[S]omeone who scrawls an Italian antifascist slogan onto a bullet casing and also “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO,” as well as obscure video game references… this is exactly who I’m talking about. Clearly he had some sort of ideological urge, some sense that his violence should contain meaning, but his impulses and influences are incoherent; indeed, that urge has been inculcated in online communities that are defined by nothing so much as, well, nothing – the all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture, forum after forum dominated by an endless race to the bottom of nihilism and self-hatred.
An assassin whose express motivation is a confused mishmash of ideological fragments and video game references is just one asshole with a gun. The 21st century violent tendency among angry, directionless people whose brains have bathed in online nihilism? That’s the perfect, tragic embodiment of the strange attractor, in the sense that I mean. The act of violence itself is not the product of a coherent belief system; it is the chaotic process by which the individual attempts to construct one. The “antifascist” label and the video game tropes are not the cause of the violence, they are the disorganized, post-hoc rationalizations for a pre-existing state of violent kinetic energy. They are the cognitive debris that has been pulled into the orbit of the strange attractor. This individual is not driven by conviction, but by a profound lack of it. They have been starved of clear, socially-sanctioned purpose and, in that vacuum, have latched onto whatever ambient signals – political noise, digital fantasies, the uniquely dehumanizing meme cultures that men have built online around their shared hobbies – they can find to justify a self-selected purpose: destruction.The Kirk murder, in this context, is not an act of political terrorism; it is a desperate, violent assertion of personal meaning by a pathetic, immoral agent operating in a system experiencing a collapse of meaning. The assassin is the ultimate product of a society that has become a cacophony of contradictory signals. Unable to process a single, clear purpose, the individual becomes a tragic automaton, compelled by a violent impulse and forced to invent a narrative that can, however briefly, make sense of the carnage. The ideology is not the map to the violence; it is the bewildered commentary on a journey that has already begun.
He loses me — or my nod-along attention, at least — with much of the math and analogies that follow. But that’s not because he isn’t in some significant way on to something:
The grim certainty of a positive Lyapunov exponent means that the system is no longer governed by its grandest political narratives, but by its lowest-level noise. We are entering a state where the societal trajectory is not defined by policy or ideology, but by which random, unanchored individual next provides the minuscule perturbation that will send the entire manifold spiraling into a new, unknowable orbit. The signal is no longer at the top, but is rather buried in the entropic static of the digital substrate, waiting for a low-inertia vessel to broadcast it to the world and in doing so spread this empty, bloody gospel.
Needless to say, this is pretty hopeless and terrifying stuff. So rather than say, as Mr. deBoer goes on to conclude, “This is where the concept of self-organized criticality becomes paramount,” I’m happy to stick with the still messy but very good gospel as presented by Stanley Hauerwas:
Eschatology is a big word that says when Jesus was conceived in Mary’s belly, a new world was born. That’s the reason why I say that Christians are not called to live lives of nonviolence because we believe non-violence is a way to rid the world of war. But in a world of war, as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything other than non-violent, because it’s not like you have to make the world non-violent. Jesus did it. Jesus did it. Our problem is we don’t believe that. Now the question is, “How do you, as a church, embody that kind of truthfulness that is required for people to live non-violent with one another, because we’re willing to tell one another the truth?” I mean, the truth is hard to bear. God loves us, and we think that’s good for God. But how to turn that into trust is a very hard matter.
I’ll take that challenge, on those terms. Yins can keep yur “self-organized criticality.”
