In his book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker observes how human beings are unique as the only creatures with the mental capacity to know that death is coming for them. The other types of animals don't live with this knowledge as far as we're aware, and therefore they don't have to experience the dissonance that comes from it. Becker writes that "The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days--that's something else."
To reconcile this awareness of one's impermanence, writes Becker, one embraces the cultural conventions they're surrounded by so they can function with the sense that this impermanence doesn't matter, or even that it doesn't exist. Becker assesses that a man "learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn't have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge."
These are the psychological tools that humans use in order to not be overwhelmed by existential horror. We allow ourselves to be shaped by our conditions, because those conditions provide the structure needed to make the reality of death no longer feel absurd. What I wonder is: where does this dynamic take us when we're surrounded by the conditions of today's world? What about when that knowledge of death is expanded to knowledge about the climate crisis, and about all the other destabilizing factors that will be made worse by our deteriorating climate? And what about when the conditions we're surrounded by are ones that have been designed--appropriately by the same social class that created the climate's disruption--to incentivize us towards ruthless competition and violence?
The psychological purpose of war during a time of catastrophe
"A rogue virus, no jobs, sky-high-tuition debt. Life is trying to put our generation on the sidelines. But we refuse to just sit back and watch it pass us by. Instead, watch us fly ahead. Watch us overcome anything. Watch us rise." So says a recent U.S. military recruitment advertisement, over depictions of young people jogging to train for their time in service. A similar ad begins with a military spokesman saying, "The news says Gen Z is struggling. Well I've got news for them-- This is followed by military members describing how they've accomplished the wild feats their commanding officers have demanded of them.
The chaotic events from America's recent history have provided military recruiters with a rhetorical tool that's historically served public-relations efforts well. This is the tool of appealing to one's desire to defy their circumstances, to embrace the denial of death. In the U.S. military's case, that device's success is proving to be negligible, as the armed forces have this year failed to meet their recruitment goal. This is unsurprising given the context surrounding these ads, which were intended to convey a sense of tough love towards the youth but may have merely come across as out of touch. The problem the current generation faces is not simply that its conditions are increasingly inhospitable, but that the ruling class has a vested interest in maintaining those conditions. And in continuing to make those conditions worse.
As indicated by surveys showing waning support for capitalism among young people, that's the conclusion Generation Z and their slightly older peers have largely come to after seeing the developments from their formative years. They've witnessed the banks get bailed out after engineering the economy's destruction, the government refuse to take sufficient action on the pandemic in order to keep profits up (something that also applies to global warming), and countless other inconsistencies between what the ruling institutions claim to be and what they actually do. Due to their for the most part only being exposed to the pro-NATO side in the information war over Ukraine, they don't necessarily blame their government for the inflation crisis, but they do see that something is amiss when Biden goes back on his promise to end their tuition debt. They intuitively get the impression that their government is increasingly trying to subject them to the "poverty draft," a fact those ads serve to obfuscate. The military is arguing to them that their deteriorating conditions are the perfect reason for them to join the armed forces, but their natural impulse is to ask: "and who's responsible for those conditions?"
Due to these contradictions, the U.S. war machine is unable to find a receptive audience for its appeals to death denial, at least in growing numbers. But just because many of today's struggling youth don't see U.S. imperialism as worth fighting for, doesn't mean war as a concept isn't getting more attractive to plenty among these disaffected individuals. As the myths that hold together the American project get seen as less credible, the urge to take drastic action that our conditions prompt is getting displaced onto activities other than joining the military. Activities like militant radicalism.
Such a reaction to our conditions, in which somebody is so alienated from our institutions that they eschew joining the military for going off on their own domestic military adventures, is observable only among a certain type. The young organizers whom I work with for the most part have been more interested in building ties with the community than in arms training, though that may one day change should the conditions prompt a more militant set of priorities from the liberation movements. Those most likely to gravitate towards weapons at this stage are the kinds of men who've been influenced by the USA's military culture, and who've either sought to continue a military lifestyle after serving in the armed forces, or want to replicate the experience of a military tour despite not intending to serve.
These types of men who seek out violence for the sake of it can overlap with radical left-wing spheres, in which cases they're either ejected from their organizing spaces for being liabilities or find ostensibly leftist groups that accommodate their desires. But they're most culturally recognizable as the angry men who go to boards on places like 4Chan. In a 2016 issue of The Baffler, Angela Nagle observed how the sentiments of these forums regularly translate to actual violence, violence that takes more versatile forms than the many famous mass shootings associated with these online spaces:
Overwrought digital threats and confrontational online rhetoric are nearly as old as the Internet itself. Posters on 4chan/b/'s more transgressive threads regularly claim that they are about to do terrible things to themselves and others. But some posters are also acting out those fantasies. Among the stale memes, repeat posts, true-life confessions, pre-rampage tip-offs, and co*k-and-bull stories that make beta forums so impenetrable, sometimes even insiders can't tell which are which. In November 2014, an anonymous 4chan user submitted several photos of what appeared to be a woman's naked and strangled corpse, along with a confession: "Turns out it's way harder to strangle someone to death than it looks on the movies... Her son will be home from school soon. He'll find her then call the cops. I just wanted to share the pics before they find me. I bought a bb gun that looks realistic enough. When they come, I'll pull it and it will be suicide by cop. I understand the doubts. Just check the f*cking news. I have to lose my phone now." Later that same day, police in Port Orchard, Washington, announced that they were investigating a suspected homicide, after the thirteen-year-old son of a woman in her early thirties found her dead in their home. The victim, Amber Lynn Coplin, was indeed the woman in the 4chan/b/ photo.
These forums encourage such crimes through the cultivation of an image of what a man's role is in the modern world. Nagle calls this version of masculinity "the new man of 4Chan." This new man, says Nagle, is a misogynist who's ideologically informed not by traditional patriarchal conservatism, but by a counterculture strain that's aligned with the "ultra" elements of the left. This strain looks down upon the "normies" and "chads" who lack the intellectual refinement of the in-group, and who've supposedly created a dynamic of sexual inequity where the enlightened men are shut out from relationships with women. "Here the counterculturalists of the beta world are tapping into a misogynic tradition--only it's aligned with the bohemian left, not the buttoned-down right," writes Nagle.
Nagle's conclusion, as indicated by the many examples within her essay of the white supremacist and misogynist violence tied to Chan culture, is that the logical consequence of these ideas is for men to want to wage war. They don't need the military to tell them to engage in violence, and the cynical Chan-board types are some of the people least likely to find the military's recent ads compelling. Though the military's subtler propaganda no doubt impacts how they think about violence; for decades, the Pentagon has been modifying films, shows, and video games to communicate the war-glorifying ideas that imperialism wants society to value. As the journalist Caitlin Johnstone has written about the men who go down the mass-shooter pipeline, their being saturated in military propaganda has driven them to see mass murder as the solution:
The three most overlooked and under-appreciated aspects of the human experience are (1) consciousness itself, (2) the extent to which compulsive thinking habits dominate our lives, and (3) the extent to which we are influenced by domestic propaganda. American society is saturated in war propaganda, and has been for a long time, to the extent that hardly anyone even notices it anymore. It's like that old joke about the two fish who are asked "How's the water?" by a passing duck and then turn to each other to ask "What's water?"; things like ubiquitous flag worship, intelligence and defense agencies influencing Hollywood movie scripts, the way the mass media consistently rallies in support of every new military campaign while ignoring the endless ongoing nature of old ones; these things are all so pervasively normalized that they don't stand out against the background much.
The nature of their conditions, in which they're living in a collapsing society where violence is encouraged by their militarized culture, is itself enough to compel them to wage war. And the cycle of shootings, which gets more intense every year, is only one element within a broader trend. Since the start of the pandemic, the country's decades-long decline in violent crime rates has been reversed in places like Oakland, whose social dysfunction reflects that of the country's other urban areas. This crime surge has come along with a growth in the country's gangs, and with a rise in domestic violence--the latter of which is as much of a statistical omen for other violent crimes as the former. Within both the petty bourgeois or labor aristocratic elements that make up the historic social base for fascism, and within the lumpenproletarian class that's been pushed to the economy's margins, war is increasingly seen as the solution. Which is a trend our socioeconomic system seeks to encourage.
During the climate crisis, capital demands that war be made more prevalent
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