When Will The Decision-Makers Finally Listen To Reason?

Subtitle: The Roots of This Senseless, Senseless Violence; The Culture of Winners Versus Losers, of Intolerance Versus Tolerance.

by Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo, Philosopher.

There really is no way for me to express with words how sad and angry this sick, senseless atrocity in Binghamton, New York makes me feel. I wish I could express my deep sympathy to each and every person whose loved one was murdered. Yes, there are reasons why people become extremely sick and we continue to ignore the obvious answers concerning how we can actually reduce such incidents from happening in the future, but there is never an excuse for such acts of violence...never! Obviously this was not perpetrated by someone with any remaining sense of humanity, compassion or respect for the humanity of others. And obviously the perpetrator of this most cowardly and disturbing criminal act of mass murder is further evidence of just how violent our world has become and how important it is for communities to find ways to provide the kind of social, emotional and physical intervention long before anyone reaches such a senselessly sick state of mind! And I am not talking about profiling people for the purpose of further disenfranchising them and making them feel even more threatened by society. For ignored and/or improperly and inadequately handled mental illness gets worse over time. Especially when the greater society at large is already plagued by a culture, and subcultures, of fortuitous violent conditioners, such as some types of video games, so-called sporting events, unjustified types of wars and improper military training methods, and certain types of movies that unrealisitically or too explicitly portray senselessly fortuitous scenes of violence, extreme cruelty and barbarism!

Another major factor is how much of our modern technologies are over-relied-on and/or misused, whereby people do not develop the right set of social graces and emotional sophistication to be able to create and maintain healthy social lives, both in terms of real platonic friendship(s) or friendship(s) of a more intimate kind. The re-enforcement of the expectation of quick, instant and superficial
self-gratification that lacks the ability to provide the kind of deeper, truly meaningful human social contact born of patience, tolerance, compassion, sharing and emotional and verbal honesty is very much at the heart of this catastrophic state of affairs! Too many persons are way too dependent on the kind of virtual reality electronic computer-based networking tools, which can never fully substitute the need for direct human contact, and yet too many people are living in fear of the fact that too many laws supposedly meant to better protect society tend to actually make it even more difficult for people to risk attemptying to befriend today’s stranger who was yesterday’s friend somewhere else and who could be tomorrow’s friend yet! In a sense we have managed to create a most unhealthy society by overlegislating social behavior, by throwing out the baby with the dirtwater, by failing to provide proper, relatively safe, alternative venues for people to meet and make new friends not based only on some set of narrow interests, but
based on our greater universal humanity! In a sense we cannot really have it both ways when it comes to living in open and democratic societies! We cannot have public law and government that is either neutral or even hostile to universalist human values, in effect societies which ignore the need for a greater sense of human connectedness and which ignore or oppose creative, relatively safe alternative venues for adults to release their frustrations in non-violent ways and where they can make new friends that are based on deeper emtional foundations! We cannot have a society that expects its citizens to be honest at work and when dealing with authorities but which somehow punishes honesty in human relations. You either have a society that only extols so-called conservative family-clan-centric social values, private elitist social groups and strict monogamy, which then, especially in hard economic times (but not only then), pushes the “losers” into extreme conditions that sometimes cause an already unstable person to explode in senseless rage and violence, or you have a society that seeks to accommodate to the most basic social, physical and matterial needs of the least of its members! A society that only awards its winners is a losing proposition! (A society that only awards its winners is a losing society!) A society that always has decent consolation prizes for those who did not win, that is to say a society that does not criminalize the natural needs of those whose matterial means are limited, is a winning society! Of course,
there are those who will point out the extreme failure of the Sixties Hippy Era and the kind of harm that comes from that kind of lax, laissez-faire, do as you please attitude! But to suggest that there is only two opposite extreme choices; one that is too Puritanistic for its own good and the other that is too loose for its own
good risks denying the possibility of a true alternative in which the traditionalist conservatives can still have their own lives in their private spaces and the responsibly progressive liberals can have their alternative lifestyles in relatively safer ways!

Whatever the specifics behind the personality traits of this mass murdering psycho may be, the fact of the matter is this: eight years of almost total rule by pseudo-democratic neo-conservative idealists has actually made things much worse in greater American society at large and these kind of atrocities are its result and would actually become less likely in a country that makes it perfectly clear that the only real American Way is that which is non-violent unity-in-diversity-oriented and in which government not only seeks to reduce access to the means to do harm, but seeks to work with the private sector to establish drug-free social venues where natural emotional and even physical intimacy is not discouraged! After all, there is a reason that the de-nazification of post-WW2 Germany included creating those kind of venues for adults to release excess stress and to develop deeper emotional relationships! It is only more recently in Germany that government once more began to meddle in the ability of poor adults to meet one another! Just as so-called Communism unleashed a chain of events that still destroys lives, even after the system has been gone, so do all other forms of extremist ideological systems, which includes that side of the Hippy Movement that mixed substance abuse with so-called Free Love, including that of the Neo-Cons!

The point is this: if we want a safer America (and World) then we need a saner America (and World), and if we want a saner America we need to realize that if those who are poor, unemployed and in great financial and matterial difficulty at least have all their basic, minimum needs provided for, especially their need for social relations, from purely platonic ones to ones that help sattisfy a need for intimate yet truly honest, respectful, physical and emotional relationships (including for those who are considered by the majority as odd-balls, non-conformists and into fringe lifetstyles), then people are less likely to totally lose their minds and become capable of such atrocities!

Restoring Humanism In America.

To my way of thinking, 21st Century America, thus far, has suffered much more than the murder of innocents on 9-11-2001. It has also suffered from the mass effect of the commercial mass media and the corporations that produce too much junk (mind you, not all American corporations produce junk).

Too many Americans have grown up under the dangerous influence of unrealistically violent cartoons, movies and video games.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm definitely opposed to any form of government imposed censorship and in fact it is my sincere conviction that all these unrealistic depictions and portrayals of violence (war and crime) should be allowed to be viewed by anyone, so long as each of those cartoons, movies and video games comes with a short, roughly three minutes long, mini-documentary that shows what real violence is like and how it destroys life and harms us all in so many other ways beyond the immediately obvious blood, carnage and death.

Anyway, we Americans are overwhelmed by all the hate, fear, violence and insecurity that has convinced many Europeans living in less violent countries, that we are a country full of mentally deranged and dangerous people, and that we glorify violence and brutality to the point that in some ways we begin to resemble the Fascists and Nazis of times past and present. That said, part of the overall problem we face is that a large enough minority of Americans, perhaps around 40%, live in relative comfort and safety, and would be quick to dismiss an Op-Ed piece like this as going too far and making more of a problem out of something that they are certain is not as bad as it seems. That is to say, those of us Americans who can afford to stay away from the poverty, crime and daily corruption that plague most of our large inner city metropolises and many of our suburbs, have no experiential reason to feel equally adamant about what both visiting Europeans experience, and what disenfranchised working class autodidacts can clearly see, day in and day out! This convenient ignoring of the full picture reminds me of that famous Alfred E. Neumann catch-phrase (MAD magazine) which goes "What, me worry?!" Because, nothing is considered a real problem until it affects you directly in person! And Europeans can see this great and growing gap (divide) between the relative "haves" and the "have nots" of America, and for them that attitude of ignorance, of failing to see the whole picture, combined with America's unintentional culture of unrealistic and fortuitous violence makes for an America that is not only a danger to itself, but, being so wealthy, military powerful and economically influential, is a threat to the rest of humanity, to world peace!

What advice do I have for my fellow Americans?

Well, we need to restore humanism to America. For there was a time after the Civil War and even up till the 1980s when many relatively educated Americans, mostly from the Middle Class, sought the wisdom of the great humanists, such as Gandhi, Einstein and Asimov, and were willing to go out of their way to help inform, educate and sometimes befriend those less fortunate!

Well, skepticism and complacency, have managed to ravage American humanism and we now live, for the most part, in a society that is too much in the hands of opportunists and desperate novices! There is even, to some extent, a severe disconnect and inability to cope on the part of many of the remaining depleted Middle Class, to the point where reality avoidance is commonplace and people tend to build walls based on seemingly convenient theories about how:
a. things are actually not that bad, b. people who claim otherwise are just mentally ill misfits and troublemakers, and c. the real problem is the suffering of people much further away and usually abroad! This culture of denial and reactionary thinking is so common today that just by writing this kind of Op-Ed Blog I risk being labelled everything the opposite of what I actually am! For those who have somehow managed to attain and keep their own comfort zones, people like me are perceived as dangerous threats and obstacles to greater social harmony! Never mind that they cannot seem to understand and explain the cause of all those sick overreactions and psychotic people, whose senseless, despicable violent acts harm so many innocents and only serve to make things even worse than they were to begin with! Never mind that throughout history it took the daring and risky intervention of truly introspective, critically thinking , relatively non-violent radicals to bring about true progress and more meaningful human civilization. No. The enfranchised large minority of "haves" tend, by virtue of their immediate circumstances and daily experience, mediocre and dissociated from the rest of us. And they do so to their own detriment without really realizing it!

In order to restore humanism in America we are going to have to instigate, motivate and inspire the "haves" to think critically and not hypocritically, to dare face the painful truth that all it really not well with America as a whole, and that all those horrible incidents that make up so much of the local news are symptomatic of a society that actually disrespects,neglects, ignores or even punishes those who make every reasonable effort to be honest and constructive individuals, instead of rewarding their humanity, their honesty and creativity!

But how do we go about instigating, motivating and inspiring the "haves" to seriously dedicate themselves to the great, most meaningful, and spiritually (and emotionally) rewarding goal of providing the "have nots" with all the real means to elevate themselves out of their dire predicaments?

The answer lies in promoting broad and deep philosophical discourse at all levels of society and in the mass media working to re-enforce the idea that what anyone should really strive for and praise is wisdom, compassion and love and not vanity, greed and self-adulation!

That's my Free Advice, for whatever it is worth.

(PS: If you agree, disagree or have anything to say at all, leave a comment.)