Elon and Colt
Elon and Colt
Are they events or products?
Once again, we are rocked by a school shooting. Once again, we get the same response. It’s a nutcase. It is a lone wolf. We need to outlaw the gun. And finally, JD Vance’s utterance that will ring through the ages, I’m sorry, it is just a fact of life. And of course, we cannot forget thoughts and prayers.
What is so incredible here is that Colt’s alleged crime of a school shooting is seen as an event and not the product of pattern or system. Stafford Beer wrote, the purpose of the system is what it does,”1 In America, we have developed an excellent system for producing school shooters. We do it with amazing regularity. It even has a joke: “When people preach about the existence of “post-birth abortions” what they preach about is school shootings.”
It is even a bigger and better system than just a producer of school shooters. We have developed a system that, across variable contexts, produces very similar behavior. For example, let’s compare, from a distance, Colt with Elon and his confreres, the scavenger oligarchs including Peter, and Donald.
-They are white, male, and have received an ethos or social paradigm from a white father with a rigid, focused, self-serving worldview.
-From a distance, fathers seem socially stunted.
-There is no evidently strong or equal female presence in their lives early on, or in the case of the scavengers, later.
-Their childhoods are cosseted and protected. Their financial stability allows an isolating wall between the outside and the home. The outside cannot control or change inside behavior. No doubts, questions, or negatives allowed.
-There are no consequences. Therefore, little psychological maturation. Virtually everyone raised in this manner is trapped in an early-teen stage. Willingness to risk increases but development of the pre-frontal cortex is delayed and diminished. Future-casting is spent trying to emulate and surpass dad, rather than development of a free-standing sense of self. Empathy and reciprocity are truncated and subsumed by a self-absorption created by nagging issues of self-worth and self-doubt. This is not a foundation for an extended, trustworthy, supportive, social network.
-Both Elon and Colt were given significant gifts that launched them on their paths. It is alleged that Colt’s father gave him the gun after a police visit. Elon’s gift was a basketful of money. Guns and money are both about power. Power in two different forms but equally recognized, accepted, and revered.
-Power, absent a stabilizing, trustworthy, social network, is catastrophic. The very real adulation, in Elon’s case, and the imagined in Colt’s case, dulls the pain of doubted self-worth. It feeds the fantasy of strength, value, and worthiness.
-Power, real or imagined, absent empathy and reciprocity and short-stops, creates a situation that Gregory Bateson identified as schismogenesis, “a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behavior resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals."2
There is a lot to schismogenesis, but a short sidewalk definition is that if one acts dominant and the other acts submissive, the dominant becomes more dominant and the submissive more so. The differentiation increases. In healthy relationships, there are short-stops that prevent too great, if any, differentiation.
Guns and money are power, more power, more dominance. Schismogenesis commences. The reports indicate there were few short-stops in Colt’s life, until he walked into school. Then the differentiation ended. The tragedy is how much too late it happened. Four lives lost but it is very likely that he is done.
Elon, where are the short-stops? Elon doesn’t use guns so he stays free but there are no short-stops in sight. It is a sure thing that Elon will become more and more “dominant” in his own mind. We have seen it already. He gets weirder and weirder, stranger and stranger, with a more and more tenuous grasp of reality. Only Elon is smart enough to “audit” the entire federal government, much the same way he did with Twitter. Only folks of Elon’s caliber (are there any?) should run the country.
We, the American culture and society, are playing the submissive role. And we have allowed the primary short-stops to wither. The legacy press is moribund. We have decided not to tax. We have decided not to call him out with ridicule. And when we decide not to associate with him, he sues and bankrupts us. Elon, and his ilk, are set, not with assault rifles, to kill America as we know it. The one remaining short-stop is the next election.
Elon and Colt are products of the same system, mutatis mutandis. It varies in specifics but is fairly constant in structure. School shootings and Elon Musk are not singular events. They are products of a uniquely American system.
1) Stafford Beer (1985) Diagnosing the system for organizations Wiley, p. 99.
2) Bateson, Gregory. 1936. Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press; Second edition, with a revised epilogue, 1958, Stanford: Stanford University Press.