The Act of Killing

The act of killing is as frightful as it is present, and even banalized.

In our global society, when political or ideological orientations radicalize themselves, they start to justify killing. This is not what Islam does, it is what every ideology does when pushed to the extreme.

What are the internal resorts that determine an individual to kill? What are the types of justifications used, when the act itself is not legal? In the current context, when the political agenda both in Europe and the US is easily redefined by terrorist acts, I think it is important to undertake an in-depth exploration of these questions.

Mass killing in public spaces are more and more common. One may distinguish two types of motives: individual and political. Mass shootings in US or the mass stabbing in Japan seem to be individually motivated.

Terrorism is a politically motivated (or rationalised) mass killing that frightens through its cruelty, its discretionary and rudimentary methods (that remind us of the frailty of life), and throughs its highly symbolic targets.

It is important to observe the similarity between the jihadist terrorism, other ideologically motivated terrorism such as the mass killing perpetrated by Brejivik, and those that appear to have purely individual motives. Individual is always political.

In most cases the killers are young men under 30 y.o., many times psychologically unstable, with a history of social and communitarian marginalisation. What makes them similar is a type of anxiety of marginalization, of growing up in societies in which they find difficult to identify anchors and landmarks for their future adult life. The inherent psychological fragility of the coming to age overlaps on a social complex and on a specific subject position in that society that drives a lot of young people to radicalisation: first in political vision, and than in action.

The difference between mass shootings and terrorism may be in the politico-ideological motivation: while in the US an adolescent seems not to need an ideology in order to transforms his (and not even once her) existential anxiety in mass crime, in Europe things are somehow different.

Mass killers in Europe chose politico-ideological justifications, but they have the same social profile as those in the US (age, degree of social inclusion, gender). The difference is that the inclusion/exclusion criterias in Europe seem to be more often than not based on a collective rather than individual type of identity. However, the radicalization of these profiles is the easiest one.

It is important to understand that the structure of radicalism is the same for the jihadists that claim allegiance to ISIS in order to justify the killer act, and for those that affirm allegiance to a far-right ideology in Europe (Brejivik case) in order to do the same thing.

In the last series of terrorist acts in Germany, we have both spectres: the young mass killer from Munich had, conform Haaretz, an obsession for Hitler’s ideas, and “he hated Arabs and Turks”, him claiming aryan roots, both as German and as Iranian.

I’d like to underline that it is not Islam that kills, nor do the conservator visions or the leftist politics. But their slippage towards extremes when it happens, constitutes a fundamental element in justifying a succession of acts that usually start with questioning the universality of rights and end up with the negation of the right to live of some fellow human beings.

What kills is the cocktail between a fragilized psychology and a radical vision, brought to the extreme (that may appear in any politico-religious orientations), and pushing towards robbing the other of his/her rights (the other being differentiated on any of the ethnic, religios, sexual, social criteria). The right to life is the last in a long list. The attempt to rob anybody of any of the rights (such as the right to move freely for example) is the first step towards the justification of physical elimination, towards the legitimization of the act of killing.

What triggers the jump to the act of killing? It is possible that this is internally justified by the de-responsabilisation that one ideology or another has to offer, thus triggering a mechanism somehow similar to enlisting oneself in an army — this time ideological, be it of the jihadists, the extremist populism, or the radical left. The responsibility of the act is transfered from the individual to the ideology in which name he/she kills, similar with the transfer towards the military institution in the case of soldiers. The latter is a “legal killing”. As a soldier, the moment of killing is positively sanctioned and the army (and thus the nation it represents) takes the burden of responsibility.

There are other types of legal killing, as the state has, for the moment, the legitimate monopoly of the distribution of violence. There are well known cases in history in which acts that start as criminal end up constituting the fundament of a new political order. The movie The Act of Killing (I blatantly copied its title) explores one of these instances, in Indonesia. The militias that killed unlawfully 40 years ago helped put in power a political structure that is still legitime today. Thus, their killing act seems to be legitimated by history, as the killers were never proved wrong. On the contrary, they became glorified. The individual process of consciousness is thus arrested by the legitimity of the recognized and historically validated power. Just imagine what will happen if ISIS would gain legitimity on the world scene…

One of the legal killing that has been outlawed in different degrees is the capital punishment. Its outlawing is in concordance with the Charter of Human Rights. However, there are cases in which law agents endowed with the legitimate distribution of violence (i.e. police) may abuse this power. Examples are unfortunately plenty these days.

Conclusion — from suicide to killing

The complex causality of the decision to become a killer cannot be reduced to the radical ideology in whose name the crime is perpetrated, and much less to the non-radical roots of this ideology. This is only the killer’s protection shield and his/her source of de-responsibilisation.

The cause of passing the threshold to become a killer must be sought for in the society in which the killer lives, as Durkheim did in order to understand suicide. The sociologist demonstrated that, while the act of suicide is the result of an individual decision, its causes are social, having a greater probability to be manifest in anomic societies — their major characteristic is the disconnect between the individual and the community. This type of societies, Durkheim believes, offers little or no moral guidance to the individual and feed an “insatiable desire” to satisfy at any price narcissist desire.

We probably need a new Durkheim in order to understand why the global society give birth to mass criminals. Maybe mass shootings and terrorist attacks are the reverse of the coin of extreme individualism that replaces any moral stance with the instant gratification of personal desires, the latter becoming thus the only moral. In durkheimian terms we are in an anomic phase, and those feelings can be easily instrumentalized by radical groups in order to create their “soldiers”.

At the same time, we need to think twice, at least, before writing articles and comments that incriminate without discerning political and religious orientations, because this is the very encouragements for their radicalisation.