Psychopathology, Grandiosity, Guns

In the on-going debate over gun control, a discussion which is invigorated  anew after each (seemingly more frequent) episode of a mass shooting, there is one argument I have not noticed (I’m sure if I read enough, though, of course I’d find it), and that is this: That guns don’t merely magnify the damage a psychopathic person will do, but, that guns, and the possibility they can offer people for commanding a vast, awe-inspiring magnitude for violence, are in fact what attracts the sick person to committing to a pre-meditated violent action in the first place.

In this situations, guns are always described as increasingly a killer’s effectiveness, which is of course true. A man with a knife cannot inflict as much damage or command as much terror as a man carrying three semi-autmoic pistols. But these guns gain additional significance to people who suffer the way Eliot Rodger, the shooter in Alta Vista last Friday, did: guns signify, and manifest, by their acquisition and use, the power that the sick person lacks in life. Rodger felt a lack of affection, a lack of respect, a lack of ‘status’, and felt, generally, that he didn’t fit into the human world that he thought most everybody else did with ease. He fantasized about ways to counter this imbalance, and many of those fantasies were violent.

Along with the dead, the wounded, the traumatized, and the grieving, Elliot Rodger left also us with something else: his 140-page manifesto. It is an articulate expression of a particular mass shooter’s psyche - and the public rarely get’s glimpses into the minds of the killers like this memoir of his offers. And one thing it makes clear is this desire for respect, this desire for ‘alpha-ness’, this desire to be considered a godlike by those who one believes has slighted one.

Eliot Rodger felt incapable of succeeding in life. He compulsively played the on-line video game World of Warcraft - a virtual environment where he could continually become more and more powerful in a world whose rules who understood. In that space, he could succeed, and become, so-to-speak, ‘alpha’, by which I mean to say, he could find satisfaction through success, if not also a sense of being better than others.

If that video game gave Rodger a way to feeling godlike in a virtual setting, the guns he bought were a way for him to feel godlike in his real life.

In Rodger’s manifesto, he describes his suffering at hands of, as he sees it, women, and also society and the human species, for putting him in a world where he feels he can’t succeed, where he could get sex or affection. As his grievances intensify, so do his fantasies of becoming a god of retribution. Eventually, he starts planning his day of pre-mediated violence, calling it “The Day of Reckoning." I quote two of his passages at length to give a picture of the power of violence that so attracted him.

"I am not part of the human race. Humanity has rejected me. The females of the human species have never wanted to mate with me, so how could I possibly consider myself part of humanity? Humanity has never accepted me among them, and now I know why. I am more than human. I am superior to them all. I am Elliot Rodger... Magnificent, glorious, supreme, eminent... Divine! I am the closest thing there is to a living god. Humanity is a disgusting, depraved, and evil species. It is my purpose to punish them all. I will purify the world of everything that is wrong with it. On the Day of Retribution, I will truly be a powerful god, punishing everyone I deem to be impure and depraved.”

“Humanity struck at me first by condemning me to experience so much suffering. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. I didn’t start this war... I wasn’t the one who struck first... But I will finish it by striking back. I will punish everyone. And it will be beautiful. Finally, at long last, I can show the world my true worth."

Rodger had an injured, grandiose psyche. Three semi-automatic pistols offered him a unique outlet to his felt grievances.

In short, then, here it is, another argument for better gun control:

Gun’s aren’t merely tools; to the psychotic, the gun can offer an aura of power, a sensation of validation and domination over others. In extreme cases of the mentally sick, killing others in a violent spectacle might seem like the only available method of balancing the sick person's feelings of inadequacy. Guns offer these people a unique path towards salvation, by way of massacre and self-annihilation, and the mere accessibility of these weapons may be what pushes a psychopathic person over the threshold from anti-social misery to committed violence against others.

Signs and Symbols

Jung distinguishes between the two.  

A sign is something that has a set meaning, such as a stop sign. 

A symbol is something which can provide many readings of itself. Furthermore, a symbol’s meanings depend on their context, in a story, in a dream, and does not provide a meaning independently. Jung takes symbols a little further, too, expressing possible mystical significance in their suggestion of mystery: "A symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning. It implies something vague, unknown, or hidden from us."

Some objects are intentionally highly symbolic, such a Tarot cards. Some people call such objects ‘projection holders’: not only do they gather potential meanings via context of other cards, the reading go them also makes use of of the participant’s psyche and projections. 

Symbol making is one function of stories - certain objects or situations or motifs become imbued with extra meaning behind the things themselves. There is no one meaning; they gather complexity through contingencies.The Blindfold in Le Guin’s Gifts, the golden mongoose in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the oar at the end of the Oddyssey, the Boots in All Quiet on the Western Front.

In further discussion on symbols and signs, their difference can be understood as another quality which makes a story good or bad, and that is, does the story ask to be read, or is it delivered as statement. Are we, the audience, given the elements of reality to put together,

I think about this in terms of Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. The story’s structure and elements are great - the narrative frame is of the nymphomaniac telling her life story to an asexual witness, who provides interpretive, bookish digressions. We are constantly invited to unpack and interpret her story; sometimes the interpretations are interesting, sometimes they fail to capture her complex reality. We are given elements, and the story is arranging them so that we can interpret in relation to all the others.

It’s great. And then it sucks. In the ending, the Lars Von Trier stops inviting us to read a reality he’s built, and, dismissing much of the reality he’s built for us, forces his characters to do something out of character for a shocking ending. The man, who’ve known for the past four hours as deeply patient and kind and patently asexual, decides off screen that, in fact, he does want to have sex, and, why not, he will achieve that via raping his friend. And she decides to shoot him dead. This rough pulling the strings of the characters is, I suppose, Lars Von Triers wanting to make a statement, he, Lars Von Trier. He stopped making a story that functioned symbolically in order to make a sign: This is what I think. 

It is an valuable tension to think about in story writings.