Violence as Social Spectacle

I consider the attraction of martyrdom, of which there are two versions. These I call religious martyrdom and nihilistic martyrdom.

What is the motivation of religious martyrdom? It means to spurn mainstream society, yet remain socially-identified with a group or sect. It is the desire for self-destruction, an action which is socially-acceptable to the group. The social focus indicates jealousy: jealousy upholds social concerns. And the desire for self-destruction indicates envy. Envy is acting so as to destroy the social influences of jealousy [¹].

Nihilistic martyrdom is the desire to self-destruct as a gesture against the whole of society. The person is acting as an individual who is not associated with any group. The focus is against society, and so indicates narcissism: narcissism only upholds issues of individuality. As before, the desire to self-destruct indicates envy. Envy is acting so as to destroy the influences of narcissism on individuality.

Since these two versions are binary to each other, so I assume that what both martyrdoms have in common is the refutation of the love mode of the emotions.

Hence:
Religious martyrdom = envy + jealousy (love mode).
Nihilistic martyrdom = envy + narcissism (love mode).

Nightmares of Envy

By the mid-1990s, I was having nightmares of a particular kind. In the nightmare there was a horde of people coming to attack me. What could I do? I grabbed a machine gun and began shooting them. Yet I could not kill enough of them: the more of them I killed, the more of them were appearing in front of me. They still kept coming for me, getting nearer all the time. I was sweating, due to intense fear. I just kept shooting until they engulfed me. I would wake up from the nightmare soaked in sweat.

Then one day I read a report of a shooting massacre in Tasmania, Australia. The gunman walked into a cafe and shot many people. The gunman supposedly was Martin Bryant, though how a person of low intelligence and poor ability in handling fire arms could carry out such a well-executed killing spree has never been explained. I was amazed. My nightmare was played out in real life by an actual person. So I realised that I was not the only person having such dreams.

When I was finally able to detect the subconscious motivation of these dreams, then they began to fade away. The motivation is envy. It was these dreams that eventually gave me the understanding of how envy functions when it is repressed. Repressed envy becomes destructive. I did not seem to be obviously envious of other people. And yet I had turned the envy against myself. Later I understood that my envy of other people had been internalised (so that I did not recognise it), and hence the hordes of people represented my envy (of other people) attacking me and trying to engulf me.

Since in the dream any attacker is a target, of any age and either sex, so a secondary motivation is bitterness. The theme of bitterness is that people are repulsive.

Spree Killers

I consider the scenario where the start of a killing rampage is spontaneous, being triggered by an unexpected event. To deduce what parental influence was the main negative factor acting on the killer, we have to look at who was the first victim. If it was a woman, then the mother was the principal parent that was hated. If it was a man, then the father was the principal parent that was hated.

Suppose that the potential killer has intense hatred of his mother. He takes a new job and then finds that the foreman has taken a dislike to him and so treats him badly. This will increase the stress on him. However, he will direct his high stress to creating phantasies of revenge against women, not against the foreman or even men in general. In other words, his increased stress means that his hatred of women has increased so that it is greater than his hatred of the foreman.

In a spontaneous rampage, the first victim represents the final straw that pushes the killer over the edge. This can only happen if the first victim symbolises the hated parent. For example, lets say that the potential killer is boiling with anger and hate towards his father. He goes out to town, taking his gun with him but he has not planned a killing spree for that day. He crosses path with a woman who annoys him; so what, what does she matter? He shrugs his shoulders and carries on. Then he meets a man who annoys him. This is just too much. Out comes the gun and he shoots the man. So he can keep his anger bottled if a woman annoys him, but the anger explodes if a man annoys him. The trigger for the spree will come from someone of the same sex as the parent who is hated.

During the handful of times that I felt like a walking volcano of resentment, ready to explode into violence, it was always men who pushed me into that mood, not women [²]. And so it was always men that I was prepared to inflict my violence on, not women. My most severe childhood trauma came from my father; trauma from my mother was less severe.

Sometimes a killer may plan an attack beforehand. In this case his first victim may not represent the parent who is hated. Charles Whitman became notorious as the sniper on a tower in the University of Texas. He planned his attack and first killed his sleeping mother and his wife, though it is obvious that it was his father that he hated. The father was an authoritarian and disciplinarian, who beat both his wife and his son.

In a spree killing, sex is not the key. It is not about sex. If sex were important, then jealousy would be a feature of the crime, meaning that the killer would prefer to attack single women so that he could subject them to sexual degradation. A spree killer does not do this – he kills and moves on. This indicates the influence of narcissism and envy. Spree killing is about power and glory. The killer has probably felt powerless and insignificant for a long time, so now he wants to do something that is significant and will make him powerful, even if it will only be for a short while. After the spree killing, nihilistic martyrdom becomes an attractive option. His final act of killing himself means that he martyrs himself in a blaze of glory. At last he has shaken his fist at the world and the world knows it !

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Ian Heath
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.	Martyrdom Sometimes the desire to make a social spectacle out of violence or aggressiveness is an important factor to deviant behaviours. I give some examples. First I explain the desire for martyrdom. Sometimes the situation that a person finds himself in appears to be hopeless or meaningless. He has a deep level of hatred to whatever he feels is oppressing him; he has a deep sense of being objectively powerless towards the oppressor, and so is willing to use his hatred as a form of subjective power to repudiate the values of the oppressor. Then martyrdom seems to be an attractive option. By ending his life in a blaze of glory, the person feels that his meaningless life has been transformed by a meaningful act.
Sub - Headings
Nightmares of Envy
Spree Killers
References