Fear and Loathing of Wealthy White Real Estate Investors
The search for a motive in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre is failing to turn up anything that resonates. We like to find easy, identifiable answers in these situations: He hated casinos. He was an Islamic fanatic. He thought country music was the work of the devil.
These explanations appeal to us because they allow us to make sense of the world in a way that allows us to continue with our lives. The human mind craves explanation; it seeks logic, reason, and order. It does not like chaos. It like to pack things up, put nice tidy little bows around them, and move on with the day. It does not appreciate a world in which things like this can happen for no discernable reason. As much as we hate the evil which is Daesh, we understand that they are deliberately trying to cause as much terror as possible because they hate western civilisation. And we appreciate that. The Columbine kids were bullied, so they took revenge. Even with these threats of an attack hanging over our heads, they are threats we can at least make sense of.
Which is why the truth in this situation may be even more horrifying. The shooter’s brother, Eric, has said “it’s like an asteroid fell out of the sky”. He wasn’t affiliated with any ideology, he wasn’t noticeably different in any way. He wasn’t bullied or disenfranchised in any recognisable fashion. So we don’t know how to report it, and we don’t know how to process it. It’s just left hanging there, while we wait for another shoe to drop. We just keep looking endlessly, like MH17. It is anathema to the human brain.
Paddock was a wealthy white male. He owned nine properties in three states. He flew planes. He went on cruises. He showed no signs of anything untoward.
And so we reach for the easiest thing we can grasp – he was mentally ill. It’s easy to call someone who does something horrific “mentally ill”. Because that’s the only thing that makes sense, right? There are social contracts, which those of ‘sound mind’ abide by. And those who break them are therefore, by definition, ‘not of sound mind’. They are ‘mentally ill.’ But does this not then become a truism? A tautology devoid of meaning? If anyone who does something like this gets thrown into that basket, what is the point? And what implications does it have for how we talk about that countless other people in that basket who don’t go and shoot 600 people?
It’s time to consider what we actually mean by “mental illness”. Did he suffer from depression? Asperger’s? Anxiety? Schizophrenia? Surely we can see that a term so broad stops being useful, and can in fact begin to cause harm by needlessly stigmatizing those who harbour no homicidal intent.
A more fruitful way to consider this may be through the prism of power. This is what I believe will provide the most compelling explanation for what drives someone to do this: The thrill of power.
Historically, life has always been a fight to the death, in which the most lethal survive. In the past few thousand years humans have developed shockingly effective ways to neuter our enemies, which have somewhat paradoxically led to a life of relative peace. We don’t hunt and kill the meat we buy from the supermarket, it’s done for us in a clinical factory. Does this mean there is a latent, unrealised thirst for savagery lurking beneath the surface? We’re getting pretty deep here, but it seems plausible at least.
So like water seeping through cracks, this ancient savagery will manifest itself through whatever outlet it can. Too often, it is the women in these people’s lives who cop it first. Time after time, the perpetrators of these mass killings have a long and documented history of domestic violence (http://www.mamamia.com.au/was-... Paddock’s case, while he may not have had a record of abusing his partners, a sex worker has come forward and detailed the violent sexual acts he would like to engage in. This in itself paints a telling picture: This was not an unhinged maniac, this was a methodical man who was in clinical control of his actions, and who deliberately chose to do exactly what he did.
People play video games where you can quite easily enact this very scenario. I don’t mention this to blame the games, but to identify the phenomenon of people finding pleasure in picking a spot, looking down into a crowd of people, and unleashing “fire and fury”.
And so we inevitably come to guns. The ultimate expression of power, deciding who lives and who dies, fetishized in America to a disturbing degree. Many people, particularly in the US, derive a peculiar pleasure just from holding them. They like the kickback when they fire. Some shoot targets, some hunt live game, with flesh and blood on the other end of the bullet. Death. Conquest. A trophy: Proof of dominance over this creature. With a simple pull of a trigger (and perhaps a slightly more complicated modification to increase the fire rate), the wealthy white male can live out the power fantasies he ultimately believes to be his right.
What we know is that for those few minutes, he had absolute control over that part of the Earth. He was the most important man in the city. More so than the rock stars on stage, or the security guards in the arena, or the billionaire casino moguls. More so than the governor of Nevada. Finally, it really was all about him.
There is probably a narrative you could weave about the fading influence of white boomers, grasping at the final straws of their demagoguery. Perhaps a cocktail waitress in the casino didn’t bring him his drink quickly enough, and because berating her wasn’t enough, the only way he could compensate for that lack of power was through an assault rifle. The intoxicating effect of privilege is easy for a wealthy white male retiree to become drunk on. But that’s obviously as speculative as anything.
Whatever happened, he got that thrill. And then he absolved himself of the consequences. With a single shot to himself, he goes out on that note. No pain, no grief, no wrestling with consequences. He wanted to do a thing. And in America, it was all too easy.
Are we going to see the President build a wall and issue a travel ban to deal with wealthy white real estate investors? Some, I assume, are good people. But clearly, some are fucking murderers. And in 12 minutes, they have killed more Americans than Muslims have in 12 years. But that’s another story…
What we’re looking for here is an explanation. And the unsettling reality is that all we have to go on is the irrepressible thirst for power, manifesting itself in guns fired from an expensive hotel suite. Women who have been the victims of domestic violence won’t be surprised. They will see a familiar pattern, of men looking to feel powerful. To call that ‘mentally ill’ is to a dangerous distortion of the term.
