Madmen and Crowds
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
There was a temporary interval in American life
when a shooting spree by a madman would have been
viewed as the crime of one man. The dead would have
been mourned. The killer, if he had been taken
alive, would have been punished, and while the
memorial might have been accompanied by some leading
sermons, the country would have been spared the
media exploitation and blame-a-thon that invariably
follows such events.
The trouble is that there are no more
individuals. Or rather the individual is no longer
recognized as having any standing. "All private
plans, all private lives, have been in a sense
repealed by an overriding public danger," Roosevelt
declared in 1940 to the Democratic National
Convention And the repeal never seems to have been
repealed. Instead all private plans and private
lives are being constantly repealed by a turmoil of
overriding public dangers, most of them sociological
in nature.
A shooting takes place and the media urges that
millions of firearms be confiscated. Every crisis
requires that more freedoms be sacrificed for that
overriding public danger that the talking heads are
screaming about this week over news feeds from every
corner of the globe. There are no more private
lives. Only public ones. Everyone will sooner or
later pass before the camera and be judged by
millions of strangers in a narrative that will
transform him or her into a hero or villain in the
great social struggle against the public danger of
the day.
Calling Adam Lanza a madman has little meaning now.
The madman retreats to a private world of his own
making. But the collective culture does not
recognize madness as a detachment from the crowd.
Instead it views it as yet another social malady to
be solved. Re-open the asylums. Provide more mental
health funding. Open hotlines for anyone with
suicidal thoughts. Social solutions for a social
society coping with the anti-social.
But even our madmen are public figures now. Cut off
from the collective culture by their minds, they
still strive to connect to its most fundamental
value. Fame.
America's spree killers don't drive pickup trucks
with gun racks. They aren't NRA members and have
never opened a bible. They are young, mentally ill
and famous. They are exactly like the real and fake
celebrities who crowd magazine covers, television
screens and paparazzi-choked premieres. But they
can't sing or dance, and have no unique way to
embarrass themselves into staged fame. Instead they
kill their way to being famous.
As schizophrenic as our shooters were, as unable to
connect to the groupthink of the larger culture,
they understood the one thing that we valued. And
they got it in a brute force way. They became what
every girl with dyed blonde hair waiting on line to
impress the judges of television's dueling singing
competitions, every waiter with sunglasses waiting
to become a movie star on Rodeo Drive, every
"internet personality" leaning precariously over a
webcam on YouTube, every kid trying out rhymes on
his friends and building a fake biography of all the
people he shot in drug deals gone bad, want to be.
Famous.
In mass culture, fame is the only oxygen of the
individual. It is the only thing that distinguishes
the vanishing individual from the herd. The
celebrity is to 21st Century America as the general,
the writer, the poet, the politician and the genius
were to former eras. All these things and many more
have been distilled down to the simple status of
celebrity. You are either famous or you aren't. You
either have a private life that everyone knows about
or your private life has already been repealed by
the overriding public dangers of cow farts, racism
and large sodas. You are either a slave to the
public or just a public slave.
A culture of crowds makes crazy people even crazier.
There's nothing for paranoia like a major city and
these days we all live in the major city of a
culture that is crowded in even its most rural
areas. Crowd culture expects everyone to follow the
leader, to join the meme, to move with the flow, but
that is something that crazy people cannot do. The
madman is always out of step and out of sync, the
paranoid schizophrenic occasionally makes a
compelling leader, but he is unable to be a
follower.
Madness can at its simplest be viewed as the gap
between his thinking and our own. Like cultural
differences, it often explodes into violence, but
unlike cultural differences it cannot be bridged
because there is no common language. The madman is a
member of a unique culture of one. He is a citizen
of himself. He has his own laws, his own values and
even his own mental language. And it is one that no
sane person will ever understand.
The madman is the ultimate individual dying in
his own private rebellions that mean nothing to
anyone else. A sane society may lock him up, it may
crudely tinker with his brain chemistry or even
carve up his gray matter, but it will never truly
make him one with the group. And our society, addled
by nearly as many drugs as your average madman, is a
long way from sane. It flirts with madness in its
aimless attempts at reestablishing the place of the
individual in a collectivist culture, and it veers
recklessly from sympathizing with violence to
pretending not to understand where violence comes
from. It's the feigned innocence of those who are
just jaded enough not to want to know how jaded they
have truly become.
If the madman has lost the ability to speak to the
crowd, the crowd has equally lost the ability to
speak to the individual. The madman suffers from a
defective mental vocabulary and the mad society has
lost the ability to formulate concepts relating to
individual behavior.
In our society the individual is always seen as
putting on a public performance of accepting or
rejecting group values. All private lives become a
public competition to see who recycles the most, is
the least racist, the most giving and the best
example of what a cog in the great social machine
should be. Every individual act is a commentary, not
ultimately on the individual, but on the social
machine. Crime is no longer a private act, but a
public one, that emerges out of social factors such
as the poverty rate, race relations, the
availability of firearms, cold medication in
pharmacies and the amount of funding for midnight
basketball, outpatient mental health therapy and a
thousand others.
All private plans are a public danger. All
individual acts are really collective acts. There is
no "I" in individual. There is only the crowd, its
avatars who live out their fantasies and entertain
them, and the masses shuffling off toward their
daily labors until they are released from the grind
and allowed a few hours to entertain themselves
watching their avatars live a public show of private
life.
How does one speak of individual responsibility to
such people and how can they be expected to
distinguish individualism from madness? The ant hive
cannot be expected to think of the ant. It cannot
understand anthood apart from the hive.
The Blame-a-Thon continues. Blaming Adam Lanza for
his own actions is insufficient. Even blaming his
dead mother is insufficient. Individuals do not
matter. Only groups do. Corporations. The NRA. The
Tea Party. Private tragedy becomes a political event
complete with campaign speeches and fundraising
letters. Organizations converge. New offices are
opened and phone lines are installed. Press
conferences are given. "This is a wake up call. A
call for action. It's time we did something."
Within an hour, the responsibility is transferred
from a killer to the society at large and then to
the groups that do not share the values of the new
collectivist society. War is declared. Press
releases are faxed. Letters are sent out. "We need
your help, Michael." "Stand with us, Susan." The
dead are buried and their bodies are used to make
the mulch of a new wave of political repression and
profiteering. The dead, like singing competition
contestants, are ultimately disposable, as are their
killers. It is the producers and the judges who
endure.
Each call to action is signed with the promise,
"So that this will never have happen again." That is
the sociological siren song of the crowd. The
promise of a powerful government safety net that
will keep every terrible thing from ever happening a
second time. But there is no net that madmen cannot
slip through when they choose to. It is possible to
repeal the private lives and private plans of all
gun owners, but not the private lives and plans of
madmen who are not peninsulas, but islands in the
stream, who do not care about laws, regulations and
expectations. Broken men looking to break.
There is more danger than safety in the crowd. Not
only can the crowd not deter a madman, for the same
reason that Kitty Genovese bled to death lay dying
for an hour, but the crowd is also mad. It is a
madness that is harder to detect because it is the
madness of a crowd. The individual irrationality of
a madman is detectable by outsiders, because of its
conflict with the group reality, and even to the
person of the madman by that same conflict, which
fuels his paranoia toward the outside world, but the
group cannot detect its own irrationality and is too
large and pervasive for its irrationality to be
recognized on the outside.
Our crowd is not yet as collectively insane as Adam
Lanza, but it's getting there. And it will not be
pretty when it does. The madness of crowds is not a
pretty thing. It can be seen in the hysterical
crowds that greeted Hitler or the equally hysterical
crowds swooning at the sight of a celebrity.
Individual madness is flawed chemistry, but crowd
madness is a will to madness, a raving desire to be
one with the collective view, to be famous or almost
famous, to exchange reason for sensation and
individuality for the group immortality of the
group.