Why Ultraviolence Is Consuming America
When Extreme Violence Becomes a Regular Spectacle, Your Society’s Collapsing. But Do Americans Get It Yet?
By now, you can see a new plague spreading across America: ultraviolence. Scarcely a week goes by where someone doesn’t die — in a gruesome, extreme, shocking way. Massacres have become commonplace. Brutality is regular. It feels as if its open season for any lunatic, maniac, or fanatic. A few days ago, a man was strangled to death by a former Marine on the New York subway, today, there was a massacre at a shopping mall near Dallas. Before that? The rise of doorstep shootings — knock on the wrong door, and bam, some crazy person just kills you. So far? There have been 191 “mass shootings.” In just 127 days of the year.
All of that is the rise of ultraviolence.
What’s happening here? America is undergoing a very specific, textbook facet of social collapse. No, social collapse doesn’t mean Mad Max. It means that things fall apart. And one of those things is democracy. Democracy is made of values, which we must enact. Its key values are justice, truth, and peace. And in America? The country is now reaching the tail end of that set of values imploding. Now, the value of peace itself no longer seems to matter.
I want you to understand this in a deeper way than “it’s the guns!!” There’s little doubt, that, yes, its the guns. But it also more than that. America’s always had guns. It hasn’t always had ultraviolence. At least not in this modern sense. In its darkest chapters ultraviolence has broken out — lynchings, for example, where, sorry, this is going to be graphic, Black men were castrated, hung, and their genitals crammed into their throats.
There’s violence, and there’s ultraviolence. Every society has violence. Some societies, like America, have always been especially violent. But ultraviolence is different. It’s overkill. It’s the snapping of a mind. It’s a massacre every week. It’s losing your mind, and killing a dozen people just like that. It’s stranger killing stranger, instead of inviting them in for tea. It’s strangling someone on a subway, slowly, slowly, until the last breaths of life leave the body. That’s ultraviolence.
Do Americans understand that, though? I doubt it, because…well…
What happened to make America this way? First, they normalized Big Lies. Then, they normalized hate. And now? As a result of that? Ultraviolence has been normalized.
The GOP has deliberately corroded the norms and values of democracy, one step at a time. First, the norm of truth — Hillary’s a monster!! Only Trump can save us! The election was stolen! Those dirty liberals are Satanic pedophiles, and Hillary’s their leader!! The Jews are out to get us! Mexican babies are replacing us!! Then came justice — Jan 6th was just a tourist visit! Trump didn’t do anything wrong!! We’re going to take matters into our own hands!! And now, finally, comes the last nail in the coffin — the destruction of the democratic norm of peace.
Look around. See how hard the GOP’s worked at destroying this norm. Did you see that infamous text from Tucker Carlson? The one that Faux News desperately didn’t want to be released? It was about fantasizing about killing someone. Do normal minds really do that? Maybe here and there, but…as a way of life? Think about what Tucker Carlson would do every night. He’d goad and incite his audience. Make them feel as if they were the persecuted victims. The ones under existential threat. They had every right to strike preemptively. And if violence was involved, well, wasn’t that just justice?
Americans aren’t connecting these dots well enough. There was a moment there that America seemed to be waking up. Now, Americans are going back to being looked at with awkward horror — because they don’t acknowledge the basic reality above.
How else is the GOP undoing the norm of peace? How isn’t it? Who’s painted as an existential threat by today’s Republicans, to “real” Americans? It’s not just refugees and immigrants anymore. It’s…more than half of society. It’s women. The LGBTQ. Kids. Teachers. Journalists. All of whom used to be “safe” in the Trump years, to a degree — but now, find themselves fair game. Fair game for what? For their rights to be taken away. But that is the legitimation of violence.
Why? How? Well, how do I justify taking your rights away? I have to dehumanize you. I have to paint you as an existential threat. I have to imply you’re depraved, violent, a menace and danger to the “real” people, the Volk. So the LGBTQ have become “groomers.” Teachers have become “pedophiles.” Kids who are different have become sinister dangers. Women have become dehumanized to the point that they’re just to be breeders, things who must endure forced birth. Anyone saying all this is wrong is part of the “woke” conspiracy to “replace” them.
That is all the incitement of violence. It’s not put that way nearly enough, but it should be. When you begin to paint more than half a society as depraved, inhuman, an existential threat — when they’re perfectly innocent, harming no one, just living their lives — what are you really doing? You aren’t just chipping away at the democratic norm of peace — you’re taking a sledgehammer to it. You’re implying that “these people” don’t deserve to have rights, which is why you’re taking them away.
And you only take someone’s rights away if you want to hurt them.
I want you to think about that point very, very carefully, because, like I said, right about now, Americans are going back to being the world-famous idiots they were not so long ago.
The GOP paints taking away people’s rights as some kind of grand intellectual exercise. As if Aristotle and Plato were involved in a careful, abstruse “debate.” Something they do reluctantly, for these magnificent higher purposes. None of that is even remotely true, because what’s prima facie true is this.
You only take someone’s rights away if you want to hurt them. Why else would I take away your right to movement, expression, association, speech, intimacy, privacy, or anything else? It’s not because, LOL, I want to protect, aid, or help you. But because I am looking to punish you, inflict harm on you, and be able to do it with impunity. We only take people’s rights away if we want to hurt them. And the GOP’s become expert at this.
How does the GOP do that? By choosing “wedge issues,” and making scapegoats. Abortion. Trans rights. Gay rights. Things that are easy enough to gin up childish fears over.
But that’s created an atmosphere in America that’s profoundly unhealthy, deeply abnormal. People are angry. Always, always angry. Not just irritated angry — but enraged angry. So Americans don’t talk to each other anymore — how could they? You don’t know if that person that you’d say hello to in any other country, the regular at the cafe or bar, the neighborhood lady with the puppy, is going to turn out to be a fanatic, lunatic, maniac.
Someone who’s been radicalized by Big Lies about all these “wedge issues.” Someone who really believes that the LGBTQ are groomers, that kids who read books are enemies of the people, that there’s a pedophilic conspiracy to replace the master race. Even in some relatively lightweight way.
See how that chain reaction works? Wedge issues. Big Lies. Hate. And sooner or later? A society in which the only dominant sentiment left is hate? It’s going to erupt in ultraviolence. That is what’s happening in America. Because democracy is a normative process, as we say in social science, meaning, it’s a thing that we, the people, enact, with norms. But when those basic norms have been destroyed, as they have in America, replaced with their opposites?
Then social collapse goes like this. First, Big Lies replace commonly accepted truths. Then, hate begins to replace equality. Injustice comes to replace justice — the rule of law stops really functioning, and meanwhile, the fanatics and lunatics are the ones who think they’re being annihilated, so why not strike back, and strike first? Finally, because of all that? Ultraviolence begins to erupt.
Because now? It’s OK to just lash out in rage. To take all that rage, that simmering sense of injustice, the hate you’ve been told to feel for all these people who are taking everything away from you, right down to your identity — and act on it. Go ahead, snap. Pull the trigger. Choke them out. Spray bullets across the square. Do it.
What’s left to stop you? The rule of law barely has any teeth — in fact, it arms you with a weapon of war. Big Lies goad you. Hate incites you. And the only thing left in the way was the norm of peace — the feeling that hey, this is wrong. But when you hear, a thousand times a day, fanatics and lunatics, in positions of power, using annihilationist rhetoric, talking about killing, punishing, assassinating, hurting, harming — that norm erodes, too. And then there’s nothing left to stop you.
Now. I’m describing how a facet of how societies collapse. Sometimes, this process is called “depacification.” The erosion of norms of peace, whose absence gives rise to the capacity, in people, for ultraviolence. Not all people. But some people. And that much is enough for ultraviolence to begin to consume a society.
What I’m not saying is that every lunatic and fanatic who goes out there and shoots up a mall, school, or what have you, is a Trumpist. That’s not my point at all. When we talk about “normative processes of social collapse,” we’re speaking about just that: norms being eroded and shattered. The feeling rising in a society of anger, rage, injustice. The capability rising in a society for people to just snap. The lack of moral safeguards that prevent people from killing, thinking, at the last second, even, My God, killing someone is wrong — and snapping them out of their haze of bloodlust.
We’re talking about a general change in society. Not just some kind of Trumpist guerrilla war — that’s the step after this. This step is a society becoming unmoored. Normatively. What prevents us from just lashing out in rage, most of the time? Norms do. Everyone goes into a blinding fit of anger from time to time, and maybe even wants to hurt someone — but then sanity prevails. Sanity prevails because we have accepted democratic norms of peace: we’ve internalized the moral logic that, hey, whew, seriously hurting someone? That’s going too far. And killing someone is going way, way, unspeakably too far.
When a society normatively destabilizes, that process no longer holds true. Not in everyone, but in enough people.And so ultraviolence begins to erupt. That final safeguard, the moral one, the social one, has broken down. That last thought — hey, doing this wrong — no longer really happens. Instead, the act of harm, or hurt, of violence — it’s seen as justified and righteous. This is what the doorstep shooters said, no? It’s what the subway strangler said. It’s what mass shooters will say, too, many of them. They’re the persecuted, existentially threatened ones. Hey — it was just self-defense! Don’t you get it! They deserved it!
That moral logic, all of it? It is the normative breakdown of the democratic value of peace. It means that people are failing to understand what the point, purpose, quite literally, the value of peace is. And in America? That’s happened because the GOP has spent, at this point, decades or more attacking peace itself. As something for sissies. Women. Liberals. “F*gs.” The “woke.” Communists. Real men, real people? They’re like militants in some kind of cleansing campaign. They don’t allow their neighbors to exist. People aren’t to have rights — basic ones. They’re not to exist as moral or social agents. They are just there — like women, kids, the LGBTQ, a growing list — to be subjugated and repressed, even if that takes overt violence, like forced births.
All of that is how you shatter a society normatively. How you take the democratic norm of peace, and turn it on its head. What have figures like Tucker Carlson been doing, every night, when they sneer, in anger, and teach people they’re the real victims — of others, living perfectly innocent and peaceful lives? What are figures like Paul Gosar and MJT doing when they “joke” about killing fellow Members of Congress? This guy, who’s also in Congress, when he poses with his family and all their guns, which is more books than most people have? What’s the GOP doing when it gins up moral panics with wedge issues — and explicitly uses them to provoke paranoid violent fantasies? When it called women murderers and gay people groomers and anyone defending them pedophiles? All that is how you denormalize peace, and normalize violence. Ultraviolence.
You model it for people — posing with your thousand guns. You cross the line, sending death threats. You paint innocent people as the most morally depraved things we know of — pedophiles. You imply that there’s an existential battle happening, and it’s OK to strike first, with lethal force.
People get the message. At first, they don’t even get the message politically. They just…get the message. Harm is OK. Violence should be normal. Want to hurt someone — a lot of people — in extreme ways? Go right ahead! First, you shatter the norm of peace. Then, you draw the political distinction — hey, you’re killing the wrong guys, no, don’t get those guys, get these guys. First, you teach people how to kill. Then, you teach them who to.
This is why ultravioence is America’s latest plague. But do Americans get any of that yet?
Umair
May 2023