In a predictable like bowel movement fashion, the corporate media will offer two partisan explanations of the recent Las Vegas mass shooting - Stephen Paddock was deranged (R) or Stephen Paddock had easy access to deadly weapons (D). Both may be technically true, yet neither explains much. There are many people who are deranged and millions who have weapons, yet a great majority of them do not commit mass murder.
An alternative view, that in my view provides a better explanation, is that such events are in fact theatrical performances staged by people who commit them. Their purpose is to communicate a message to the public in manner that the author finds aesthetically appealing. The main difference between these massacres and, say, Hollywood "action" or "horror" movies is that the extras in Hollywood movies leave the scene alive after the shooting - both literal and figurative - is done.
This explanation of criminal acts has been proposed by Jack Katz in his 1989 book "Seductions of Crime." Katz assembles impressive secondary empirical material to demonstrate that what motivates many perps not material rewards but the sensual experience of the crime itself. "The adolescent shoplifter, for example, savors not the trinket she steals but the challenge of sneaking it past the clerk, the thrill of having outsmarted the system. With stickup men, as with members of adolescent street gangs, it is the transcendent joy of dominating an adversary. With the impassioned killer, it is to vent the rage triggered by humiliation or by a threat to some cherished moral value."
Aesthetic and rules of the drama play and important role in Katz's explanation. They induce, so to speak, the perp to the logic of action suggested by the dramatic rules of the genre, the choice of scenery, the choice of props, and the course of action. Different types of drama may appeal to different cultures and different types of individuals. The drama of bringing down an airliner full of infidels from the sky may appeal to people from cultures infused with stories of eternal battles between the believers and the infidels. Machine gunning people attending a concert is more aesthetically appealing in a culture infused with images of a single individual, a rock star or a business executive, controlling the masses from a high stage, or Hollywood images of a super-hero shooting down villains by the dozen to the applause of the audience.
The main point here is that the dramas of "martyrdom", "super-star" or "super-hero" are not only culture specific, but have wide aesthetic appeal to many people from a particular culture. Many people in those culture vicariously re-enact such dramas, eithei in their day dreams, in theaters, or in staged re-enactment events. Few, however, go a step or two further and take the step alluded to by Franz Kafka in the short story "The Penal Colony" - an execution by writing the sentence into the flesh of the condemned.
My guess is that people who take that extra step and actually arrange for mass killing are those who have what is considered "leadership qualities" in a particular culture. These individuals imagine themselves as leaders or even creators and are not satisfied by mere consumption of popular narratives in their cultures. They aspire to creating ones of their own, ones that would leave others in awe. Many such leaders and creators eventually end up in mental institutions, some succeed as super-stars of business (the Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs) or entertainment, but the few become mass murderers like Mr. Paddock.
This explains why an individual who has no rational reason to kill strangers in great numbers does so. His behavior is no different from that he reads about in religious texts of his culture about martyrs, businessmen, and other super-stars. What separates him from millions of others consuming the same stories is gumption and leadership, the willingness and determination to implement the dream.
What still needs an explanation is the incidence of mass shootings, that is, why they are occurring with greater frequency in certain times and places than others. Here, it is useful to consider the insights of the sociologist Mark Granonovetter who focused on the social context in which individual decisions are made. In this line of thought, individual decisions are affected, to a significant degree, by social precedent. If one person sees other people engage in a particular behavior, they are more likely to engage in that behavior than if nobody around that person engaged in it. This creates a positive feedback loop, also known as path dependence in institutional economics. in which subsequent repetitions of a particular type of behavior makes it more likely for that behavior to occur in the future.
Based on this reasoning, Malcolm Gladwell offered a compelling explanation of the increased incidence of mass school shootings in the US. In this explanation, each incidence of schools shooting lowers the threshold of resistance to such actions, and thus making it more likely for another person to commit a similar act. That is, as the mass shooting start occurring the influence more people to commit such acts, but who would not commit them in the absence of prior acts of this nature. This explains why such acts are more frequent in the US after the Columbine school shooting than in other countries, or for that matter in the US in an earlier time.
To sum it up, social context increases the incidence of mass killing sin two ways. First, it provides cultural narratives that sanction and legitimate mass killings as the means of redressing real or imaginary grievances. These narratives appeal to a wide range of individuals, but most of those individuals would not decide to act on those narratives on their own. There are powerful social norms that prohibit killing of fellow humans, especially on the mass scale, and these norms effectively prevent most people from acting on even most appealing killing fantasies. But of norms are being eroded, they stop acting as a deterrent, which increases the likelihood that someone will act out these violent fantasies. What causes this gradual norm erosion is a positive feedback loop, known as path dependence, in which an initial occurrence of social behavior makes subsequent occurrences more likely, and as the incidence of that behavior increases, so does the likelihood that it will be further repeated.
This is an uneasy diagnosis of a serious social disease, because it recognizes the root cause of a problem that cannot be easily solved, at least in a democratic society. Breaking the positive feedback loop that creates mass violence requires state interventions that would make civil libertarians cringe, while the prospect of these measures' success is far from being certain.Facing a serious problem that does not have an easy solution is not what people can typically cope with, cognitively or emotionally. That is why most people prefer alternative diagnoses, one that offer a prospect of a solution, even if illusory. Such as better gun control, or a better mental health care system.
What still needs an explanation is the incidence of mass shootings, that is, why they are occurring with greater frequency in certain times and places than others. Here, it is useful to consider the insights of the sociologist Mark Granonovetter who focused on the social context in which individual decisions are made. In this line of thought, individual decisions are affected, to a significant degree, by social precedent. If one person sees other people engage in a particular behavior, they are more likely to engage in that behavior than if nobody around that person engaged in it. This creates a positive feedback loop, also known as path dependence in institutional economics. in which subsequent repetitions of a particular type of behavior makes it more likely for that behavior to occur in the future.
Based on this reasoning, Malcolm Gladwell offered a compelling explanation of the increased incidence of mass school shootings in the US. In this explanation, each incidence of schools shooting lowers the threshold of resistance to such actions, and thus making it more likely for another person to commit a similar act. That is, as the mass shooting start occurring the influence more people to commit such acts, but who would not commit them in the absence of prior acts of this nature. This explains why such acts are more frequent in the US after the Columbine school shooting than in other countries, or for that matter in the US in an earlier time.
To sum it up, social context increases the incidence of mass killing sin two ways. First, it provides cultural narratives that sanction and legitimate mass killings as the means of redressing real or imaginary grievances. These narratives appeal to a wide range of individuals, but most of those individuals would not decide to act on those narratives on their own. There are powerful social norms that prohibit killing of fellow humans, especially on the mass scale, and these norms effectively prevent most people from acting on even most appealing killing fantasies. But of norms are being eroded, they stop acting as a deterrent, which increases the likelihood that someone will act out these violent fantasies. What causes this gradual norm erosion is a positive feedback loop, known as path dependence, in which an initial occurrence of social behavior makes subsequent occurrences more likely, and as the incidence of that behavior increases, so does the likelihood that it will be further repeated.
This is an uneasy diagnosis of a serious social disease, because it recognizes the root cause of a problem that cannot be easily solved, at least in a democratic society. Breaking the positive feedback loop that creates mass violence requires state interventions that would make civil libertarians cringe, while the prospect of these measures' success is far from being certain.Facing a serious problem that does not have an easy solution is not what people can typically cope with, cognitively or emotionally. That is why most people prefer alternative diagnoses, one that offer a prospect of a solution, even if illusory. Such as better gun control, or a better mental health care system.
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