Ours is the age of exceptional violence. Violent crime is at historic lows, murder rates are dropping across the country, and yet, acts of public violence which would have once been shocking are now regular. On Saturday evening, a gunman attacked the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in an attempt to assassinate President Trump. What followed was perfectly unsurprising. Within minutes, accounts on social media were spreading absurd conspiracy theories about a “staged” attack, just as they had following previous assasination attempts on the President. Others wished for more shootings. Strikingly, the alleged gunman’s manifesto cites his Christian faith and desire to protect the oppressed as his motives; twisted as his logic may be, he is hardly alone in endorsing political violence for these reasons. A national dynamic like this would have been unthinkable just ten years ago. Now, assassination attempts, conspiracy, and death wishes are part of the fabric of public life. Something critical has broken in the American psyche.
We have long known the degrading effects of violence. In her classic essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” French philosopher Simone Weil makes the point that violence is dehumanizing to all, not just those on its receiving end: “force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.” Force, Weil says, turns people into things. It turns the victim into an object (in the most extreme case, a corpse) and makes the wielder lose their humanity. She points out that it is almost impossible to use force with moderation; violence pulls us on further and further into the extremes. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, “all who take the sword will die by the sword.”
Weil, though, could not have envisioned what the social media age would mean for our relationship to force. The contemporary landscape has blurred the line between wielder, victim, and spectator. Killers write detailed manifestos filled with meme jokes and social media references; assassins like Luigi Mangione receive thousands of letters from their social media fans; and mobs of internet users on the far-left and far-right alike craft detailed conspiracy theories that simultaneously deny and celebrate violent acts. The social media users who stay at home receive their share of dehumanization whenever they celebrate or deny violence. And with posts dreaming up new targets and romanticizing killers, they certainly will bear part of the blame for inspiring the next killing. Social media gives the illusion of separation, but online actions have real world consequences, and there is no simple way to wash one’s hands clean. When political violence becomes a spectator sport, is it really surprising that new killers keep cropping up?
