Like
many people, I was horrified by the largest mass shooting in U.S.
history. It had a particularly strong impact because I just finished
a three-day vacation from paying attention to the news, which was
already depressing in large part because the presidential election
had been reduced to a choice between a champion of policies that are
making our planet uninhabitable, and a megalomaniac who likely would
speed up our demise.
Readers
of my work know that I respond to emotional discomfort by attempting
to understand the triggers, typically using abstractions that I
invent based on experience and extensive study. Luckily I already had
a basis for understanding, in the form of what I call "group
interaction." Of the three types of interaction I identified
(isolation, domination, and coexistence), domination seems to be
preferred by mass murderers since its goal is total elimination of
other groups of people.
The
shooting added some momentum to the ongoing debate about guns; and
here, too, my research provides some insight. Guns provide an unfair
advantage to small groups, down to the individual level, in
effectively stealing resources from other groups to advance their own
growth. A "fair advantage," on the other hand, would be to
allow motivation and population to determine the outcome of an
interaction, which in practical terms would mean letting everyone
have access to the same technologies. Resistance to gun availability
might thus be explained as a group's fear of granting unfair
advantage on one or more other groups; and the focus of such fear on
government intervention might be symptomatic of isolationist
preferences by people who see themselves as significantly different
from those represented by the government.
The
preference for isolation is a good candidate for explaining parallel
debates relating to immigration and race. If people fear they will
lose resources if people from another group merges with theirs, then
they will try to avoid the merger. This is especially likely if the
other group has apparently far fewer resources than they do, because
the other group would be more motivated to take resources from them.
Those
of us who favor coexistence have trouble understanding these debates,
perhaps because we tend to have a very fluid identification with
groups, easily changing the definition of our group to include the
sum of others. I personally have no problem considering the entirety
of humanity as the basis for my identity, and then shifting with
understanding and familiarity to a broader identification with the
rest of life on Earth. It is inconceivable that deadly force would be
justified except in cases of direct threat, so its use is especially
shocking.
That
said, I doubt any of us is pure in identity with groups and our
interaction preferences, either collectively or as individuals. For
example, I expect that all of us (myself included) favor our families
over other people for primarily biological reasons, with shifting
degrees of allegiance to individuals based on experience and natural
similarities. We have a drive to meet basic needs, for ourselves
first and our self-identified groups as a close second, which
includes assessment of the potential for growth in population and
resource consumption. There are also situational considerations, like
joining a company as an employee, and facing existential threats such
as natural disasters and predation by other species. Someone who
coexists as a matter of preference (like personality) may freely
practice it with family and friends, but be forced to take resources
from others as a requirement for meeting needs as part of a
corporation seeking economic hegemony. Knowing this, I try to treat
each interaction and perception of group identity as parts of a
transient event, useful in the moment but subject to change without
warning, which is my intellectual argument for broadening definitions
as much as I do, as well as adapting to my own acknowledged ignorance
about most things.
Based
on my research, the most reliable way to avoid lethal violence is to
have access to a large amount of resources that is not controlled
by anyone else (and can't by its nature be controlled by any person
or group), and that requires cooperation to acquire and process into
needs and wants such as artificial environments. Such a situation has
been extremely rare, and may be practically impossible now that
humanity has merged both as a collection of groups, and (mostly by
domination) as a species with the group representing our planet's
other species that is also its primary set of resources. There may be
an exception for a tiny minority of us who escape into space and
approximate the ideal situation for a while, but I fear that the
overwhelming majority of us are doomed to imminent painful and lethal
collapse that will make our current gun violence look trivial by
comparison.
