When The Elephant Wants To Kill
Why we should pause before drafting violent events with a political angle into our political discourse
There’s a truly awful story out of Pennsylvania today - a man named Justin Mohn murdered his father, decapitated him, and live-streamed an incoherent, anti-Democrat-inflected rant while holding the decapitated head up to the camera. Most people aren’t sadists, they don’t want to hurt other people if they can avoid it - but when you enthusiastically dehumanize your perceived opponents, over and over and over, every day, you start to see them as less than human. And once they’re outside of the bounds of humanity, you can do anything to other people with a clear conscience.
This is a vision of real evil - the kind of evil that we seem to be able to swallow when it comes to terrorism without making broad statements about the beliefs people doing the evil represent.
The blindingly obvious take that many in the hot take economy will share is that this is an indictment of our MAGAfied, QANON culture, just another data point in a set that shows that people with right-wing views, or even all Republicans, are all nascent murderers who can’t be trusted. E.g.,
And of course, it is fun to use terrible incidents to mock your political opponents. It allows you to show how great you are for not being like them, and how terrible they are for being the way they are. Win-win for the ego. You can find similar conservative takes regarding the Nashville mass shooter who wanted to kill people for their “white privileges,” or the two New York brothers who were recently arrested after investigators discovered they had an arsenal of homemade explosives and guns along with “Instructions for making a variety of bombs, anarchist propaganda and a ‘hit list,’ with ‘cops, judges, politicians, celebrities’ and ‘banker scum’ scrawled on it…” or the anti-Trump Bernie Sanders supporter who opened fire on Congressional Republicans during a baseball game and shot Rep. Steve Scalise.
You might expect me to go on to make a case that “the left” (please, read “I Don’t Wanna Be French” and help me get rid of the useless terms “right” and “left”) is the REAL danger, and we need to be looking out for them. But I think we need to pull back from using these extreme events as a synecdoche for the entirety of deeply held beliefs of American political factions.
Deeply troubled people who do things like decapitate their fathers and shoot up Congressional baseball games are almost by definition mentally ill. Sure, you have your Stalins and your Lenins and your Hitlers who leveraged existing political currents to become Head Executioner of their nations - but these sad, pained, rage-filled individuals aren’t in that category. No one is glorifying James Hodgkinson or Justin Mohn, except in the most diseased corners of the internet. They’re not leaders of a movement, they’re fleas sticking their suckers into the pale, scarred skin of our cirrhotic political discourse.
Political beliefs are more about personality and temperament than rigorous argumentation and deep contemplation. Jonathan Haidt uses the model of “the rider and the elephant” to describe how people’s emotions and reason interact. “The Rider” is the higher intellect - your reason. “The Elephant” is your emotions and instincts - your gut. While the rider can (with lots of work and time) generally direct the elephant, if there’s a disagreement between the two, the elephant is going to win the argument. He also describes reason as something like the gut’s defense attorney, who will deploy whatever arguments are at hand to defend the gut’s instincts.
People feel first, then they think. When someone is deeply disturbed, angry, hopeless, and maybe experiencing mental illness (in the case of Justin Mohn, he thought he was going to be both President and Messiah), they look for reasons to justify and express those feelings. Maybe it’s the Woke Communist Revolution that’s keeping them down, maybe it’s the MAGA nuts and Republicans. But if the elephant is driving the rider in a murderous direction, the rider will act as though it wanted to go that way all along and grab whatever justifications are readily available to continue down that path with a clear conscience.
This is why I’ve started to suspect that our cultural problems have little to do with finding the One True Ideology that will make everyone happy, and much more to do with our collective feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, and lack of individual agency. I’d argue that some worldviews (conspiracy theories and Critical Theory in particular) bolster and amplify feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, and lack of individual agency, but they don’t cause them. It takes two to tango - a person who buys into those totalizing worldviews has to come to the table with a sense of injury that needs treatment.
Instead of using horrible human tragedies as tally marks in the eternal war to determine which half of the American public is worse, we need to strike at the root of the issue - the unremediated tragedy and dysfunction among individuals that fuels them.
What would this look like in practice? Getting to know your neighbors. Volunteering in your community and building relationships with people who have lived difficult, unfair lives and trying to give them hope and community. Talking to (instead of exiling) relatives who have different worldviews. And being open to help, hope, and community if you’re feeling that dark sense of powerlessness rather than retreating further and further into the dark corners of internet subcultures.
We’re all here on Earth for a few brief moments. We can be overwhelmed with the weight of history’s injustices and the putrid current moment in culture, or we can look at each other and treat our human brothers and sisters as the ephemeral, momentary, beautiful messes that we are, warts and all, and love each other.
Some prose for the hall of fame:
"...fleas sticking their suckers into the pale, scarred skin of our cirrhotic political discourse."
Thank you! 👍🏻😊❤️