Group, Consciousness, Killings

Moral Panic is part of the popular consciousness. It is the idea that society becomes orientated radically against a sub-group.

Unlike with racism and what is now called discrimination in general it is supported because it is considerted to have a "moral" basis.

The most recent moral panic is "Terrorism". The flames of this have been very carefully monitored to stop it becoming out right racism and imperialism - which would have made "Terrorism" look suspicious. We have been told it is moral to "hate" Islamic Extremists but not Islam which rejects the extremists. Interestingly those who have told us this are considered extremists by the vast majority of peaceful Christians who follow Christ in suffering the iniquities of evil men. This has been blogged to death as well.

There seem to be many analyses of the cause and nature of "moral panic" but I want to analyse a a particular one here: the media and its role in consciousness.

Each one of us has a media reporter inside us who edits and composes narratives about themselves. Things are screened for particular audiences and manipulated to provide effects. It is only 20% what you say and 80% how you say it (good old 20/80 rule). I have not filled this blog with pointless personal narratives about my life (truth or lies) - maybe these are entertaining but this is not entertainment.

If there is one piece of evidence that the Society has a Group Consciousness it is the existence of the media. The Media functions as the story telling engine of a nation. It IS social consciousness. Prior to printing it was a job done by playwrites and before that travelling poets who for a hundred thousand years have told the stories that are the life blood of group consciousness.

I remember staying late at school one day and a guy in our year who I never spoke to normally (he was in the borders and part of a different group) came up to me and reported that the Challenger Space Shuttle had exploded. This news represented a greater social group than just the school sub-groups and he felt compelled to transfer the news not because he cared that I knew, or even that the news ment anything to us, but this imperative lay in his membership of social concsiouness.

I have argued at length about Groups, Group Membership, Status in a rather Materialistic way - whereby people are involved in a game of survival. I realise that this has been the prelude to a deeper understaning that began on Thursday... briefly slot that story in this blog here...

Went to see a book launch talk by Alain De Botton on work - a birthday present and material for my own book on work. At the book signing I was faced by a social situation I could not compute. You give the book for signing but also need to engage in some conversation. I did not and became very clear that it was socially imperative that I did. My sister bailed me out but this was not how it was "supposed" to work. What do you say? I've never read De Botton so can't say anything about being a fan or liking his work, I had a billion things to argue about but this was not the place, he doesn't need to hear that he was good or you liked it - I was buying the book wasn't I! he doesn't know me and I don't know him and we'll never meet again, so actually silence to sign the book seems the best way: yet there is a dominating social imperative to speak, to engage in narrative, to fulfill our membership of the social consciousness. They call it cynically the social airs and graces: but this is for fake social climbers - behind this is a real substance, a genuine imperative. It is worth adding that speak or not speak a narrative was fulfilled and I've said it here! So "Narrative" is a vast dialectical engine that constructs a consciousness outside the boundaries that we "think" we have mastered because we can talk. Talk or Not-Talk consciousness and group consciousness was.

This fits well into the growing analysis of self. We are not islands unto our self. We are not archipelagos surrounded by seas. We are not even dry lands at all. We are the oceans and the lands together because without one there is not the other. What is water on a planet of deserts? What is land on a planet of fish? And so by the same token: What is land on a planet of deserts? What is sea on a planet of fish? This fits with the recent blog on evolution. And so it is, what is the self without society? What am I if there are not we? This is most famously from Hegel (1805), "The I that is We, and the We that is I". I read that over 10 years ago, yet still struggle to grasp it.

It is no accident then society models our own inner world. No accident that both I and society have a media centre. The reason? because we are the same thing looked at through the broken window of multifarious existence. It is that ancient shattering of the One into the many which creates existence, and the beguiling feature of the world of many things is that its broken face hides the Unity : indeed creates the Unity because how is there unity when all is One! Just as how can there be seas on a planet only of water. (Which is an interesting image by itself: imagine a planet made entirely of water - a huge rain drop in space).

So now to something darker. Again the Media reports a new gunning in America. It is not that a thousand people haven't died since yesterday, it is that these few died at the end of a gun, and that fits a pattern, and that pattern is easily grasped and distinctly emotive and ready for consciousness. In reality of course we know it is a particular event with particular causes and that man had a particular life and particular issues and it is just a coincidence that it has happened - something that is begin exploited to create a story and the sense of something else in American society - the material to create a "moral panic".

Or is it? We also know of copy cat killings (CCKs). It is remarkable that in this "advanced" society this issue is always pushed under the carpet. Maybe it is because it challenges the idea of men being "islands unto themselves", independent and free. But when we see that actually we are all one (at least in the sense that we are individuals only because we are all One - is an immortal alien on a planet of only himself an individual? or a Society?)... when we see we are all One we suspect suddenly that we have a hand in everything. The idea of mass killing with a gun has two sides: it requires the perpetrator and the victims, and it needs the audience to witness it. All these people form consciousness.

So where did this idea form? It is a common tale that the Chinese had used gun-powder for millenia before the Europeans found it and realised it could be used to foprm weapons. It was not the technology of gunpowder that caused weapons, but the culture - the consciousness. The idea of mass killing existed already it just needed the technology. Wind forward to September the 11th - a remarkable idea to use planes as explosive - something that was dreamed up long before and not by the Mujahadin (who became Al Qaida). Likewise to use of guns on civilians because you are angry. All American films use the gun to satisfy injustice and anger - the idea is out there it just needs actors and an audience.

If we don't like the stories on the media it is not the media, or the people that we don't like, it is not even us who is disliking them - it is a nausea within social cosnciousness itself.