“Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Spill her blood!”
Joining in with rituals and succumbing to emotional dysregulation are choices
I got an A at school for an essay on Lord of the Flies, possibly because it was the first book that really said something to me about conformity.
Although I did fall for the human need to identify with a team in the decades that followed, the unease this provoked eventually outweighed the impulse. It leaves me feeling detached from crowds and their received simple understanding of nuanced and complex things.
Recent events do nothing to dissuade me from this position.
Charlie Kirk was a saint, a martyr, a hateful antichrist and on and on it goes.
All I’m personally confident to say is that he was a man who believed some things and wanted to talk others into believing them. That’s what he was and now he’s been extinguished for reasons none of us yet really know, but you’d never guess this.
The proverbial Martian arriving in these familiar moments of cascading hyper-opinion might find it strange. All these people who don’t know enough about something being so confident that they know everything.
I also blog on an erotic community platform at the moment. It’s like a Facebook for the debauched and I notice with dismay how people are compelled to do politics even there. Many posts have assured me that compassion for Charlie Kirk and his family is The Wrong Reaction because something something HATE. I have seen no equally open pushback at all on this sentiment, which is interesting. The ‘silent majority‘ knows to keep its head down.
On that site what’s curious is how the people who choose complicated gender identities and display edgy relational statuses and aspirations in particular so often seem to be medicated for things like ADHD, show signs of regular mental distress and are always massively liberal. The correlation between this and also thinking that killing people for Bad Opinions is fine seems unsurprising. We’re used to this now. No wonder the data consistently correlate mental health issues with ideological positions and the worst of them suffered by the most liberal. I never used to understand the right-wing trope on Twitter that ‘liberalism is a mental illness’ but I can see now how it arises. It’s bullshit, of course, but there really does seem to be something of a there there.
I saw less of the uninformed but confident opining on Facebook itself, because most of my connections are French and not so plugged into the anglophone news sphere. But there was some of it among British friends, so there’s no escaping the chatter everywhere people congregate to give and receive attention online about things like the murder of Charlie Kirk. A thing that none of us really knows much about.
Not since a few weeks ago, when an outlier idiot did something so dysfunctional and pointless, has there been so much chatter. Substack continues to be full of it all and I’m having to skip past even more Notes than usual because life’s too short to waste on people externalising their emotions in the guise of commentary.
That the killer had a trans-identifying lover and dwelled in unsavoury digital spaces seem to be the most obviously salient facts established so far. But neither of these things need really be especially significant, if you can bring yourself to stop having feelings about it all.
It’s easy to do that. All you have to do is stop reacting from the limbic system and think in the neocortex instead. All those disparate facts do is tell you some background things about someone who did something that normal people internalised in infancy as things you don’t do, even if you’re unhappy about something.
The killing of Charlie Kirk tells you nothing beyond that. Anyone saying otherwise is mostly just caught up in a moment of ritual observance, whatever intellectual frills they stitch onto the discussion. The same applies to the high falutin podcast discussions about it too. The ones that seek to identify what it means for the culture.
It means nothing that we didn’t know already, which is that there is always a small number of emotionally dysregulated people who aren’t really fit to be among us. Some Jews were murdered outside a synagogue yesterday, in Britain, ostensibly ‘because’ Israel has been killing people who want their entire country wiped off the map and some people are having big feels about it all.
But all any of this really tells you is that there are a few people who can’t control their impulses and sometimes take other people’s lives because of this failing.
Sorry to be the least interesting blog on Substack, when what you really want is compelling social commentary.
The point to this piece is just personal. Which is that it feels better to notice the role of the limbic system, how collective reasoning from the limbic system typically hacks your own reactivity and that feeling aroused by the contamination of crowds is not nourishing. Nor does it make anything in the world better.
Conservatives won’t stop being in control of the US for the next few years, so killing Charlie Kirk or gloating about his death, won’t improve the world for those who don’t like that fact. Gaza will still be a horrible, ruined place with no clear path to viable Palestinian statehood and killing some jewish people in London changes nothing about that.
Once you see futility there’s no appropriate reaction to it beyond an eye-roll. These acts are futile and so is joining in rituals to celebrate or denounce them. Our emotions about many things are largely a waste of energy and space, is what I ended up realising. Just spasms from the limbic system.
William Golding did us the favour of describing how cross-contamination between limbic systems makes the collective lose its mind in ways that end in killing. Later, someone went on some podcasts to justify writing an essay titled ‘Charlie Kirk is dead: here’s why I’m celebrating‘ and this just seems pathetic to me.
I still cannot help but have opinions on all sorts of things, so advocating consistent neutrality would be hypocritical. For example, my opinion of anyone who isn’t disgusted by the murder of Charlie Kirk is that they’re some combination of stupid and morally confused.
But thinking this about people (especially those I don’t personally know, like the author of that essay) does not enhance my life. There is nothing nourishing me in these feelings. So I maintain awareness of that dispositional disdain and celebrate that while it was once satisfying to feel such things, it no longer is.
Last time here there was a footnote about how hard it can be not to join in with the latest ‘thing’.
“My Substack Notes feed featured little else but reactions to Kirk’s murder. It was interesting that I was dying to add my thoughts. Agree with people or disagree with them, offer some kind of alternative perspective from that of the herd. On other platforms I saw various justificatory declamations that he had it coming for one reason or another. Those infuriated me. But still I held my counsel.
It was hard.
But I resisted those urges. The urge to be part of something. Bear witness to a tiny moment in history. To have the right take. To identify with the right people and slag off the wrong people.”
Some things are natural, but unhelpful and even undesirable. We can’t help our collective social impulses, but they can be metered once you see what’s happening. And it might be useful to notice it, given how it is exploited for control. The other inevitable literary example is Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate and of course it’s chilling when you see synchronised behaviour of the kind encouraged in North Korea.
But, personally, Golding’s ‘Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Spill her blood!‘ captures the seemingly frenetic quality of ritualised emotion best.
There’ll be a new pointless assassination soon enough and that will be the moment to notice this for yourself, perhaps.
(If you visit that link you’ll also find cheaper ways to become an ongoing supporter of Rarely Certain than subscribing via Substack)