or massive societal breakdowns such as wars, disease, or mass death, they represent traumatic breaks in the threads of meaning which narrate our lives and stories. Without an explanation, without a sense of causation, we cannot easily mend those threads and begin weaving our worlds again.
Ancient peoples looked to their priests, their shamans, their wise men and women, or to their prophets for help closing the narrative gap. We still do, even in supposedly secular and enlightened nations. The priest’s homily and the pastor’s exhortations of comfort are obvious continuations of the ancient past, but the journalist, the influencer, the politician, the academic, the expert, and the demagogue likewise perpetuate the ancient relationship between the oracles or the elders and the people who look to them for explanation.
Relationship by definition never occurs in only one direction. A druid or a shaman advising a people was also responsible to them; weaving from the stars or the entrails a narrative or an explanation that could not accurately guide the people meant the reader of those signs would soon no longer guide them. The past was much more democratic than we are told it was. Leaders who lead wrongly have never stayed leaders for long, though for them it was next more often the bog or the blade rather than a post-presidential retirement and long speaking tour.
This core relationship between the wise and the people has not changed in our present, but what has changed is our understanding of who is wise and who are the people. Consider the COVID-19 events these past few years, in which experts all agreed (except for the many who did not) on specific public policies and personal practices that must be adopted (until completely different policies and practices replaced them soon after). Contradictory regulations were put into place in adjacent countries, then suddenly dropped or switched, while those not fully convinced of the authority of others’ chosen experts become pariahs and even blamed for being the cause of the spreading of plague.
Underlying this chaotic societal strife was the much larger chaos of competing masses and their competing guides. Where does a mass begin and where does it end? I was born in America but I do not live in the United States: am I part of the mass-identity of “Americans,” or now of “Europeans,” or of another mass altogether? Who are the authoritative guides for those groups, and who decides who those authorities are? And then how do I decide if the process by which authorities are decided was itself authoritative?
This problem extends far beyond questions of public health policy and into the very core of modern civilizational forms of truth-making and social cohesion. Though we often speak of ourselves as part of communities or of groups, there is nothing that actually demarcates any border which might tell us who else is part of it and who guides it. A village has a physical area and physical inhabitants who are part of it, composing together a community. The village of which I am a part has a specific number of inhabitants and a specific border, both of which I can physically examine and verify. In the short space of a few hours, I can count each house and its inhabitants from one side to another and have a meaningful sense of this village. I cannot do the same for a Nation, nor for a city, nor for a sex or a sexual orientation, a religion, or a political orientation.
Thus, “village” as a community form or group identity is a physical reality to me. I know generally who to trust here, who to listen to hear, and who is most likely to be interested in the well-being of the village and its inhabitants. I can meet with them, have drinks or dinner with them, and most of all be in relation with them. As with pre-modern and animist conceptions of groups such as tribe or the people, I do not need to imagine others as part of a group in which I am also included, because I can physically experience our co-existence and relationships.
On a larger scale, and especially in cities, such reliance on physicality is impossible. As such, we’ve come to replace material relationship and definitions (land and physical proximity) and the shared cultural experiences they create with idea-based or ideological masses. This is seen easily with the modern mass formation of sexually- and gender variant people into the ever-expanding acronym of the LGBTQIA+ “Community.” While a useful marketing fiction for corporations and political groups, there is actually nothing resembling a community behind the idea. I’m a homosexual man and thus part of the “G,” but I don’t actually live in a community with—nor have much uniquely in common with—the millions of other homosexual men in the world. The same goes for each other letter: though I’ve a few lesbian friends, and a few trans friends, a few bisexual friends, and one intersex friend, none of our relating to each other is based on some sense of larger variant sex or sexuality that binds all such people together.
While seeing ourselves as parts of such fictive communities can give a sense of meaning to our lives, they make poor replacements for physical relationships within bounded communities. If some great misfortune were to befall my husband and I, it would not be the fictive global alphabet soup community arriving to give us help and comfort, but rather our neighbors, friends, and family within close physical proximity. I know my two nearest neighbors would rush to our rescue in a medical emergency or house fire, and they know the same of me. No marketing, ideological, or political fiction binds us together, but rather actual being-in-relationship with each other.
The difference between physical understandings of community and these more abstract and fictive ones also extends to the relationship between each and their guides and authoritative narrators. A physical community such as a village or a parish might look to a religious figure such as a priest for guidance during moments of traumatic break, just as a family or tribe might look to its eldest members. They do so not merely out of a sense that such a person is by nature authoritative, but rather because he or she has previously shown themselves to be reliable. When such a person has instead shown themselves otherwise, then the people look to other persons instead.
On the level of fictive communities, however, the authoritative persons are chosen not through relationship but through social establishment. A popular activist or politician, for instance, or an academic or other expert crowned by an institution, become the elders and priests. In all cases, they derive the authority of their position of guidance not from any history of relations with the group, but rather through the appearance of authority.
One obvious problem with this situation is that there is no reliable way for any group to have direct experience with the voice of authority, and therefore no way to test their reliability. We are expected to trust the person without any of the body of physical experiences humans naturally use to determine whether someone is worthy of trust. We trust our parents as children not because they are socially-determined authority figures, but rather because they physically care for us, keeping us safe and fed. A group trusts a religious figure or elder on account of his or her previous physical relations with the group. The members of a fictive community (a city, a nation, an identity group) has no such recourse to physical history.
In the place of the physical comes the ideological, abstract sets of beliefs about the world which pre-determine which authorities to trust and which to reject. An ideology of scientific secularism, for instance, disposes its adherents to trust those with multiple degrees from prestigious universities as authoritative. Adherents of other ideological frameworks, such as those which mistrust the extreme wealth and exclusivity of universities, might instead turn towards politicians, religious figures, or a favored activist or commentator for guidance.
The larger and more fictive the community, however, the more likely its imagined members will instead turn towards ideology itself. This is particularly true of political ideologies which offer robust and coherent calculations to determining who and what is true and trustworthy. Rather than a trusted figure offering narration of the world to close a traumatic break, the ideology itself becomes the narration.
This is seen most clearly in the countless competing narratives around mass killings and especially school shootings in the United States, narratives which recur each time in predictable ways. Depending on the ideology, such violent eruptions occur because there are too many guns available, or because of mental illness, or because of the glorification of violence in media, or because there is no more prayer in school, or because of broken homes, or because of toxic masculinity, or because of community breakdown. Each person within each ideology is just as certain this time as they were the last time (and will be the next time) of what the true cause is, while nothing actually changes and they keep happening.
Rarely noticed in these competing ideological conclusions, however, is that despite being apparently contradictory they all speak truth about specific facets of these events. Many (but not all) of the perpetrators indeed experience mental illness and managed to get a gun without any external check. Many but not all all of them consumed violent entertainment, and many but not all of them exhibited social traits associated with toxic aberrations in masculine expression. Many but not all of them lived in chaotic and unstable families and social groups, and many but not all of them had no sense of direct religious community or spiritual practice.
None of these explanations suffice to explain the situation, but taken together they paint a larger narrative of fractiousness and societal instability for which none of the ideological conclusions can account. More importantly, however, mass shootings become themselves the moments such ideologies contest with each other, increasing the spectacle nature of the such events beyond their larger context of overall murders.
The very definition of a mass shooting is rarely agreed-upon. For example, there are six different tracking projects in the United States for mass killings, and each has a different definition of what those events entail. The FBI, for instance, defines such events as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area; in most cases, active shooters use firearm(s) and there is no pattern or method to their selection of victims.” Their definition includes attempts to kill with weapons other than guns but excludes any event in which the killer was involved in another crime (such as gang-related crimes, altercations, armed robberies, or domestic abuse incidents).
Other tracking projects also exclude other crimes, most insist a mass killing must be “indiscriminate” (without apparent motive or relation to the victims), and do not agree on the number of victims that must be killed in order to count as a mass event. The range between the figures the six tracking projects provide for number of incidents and number of dead in 2021 is very wide: from 6 events with 43 dead to 818 events with 920 dead.
To put this in morbid context, however, we should keep in mind that the total number of murders in the United States the year before (2020, the most recent official government statistic) was 24,576 and estimated to have increased for 2021. Even using the previous year’s statistic and comparing it to the least restrictive mass killing tracker’s figure, only 3.7% of all murder victims in the United States were murdered en masse.
Scoping out a little more broadly, the United States has a rather high murder rate compared to other large nations. It has the third largest population in the world but has the 9th highest murder rate of the 25 nations with the largest populations. China and India, both with much larger populations, and Indonesia and Pakistan, the forth and fifth largest countries, have lower murder rates. Overall, the US murder rate is 59th highest in the world, just above the murder rates in Bolivia and Ukraine.
So on one hand, the United States has a shockingly high murder rate, but less than 4% of those murders are mass events. Yet despite their rarity (again, using the most liberal and least restrictive definition of such events), the relatively low death count from mass killings gets far more attention than the small town’s worth of corpses produced by US murderers each year.
This is where the competing political ideologies in the United States all falter. Mass killings are spectacles, just like all else in American life has become spectacle. Ideologies and those who adhere to them become lost in the event, caught up, swept away along their own grand narratives’ attempts to make sense of something completely senseless. Mass killings are terrifying just as plane accidents and natural disasters are terrifying. They are intrusions of trauma into otherwise settled lives, interrupting the patterns and weaves of the narratives which sustain us. Especially when they involve children and schools, mass killings take on a dimension of cosmic injustice which leads even otherwise peaceable people to scream for blood.
Unfortunately, the focus on such events obscures larger societal problems. For the other 96.3% of people murdered in the United States, we might ask why their deaths mean less only because they were killed alongside no more than two other people. Why should the overwhelming number of children murdered by parents, or by other children, by strangers, in indiscriminate gang shootings, or even by themselves in suicide be counted as less important than the very small number of children killed in mass events?
Perhaps it is precisely the idea of “mass” itself which causes us to become morbidly fascinated with such rare events to the exclusion of the many, many, many other murders in the United States. In a mass killing, you are killed because you are part of a mass. The murderer doesn’t know you, doesn’t care to, and you will not have known them. You are merely a member a faceless body to them, as well as to the journalists and media companies circling your corpse after you have died, and to all those who will hear of your death through mass media. Though your death—unlike all the vast preponderance of other murdered people—will make national news headlines, you will still be merely a statistic, not a human in relationship with others.
Of all the proffered explanations for the high murder rate in the United States and its occasional mass events, the one I suspect comes closest to scratching at the truth of the matter is that of societal breakdown. Nations with similarly high murder rates such as Ukraine and those with much higher rates (much of South America and of Africa) all have comparably unstable societies. Many (but not all) are previous sites of colonial conquest and displaced populations through mass migration or forced slavery, with notoriously corrupt governments and excessive gaps between the highest classes and the lowest classes. They also lack stable religious and cultural traditions and histories, interrupted by external or internal aggression.
As a friend points out in his excellent essay on the matter, the United States itself was built upon the gun and established through the gun, and now keeps its guns trained upon the rest of the world as much as it does its fictive masses. As another writer recently noted, the manufacturer of the very same AR-15 used in the recent mass killing in Uvalde, Texas just received a massive military contract to supply those same guns to Ukraine—a country notorious previous to Russia’s invasion as the primary trafficker of illegal guns and of sex slaves to the rest of Europe and to Turkey.
No ideology has yet succeeded to explain why this all is, nor to offer a convincing political program to reduce the internal and external murders committed by the masses of the United States. That’s probably because no such program is possible, and ideology operates only as a poor substitute to physical community. There is no shared history, nor shared culture, nor shared traditions within the United States which can bind Americans together enough to make murder less frequent, nor will there ever be as long as they remain part of masses and fictive communities rather than people in physical, actually-existing relationship with each other.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, theorist, and writer living in the Ardennes. He writes at From the Forests of Arduinna, and his latest book is Being Pagan: A Guide to Re-Enchant Your Life