Ya' Cousin Cleon
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For some, however, this obsessive combing through the details of Lubitz' life is misguided, because it places too much emphasis on the individual and ignores the broader structures within which mass murder is committed. Russell Brand recently blamed the tragedy not (as many have), on Lufthansa, the company which employed Lubitz, not solely on Lubitz himself, but on our culture of relentless overwork and social alienation which causes people to malfunction.
The way we talk about mental health is, more often than not, depoliticised. Recovery is the responsibility of the individual. The root of trauma is the family. There's rarely an attempt to situate the individual or the family within structural systems like capitalism or racism. All the facts we have about the Germanwings case, mainly from leaked documents, suggest that Lubitz was mentally ill, and that he hid this mental illness from his employers. Why? Because he would lose his job, his economic security, his means of survival.
Franco 'Bifo' Berardi is an Italian Marxist academic and theorist who has written extensively on the topic. In the introduction to his study of mass murder, Heroes, he says, "I saw the agony of capitalism and dismantling of social civilisation from a very peculiar point of view: crime and suicide". For Berardi, the mass murderer is not an aberration or a monster, but a character directly produced by a system which coerces us all to be constantly productive and competitive.
VICE: We have a commentator here in the UK called Russell Brand. He said that "[Lubitz] lived in a system that causes individuals to malfunction, because we have a lack of cohesion, a lack of connection and a lack of truth." Is this consistent with your theory of capitalism and mass murder?
Franco Berardi : I'm sorry, I didn't understand... who is this person?
He's a comedian-cum-popular-left-wing-commentator.
I see. Well... we have to ask ourselves, "What is this lack of cohesion? What is its genealogy?" I don't pretend to have a universal answer. But what I will say is that suicide has increased particularly rapidly in the last 45 years – by 60 percent according to the World Health Organisation. It is epidemic.
For every person who succeeds in committing suicide there are 20 people who unsuccessfully try to kill themselves. And what else has happened in last 40 years? Neoliberal transformation and greater connectivity – this is my answer to your question about cohesion. We are seeing an all-time high in the need to compete economically, and a general low in sensibility and human relations.
Which is what Brand seems to be saying about a lack of social cohesion. But how does suicide, which as you say, is epidemic, become these frightening acts of mass murder?
Well, because those people hate everybody. The frequency of psychopathology is on the rise. You see, my book is also an attempt to find a possibility of understanding the spreading suicide of terror, the kind of acts that are currently being committed by the Islamic State, for example. This kind of phenomenon... I don't think we can possibly describe it only in terms of ideological or religious beliefs.
Of course these religious and political beliefs do exist and are important factors, but I believe that the deeper, more universal motivation of these acts is suffering. Because you just can't understand a young person coming from London and going to Syria to kill and be killed only on the basis of their religious beliefs. We have to try to understand their humiliation.... we have to try to understand what kind of hell is inside this person.
You say in your book, controversially, that the mass murderer is "less hypocritical than the average neoliberal politician". Do you think that mass murderers are performing neoliberal ideology?
Well, I will ask: What is the core of neoliberal ideology? Firstly, that you are alone, that you are an individual competing with everybody else. Secondly, that the real distinction among human beings is between winners and losers, right? There's no more stable class identity, no more stable political identity – the real divide is between neoliberalism's winners and losers. And if you are a young person who has grown up in this capitalist environment, and you understand that actually you can never be a winner, what will you do?
In some cases, you decide that you are going to be a winner for a second, for an hour, for a moment. Because you feel like a winner when you kill all the people around you and then kill yourself. And this is not just my theory; it's not me saying all these horrible things. It's Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two young men who committed mass murder and killed themselves at Columbine High in 1999. They wrote in their diaries, which are available to read for anyone: "You gave me all this shyt, telling me I am a loser, but I will be a winner for a minute." And so you see, it's not so much the neoliberal ideology [that motivates mass murderers]; it's much more the particular psychological effects of this neoliberal ideology.
Would you say, then, that the act of mass murder is sort of an ultimate assertion of individualism, whereby the individual makes their environment and everyone in it submit to their will?
There are two sides of this phenomenon. On one side, suffering and humiliation are pushing you to do the only thing that you see as possible. Killing yourself in order to cancel out the precariousness of your existence.
The second phase is the spectacularisation of the action. In many cases that I try to analyse in my book – particularly Seung-Hui Cho, the South Korean Virginia Tech killer, and Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who carried out the shooting at Jokela school – their spectacular consciousness is very clear. They take selfies before, during and after the event. They send videos and declarations to big broadcasting companies like CBS, they write their manifestoes on the internet.
They want to be a winner for a second, but at the same time they also want to be famous, they want to be known by everybody. So I think that the crucial point is the self-perception of the isolated individual who commits mass murder, and that this kind of isolation finds a way out in the spectacularisation of these kind of acts.
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