The Wizards of Ozymandias

On December 5, 2007, nineteen year-old Robert Hawkins went on a shooting spree at a shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, killing eight persons plus himself, and wounding four others.

Now that I have your attention, did you find yourself offended by the title of this piece? Good! It was intended to be offensive, not because I derive any pleasure from the angry reaction of others, but to make a point as bluntly and as poignantly as I can.

What if I had created a bumper-sticker with such a message on it, attached it to my car, which I then drove around Omaha—a city in which I lived for some nine years. Would you—or my fellow Omahans—be rightfully angered by my actions? My message would be clear enough: urging others to heap praise and support upon those who go about killing innocent men and women. The “bad-taste police” might be the least of my worries from such an action: I might even find myself criminally charged with aiding and abetting the crime of murder!

What kind of twisted mind could concoct such a message, you may wonder? When a mass-killing is followed by a similar atrocity elsewhere, many are quick to label the latter the work of a “copy-cat” killer. I shall fall back on the same explanation: my proposed bumper-sticker is “copycatted” from the works of others, as we shall see.

While young Robert Hawkins was carrying out his mayhem, there were doubtless many cars in the shopping center parking lot with bumper-stickers reading “support the troops.” What does this message mean if not for us to offer comfort and encouragement to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan; to provide our confirmation of the validity of what they are doing in those countries? And what are they doing, if not killing thousands of men, women, and children? How have Iraqi civilians been any more deserving of the death and suffering visited upon them than were the customers and workers at a shopping mall? Whose innocence is entitled to greater respect or protection in either battle zone?

Most of us—in whatever nation, religion, or culture we were raised—are uncomfortable exploring the dysfunctional and destructive nature of our thinking. Our identities are so wrapped up in such collective abstractions that we regard any critical examination of them as a challenge to our personal worthiness. It is far more comforting to take the easy route of casting the world into camps of the “good” and the “bad,” and to follow leaders who reassure us of the school-playground principle that “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

Our institutionalized thinking—which you and I, alone, have produced and are capable of changing—has turned us into the reactive beings eager to man the barricades of whatever conflicts the established order chooses for us. I suspect that if the present administration were to declare Lapland part of the “axis of evil,” most Americans would accept such a characterization, and turn upon neighbors who displayed reindeer Christmas decorations as “terrorist-sympathizers.” To voice any doubts to the contrary would be to entertain the possibility that the very core of their identities is grounded in lies.

In this way, faceless “others” become the shadow forces against whom we fight in a vain effort to find peace within ourselves. Randolph Bourne’s “war is the health of the state,” and Charles Beard’s “perpetual war for perpetual peace,”1 reveal far more than the destructive foundations of every political system. Worse yet—and what we choose not to know—they reveal who and what we have made of ourselves. So much of the content of motion pictures, television, video games, and the lyrics of popular music, are awash in themes of violence. But these expressions of our culture are not the causes of our difficulties, but only a reflection of who we are. Not wanting to endure the pain of self-examination, we focus on Hollywood, or drugs, or the availability of guns, to explain what we have made of ourselves and, derivatively, the society in which we live. We will put a “support the troops” bumper-sticker on our cars as a way of disguising our refusal to challenge our own thinking.

In his despairing suicide note, Robert Hawkins lamented the “meaningless existence” of his life. But where, within the families or the cultures in which they are raised, are children encouraged to find a sense of “meaning?” For most, any existential purpose usually amounts to little more than an attachment to some external agency—an institution—that offers but a superficial, ersatz significance. What school system, for instance, spends any amount of time helping a child develop his or her own sense of being if it does not serve institutional interests? Behavior-modifying drugs await the child who insists upon pursuing his or her own interests in most school systems, prescriptions that have almost always been found in the case histories of young mass-murderers. At their worst, government schools are breeding farms for the domesticated humanoids who provide the energy to operate and sustain institutional machinery. At their best, they help children discover and get trained for their assigned stall in the organizational hierarchy.

I recently saw a couple getting out of their car in a parking lot. Their auto was a bandwagon of slogans for the war system: “proud parents of a sailor,” “support the troops,” and other patriotic messages adorned with flags. The man also wore a very noisy T-shirt that proclaimed his commitment to the war effort. I thought to myself what terrible parents these people must have been, to not only fail to protect their child from the war system that wants to consume him or her, but to brazenly celebrate it! If their child should die in battle in furtherance of the state’s political and economic ambitions, will they regard the death as the fulfillment of a “meaningful existence?”

Before answering such a question, every parent should think back to the sense of “meaningless existence” that preceded Robert Hawkins’ suicide attack in Omaha. One of the stories unreported from most of the mainstream media relates to the high suicide rates among soldiers. In one investigation, CBS discovered that, in the year 2005 alone, at least 6,256 suicides were reported among those who had served in the military,2 while another study revealed that, during the period 2005-2010, members of the military committed suicide at a rate of once every 36 hours.3 Apparently, a chestful of medals was not sufficient to remove the sense of “meaninglessness” experienced by so many young people who directed their violence against foreigners; there was no felt transcendence associated with being a fusilier in an invading imperial horde.

Within a handful of years, we shall begin to glimpse an answer to whether America will remain in its present state of free-fall, or whether individual intelligence will overcome mass-mindedness in informing social behavior. The decentralizing role of the Internet and other personalized technologies provide encouragement for the future, as do the efforts of Ron Paul and his spontaneous network of individualized supporters to extend such peaceful, creative, and orderly transformations. This continuing movement away from the vertically-structured power systems that destroy humanity is what, above all else, terrifies the stockholders of the established order. The early confrontation between Ron Paul and the disingenuous Rudy Giuliani concerning the explanations for 9/11 raised the kinds of inquiries the rulers do not want considered.

What established authorities fear the most is an answer to the question raised by the bumper-sticker from the 1960s: “what if they gave a war and nobody came?”

4This phrase became the title of a book by Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953). Barnes attributed the words to Beard.

5www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/13/cbsnews_investigates/main349671.shtml

6Report, Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicides (Center for a New American Security, October, 2011). www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_LosingTheBattle_HarrellBerglass.pdf

• 1T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925.
• 2Bretigne Shaffer, “Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the World,” in Why Peace, Marc Guttman, ed. (Marc Guttman: East Lyme, Conn., 2012), pp. 118–26, at 124.
• 3See, e.g., James Gleick, Chaos: Making A New Science (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1984); Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980); and John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
• 4When I first decided to chronicle the collapse of Western Civilization, I assumed I would have a sufficient amount of time to observe and comment upon the transformations taking place. I shared T.S. Eliot’s sentiment that: “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” Surely a vibrant culture that took centuries to develop would have to experience a prolonged demise. I could not imagine that its downfall would be as precipitous as it has proven to be. Because of the complexities involved, it is difficult to identify a specific date or period when the descent began. Suffice it to say that the process was well underway by the time Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!
• 5If there is one period in Western history that I think reflects what we have become, it would be the French Revolution. What could be a more fitting symbol for that period of collective madness, destruction, and inhumanity than the guillotine, ever busy searching for new victims? Whatever visions of mankind in society have been offered by the numerous creators of Western Civilization are being lost as the culture, itself, disappears into history’s “black hole.” My oldest daughter, Bretigne, may have most succinctly encapsulated the changes occurring during her lifetime when she wrote: “I don’t know who the people around me are anymore.”
• 6The study of chaos informs us that complex systems are subject to far too many interconnected and inconstant variables to make it possible to control events in order to achieve predictable outcomes. The ability to predict outcomes in a complex system rests on a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” meaning an awareness of the presence and strength of every factor that could affect the result. In other words, our efforts to describe or to prescribe those patterns of regularity we define as “order” are limited by complexity itself. Events in our world are generally produced by countless networks of influences that make it difficult to identify causation. What may appear—if seen at all—as an inconsequential factor can produce damaging results (thus the nursery rhyme about “the want of a nail” leading to the loss of the war). We also discover that our faith in linear processes to produce anticipated results is often upset by the intervention of nonlinear influences (“the straw that broke the camel’s back”). The hubris that attends all political programs of central planning is fueled by an ignorance of the forces of chaos.