New Zealand

The massacre in New Zealand has shocked minds and hearts worldwide. It was not an attack on Islam, rather it was an attack on humanity.

The origins of this may be found in the use and abuse of the Internet, which has spawned a cavalcade of nefarious individuals whose evil inclinations have been stoked and encouraged by a relentless bombardment of lies, distortion and encouragements. Let’s look at their sub-groups – relatively untutored generalizations follow.

There are the true believers. These are people who are legitimately members of disaffected groups who have cause to complain about their treatment. Most obvious are groups such as ISIS which recruit adherents on-line using claims of a war against Islam as their base recruitment tool. Where they seek to recruit other Muslim people, they use the Internet to plant seeds in fertile soil, and they do have success pulling in those who may be psychologically predisposed to identify with their manipulative propaganda. By appealing to a pre-modern idealized world where everyone knows their place, where men dominate, and where subservience is demanded and expected, they attract persons of low character who see their meaning in life in the control of others, and who think service to tyrants is the same as supporting “the good”.

Then there are those who are not members of disaffected groups, but who join them perhaps as a result of more exaggerated feelings of disaffection and of being outsiders. The most obvious persons to do this are non-Muslims who join groups like ISIS as loyal adherents. They have usually been used as willing cannon-fodder, happily heading off to paradise where their every sexual fantasy will be fulfilled.

Then there are the “lone wolves”. These are people who may be outside of any recognizable mainstream of society, who spend hour after hour scouring the Internet for fuel to stoke their hatred of persons, places and things they know almost nothing about. They may only believe in killing as a path to a twisted sense of meaning. Many American lone wolves have been fantastically successful, with their desire to kill based on their own twisted logic.

It looks like the New Zealand shooter may have been one of these lone wolves. There were always such people before the advent of the Internet, but they were probably not as pervasive. There will always be evil. 

Beyond that, prior to the most modern of the modern eras, societies did not think they had to try to adjust to “new realities” where such persons feel they can give themselves license to take the lives of people who are, for them anyway, nothing but a hated abstraction. We have seen a shooter in an entertainment area of Toronto, and a fellow drive a van onto a side walk in the same city killing multiple people. The killers did not know any of them – humans had become an unacceptable abstraction that they wanted to terminate.

We bewail the “what” with scant reference to the “why” and the “how”. Why and how did these people come to see humans as targets?

Maybe we should head back to the Internet.  

Dare I say that in spite of social media, the Internet is a deeply flawed social space. There are connections, but they are electronic connections mostly not real connections. It is not possible to have literally hundreds of “friends” and have the word mean anything more than that someone clicked a button.

Can someone who has real and regular human interactions kill as if their targets are abstractions?  In a word, “yes” (see Nazis…), but the Internet may make it easier, because there everything and everyone is to some extent an abstraction.  The essential distance that these people would need to have from the basic reality of other people in order to kill then with no concern is pre-built into the system itself.

I deleted my multiple Facebook and Linkedin pages recently, as well as some extra e-mail addresses that I hardly ever used. I have started meeting humans more often, and allowing their essential reality to permeate my on-going existence.  

So far, no regrets.