AFTER ARIZONA MASSACRE, WHAT’S NEXT IN ANGLO-SAXON AMERICA?

Erle Frayne D. Argonza


Americans were shocked again by another event of mass murders done by an expectedly sociopathic man—a certain Mr. Loughner, 22 year-old White man. Just about a month ago, a White man in the east coast shocked Americans when he shot at a school board’s officials before shooting himself to death.

Aren’t Americans supposedly inured to such sociopathic murders already? Not only Americans, but White men and women shouldn’t be shocked at all over such tragic deaths, as White society has been showing increasing signs of madness over the last 150 years or so.

I’m sure nobody has forgotten Jack the Ripper. At the time the crimes of serial murders were done by the diabolical killer over a century ago, sociologists were busying themselves with studying the fragmentation of the collective mind in modern society, which has been the cause of crimes and suicides.

Just go back to the works of Emile Durkheim, George Simmel, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and you would browse for yourselves the painstaking inquiries and theorizing done by sociologists then to capture the fragmentary state that institutions and the collective mind were undergoing.

Onwards through the latter half of the 20th century, Western (read: Caucasian) thinkers haven’t ceased to capture in theory what was going on behind society’s structures that was cause behind fractured minds and sociopathic behavior. Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean Francois Lyotard, Jacques Baudrillard, to name a few luminaries, continued the tradition of studying the fragmenting society, psyche, and their expressions in symbolic constructs.

So, with the latest round of massacre expectedly by another White man, what else is new in Anglo-Saxon America? That gunner’s psyche is fragmenting, rendering him as a dangerous walking predator of sorts. Too many Anglo-Saxon men and women, followed by their colored people who were socialized into the Anglo-Saxon’s culture, are fragmenting in their psyche just as White society’s institutions have been disintegrating (read Baudrillard, Lyotard, Foucault).

Let’s get this straight: the phenomenon of sociopathic massacres is highest in the United States, though it is also prevalent in other Western countries. In contrast, such massacres are nearly absent in the ‘emerging markets’ that are today’s growth drivers of the global economy.

One need not even resort to using statistical correlates or chi square test to check whether being White man’s country is a predictor of such sociopathic murders. And among White man’s countries, the USA is topmost in the total incidence of such a ‘deviant’ or ‘abnormal’ behavior.

I did discuss the matter of mass massacres with my mother very recently. She acquired American citizenship and is already retired, though she chose to have a dual citizenship. She is very much aware of the social pathology that goes on in the USA, and was of the opinion that the next mass massacre is just around the bend.

So I raised the ‘research problem’ to my Mom about when would be the next massacre in case? Using intuitive forecasting, based on pass trends, I surmised that most likely over the next six (6) weeks at least, another massacre will take place somewhere in Anglo-Saxon America, and most likely it will be a White man committing the crime.

I won’t be surprised if my own estimate of one massacre in six weeks will turn out to be badly underestimated, that a couple or more will take place in the days ahead. A society that is in deep crisis—socially, culturally, economically, politically—is replete with possibilities of pathologically-induced massacres.

To comprehend their own states of being, I would counsel Americans (predominantly White Anglo-Saxon) to go back to the work of the late Pitirim Sorokin titled Crisis of our Age. Likewise read the works of Daniel Bell concerning the unfolding Post-Industrial society up North.

Well, there also was the late Jurgen Habermas who reflected on the ‘legitimation crisis’ and its attendant malaise in White societies. From Habermas you can branch out to the works of Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch.

But this is what Americans ought to think about: time is running out on America. Too many luminaries up North have written about the fragmentary society and psyche, yet Americans failed to grapple with the realities unfolding, failed to address the fragmentation process with ‘best practices’ done at all levels.

Americans better be quick in altering the course of their history, for the compass of the unfolding history points towards sinking in quicksands of uncertainties, chaos, and a Dark Age.

[Philippines, 15 January 2011]

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