Another School Shooting. Why is This Happening?

Richard Mellor

I was expecting the usual barrage of arguments in the mass media this morning explaining away the cause of yet another mass murder of schoolchildren as either too many guns or not enough of them. Or not to worry, this wasn’t a terrorist act, just a deranged mentally ill “lone wolf” attack.  It always frustrates me that this is how the issue s framed . Social alienation is not delved in to in any serious way and certainly not the capitalist system as the cause of it.

As I am always compelled to do, I stress that I am not opposed to gun laws and do not believe just anyone indiscriminately should be able to have easy access to guns although with some 300 million gun laws in the US getting one isn’t difficult.

It is refreshing to read the piece below that deals with the real issue, capitalism and the collapse of the world’s most powerful capitalist nation of the past 100 years. In another article, the author correctly points to the social base for the rise of Fascism in Germany, the collapse of the middle class. It was the collapse of the German middle class and not “the worker” that provided the base for the rise of Fascism in Germany, and yesterdays shooting, like Columbine and others occurred in an affluent middle class neighborhood, the perpetrator a middle class youth. Note: Since writing this introduction I have just been informed that the killer, Nikolas Cruz is linked to a white nationalist group called the Republic of Florida that describes itself as a "White civil rights organization fighting for white identarian Policies" and a "White Ethno State." Here is the example confirming the points made in the article linked to in this paragraph.  Those who are defending Trump should not be given any leeway on this, Bible in hand or not.

The author uses the term “extreme capitalism”, I would agree with that term but capitalism has always been and always will be extreme. I have pointed out in previous posts that, despite the luxury of material possession, from gadgets that talk back to you to pick up trucks that are rarely used to pick up anything other than one’s male ego and enslave you in debt, the US population is the first and most vulnerable victim of the poisonous, capitalist free market ideology from the world’s most powerful bourgeois. The massive never-ending propaganda telling us how great we are, that we are exceptional, that the rest of the world wants to be like us and if they can’t, they are out to destroy us, is becoming harder to accept. If you don’t own one of the things they tell you you should, you are nothing, a failure and if you fail, it’s your fault. Nowhere else is this poisonous, individualist selfish ideology that runs counter to human instincts and culture as prominent as the US.

The author writes that the, “American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel.”  This is a powerful and accurate statement and it is not yet over. It is what is never part of the discussion after these events. World capitalism was facing collapse in the 1930’s and the remedy, Fascism, proved a disaster with millions dead and massive social destruction including the US dropping nuclear weapons on urban centers, the only nation to do so up to now.  The world bourgeois were badly burned by Fascism, capitalism likes to keep social tensions, simmering, racism, nationalism, sexism, religious divisions, but they do not like them to boil over, to turn in to open warfare although it is not always preventable. The presence of nuclear weapons has blocked that road up to now and instead we see regional conflicts, the break up of nations states, the rise of religious fanaticism of one kind or another as the solution is sough in the heavens.

The present economic, political and social crises in the US including these mass killings are a product of it.

The US ruling class is driven by the laws of the system to act the way they do. More “extreme capitalism” more capitalist fundamentalism is on the way. Sweeping deregulation, more austerity and opening all doors for capitalism and the so-called free market to solve its own problems, an historically failed approach with catastrophic consequences, is what lies ahead. In the US the population is kept in a state of constant fear and insecurity, war, health care, jobs, rent and housing, the environment and whether ones child will have a world to live in and at all times fear of foreigners, this is an environment that breeds crises.  What must be happening on the ground when an historically privileged sector of the working class (white workers) is experiencing decline in their life expectancy? And how much worse must the conditions of those historically less privileged sectors have declined, blacks, Native Americans etc.

We discuss these issues and the ongoing crisis of capitalism in the conference calls this blog and “Workers’ Think Tank has each week.  We may want to wish it away, but the author’s description of the collapse of US capitalism is refreshing truth. For Facts For Working People, we stress that this collapse is global and as the working class here in the US is forced to stand up and defend itself it will be a violent and confused event due to the refusal of the heads of organized labor to lead an offensive and a significant social force to which workers can orient. This will be have built in the course of the struggle.

If you would like to participate in our weekly conference calls, send us an e mail at: we_know_whats_up@yahoo.com and we can talk about it.  The one thing missing in the article is the role of the working class and the US working class in particular plus the author does appear to think capitalism can be reformed, that it can resolve all these crises of its own making; it cannot. Meanwhile it is a good read and we thank the author for writing it.  Originally published at: Eand.co 

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse

umair haque

vampire.

Jan 25

The Strange New Pathologies of the World’s First Rich Failed State

You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.”

Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse — strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society.

America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days. That’s one every other day, more or less. That statistic is alarming enough — but it is just a number. Perspective asks us for comparison. So let me put that another way. America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, the phenomenon of regular school shootings appears to be a unique feature of American collapse — it just doesn’t happen in any other country — and that is what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”: a new, bizarre, terrible disease striking society.

Why are American kids killing each other? Why doesn’t their society care enough to intervene? Well, probably because those kids have given up on life — and their elders have given up on them. Or maybe you’re right — and it’s not that simple. Still, what do the kids who aren’t killing each other do? Well, a lot of them are busy killing themselves.

So there is of course also an “opioid epidemic”. We use that phrase too casually, but it much more troubling than it appears on first glance. Here is what is really curious about it. In many countries in the world — most of Asia and Africa — one can buy all the opioids one wants from any local pharmacy, without a prescription. You might suppose then that opioid abuse as a mass epidemic would be a global phenomenon. Yet we don’t see opioid epidemics anywhere but America — especially not ones so vicious and widespread they shrink life expectancy. So the “opioid epidemic” — mass self-medication with the hardest of hard drugs — is again a social pathology of collapse: unique to American life. It is not quite captured in the numbers, but only through comparison — and when we see it in global perspective, we get a sense of just how singularly troubled American life really is.

Why would people abuse opioids en masse unlike anywhere else in the world? They must be living genuinely traumatic and desperate lives, in which there is little healthcare, so they have to self-medicate the terror away. But what is so desperate about them? Well, consider another example: the “nomadic retirees”. They live in their cars. They go from place to place, season after season, chasing whatever low-wage work they can find — spring, an Amazon warehouse, Christmas, Walmart.

Now, you might say — “well, poor people have always chased seasonal work!” But that is not really the point: absolute powerlessness and complete indignity is. In no other country I can see do retirees who should have been able to save up enough to live on now living in their cars in order to find work just to go on eating before they die — not even in desperately poor ones, where at least families live together, share resources, and care for one another. This is another pathology of collapse that is unique to America — utter powerlessness to live with dignity. Numbers don’t capture it — but comparisons paint a bleak picture.

How did America’s elderly end up cheated of dignity? After all, even desperately poor countries have “informal social support systems” — otherwise known as families and communities. But in America, there is the catastrophic collapse of social bonds. Extreme capitalism has blown apart American society so totally that people cannot even care for one another as much as they do in places like Pakistan and Nigeria. Social bonds, relationships themselves, have become unaffordable luxuries, more so than even in poor countries: this is yet another social pathology unique to American collapse.

Yet those once poor countries are making great strides. Costa Ricans now have higher life expectancy than Americans — because they have public healthcare. American life expectancy is falling, unlike nearly anywhere else in the world, save the UK — because it doesn’t.

And that is my last pathology: it is one of the soul, not one of the limbs, like the others above. American appear to be quite happy simply watching one another die, in all the ways above. They just don’t appear to be too disturbed, moved, or even affected by the four pathologies above: their kids killing each other, their social bonds collapsing, being powerless to live with dignity,or having to numb the pain of it all away.

If these pathologies happened in any other rich country — even in most poor ones — people would be aghast, shocked, and stunned, and certainly moved to make them not happen. But in America, they are, well, not even resigned. They are indifferent, mostly.

So my last pathology is a predatory society. A predatory society doesn’t just mean oligarchs ripping people off financially. In a truer way, it means people nodding and smiling and going about their everyday business as their neighbours, friends, and colleagues die early deaths in shallow graves. The predator in American society isn’t just its super-rich — but an invisible and insatiable force: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes, becoming mere mundane everyday affairs not to be too worried by or troubled about.

Perhaps that sounds strong to you. Is it?

Now that I’ve given you a few examples — there are many more — of the social pathologies of collapse, let me share with you the three points that they raise for me.

These social pathologies are something like strange and gruesome new strains of disease infecting the body social. America has always been a pioneer — only today, it is host not just to problems not just rarely seen in healthy societies — it is pioneering novel social pathologies have never been seen in the modern world outside present-day America, period. What does that tell us?

American collapse is much more severe than we suppose it is. We are underestimating its magnitude, not overestimating it. American intellectuals, media, and thought doesn’t put any of its problems in global or historical perspective — but when they are seen that way, America’s problems are revealed to be not just the everyday nuisances of a declining nation, but something more like a body suddenly attacked by unimagined diseases.

Seen accurately. American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel . And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special — the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics. It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes. That is why our narratives, frames, and theories cannot really capture it — much less explain it. We need a whole new language — and a new way of seeing — to even begin to make sense of it.

But that is America’s task, not the world’s. The world’s task is this. Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too. They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.

Umair
January 2018