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Why America’s an Ultra Violent Society
Umair HaqueThe statistics are astounding, heartbreaking, devastating. 1.4 massacres per day.
If I told you those numbers about any other country, you’d immediately think: failed state. They’re the kinds of numbers you might imagine in a place where society has completely broken down, and the only thing that really rules is violence. Americans might imagine places like Iraq or Syria, thinking of such mind-boggling numbers. The fact, though, is that it’s America which has 1.4 mass shootings every day.
And that’s in 2021 alone.
The average person would be correct to think “that’s a failed state” of any country that has more than one massacre per day — even if, or maybe especially because, America’s on that list too.
Why is it this way? What are the roots of America’s ultraviolence? After all, there’s a big difference between, say, Afghanistan, Iraq, and America. Afghanis and Iraqis don’t exactly choose to live in failed states. They are made to, because of countries like America, which have left them war-torn shells for much of modern history. Americans, on the other hand, choose the failed state they live in. That’s what makes the rest of the world shudder, regarding Americans as strange, almost alien beings.
The world is right about America in a way that Americans don’t yet really understand. America is an ultraviolet society. That’s because it’s one that’s ruled by dominance and aggression, wielding the omnipresent threat of violence.
It’s easy to see in the shocking statistic of more than massacre every day. But it goes much, much deeper than that. Ultraviolence defines every last aspect of American life.
Think about the average American’s life. He or she gets up every day, and goes off to a “job”, whose only point, really, is to make some billionaire richer. The average prole, after all, isn’t getting a fair share of what he or she produces. Instead, the basics are kept in a condition of artificial scarcity.
Basics — decent food, water, medicine, healthcare, housing, money — all of these are kept massively artificially scarce. Why? To control the average American. They are attached to “work,” which means that if you lose that job, you lose your healthcare. You lose your ability to feed and shelter and clothe yourself and your family. You lose your dignity. You are left to die.
That’s not hyperbole. Millions of Americans have experience with a thing nobody else in the rich world does — “medical bankruptcy.” Even those Americans who are lucky enough to have a “job” have to choose between their life savings — and a life-saving operation. Or maybe a house and educating their kids. Or maybe educating their kids at a school — where they have to pretend to die in “active shooter drills” — or not having their kids be educated at all.
Do you see the point I’m making? It’s hard for Americans to really grasp it. Ultraviolence is what rules — controls — their lives. It’s hard for Americans to see it because it’s omnipresent, like air. They’ve always been choking on violence — so how would they know what it’s like to breathe free and clean air? Let me put it to you another way, then.
Americans are always faced with the threat of violence, which is used to control them. Black Americans, of course, suffer the burden of policing which brutalises them just for existing.
But even the White American faces life in a society which is constantly threatening to withdraw the basics — money, water, food, medicine, healthcare, and so on — unless they comply. Unless they go out there and “work” till their dying day, doing some soul-crushing dreck that only makes some ultra-rich person poorer. Americans live on the knife’s edge precisely because the threat of poverty, misery, anger, hatred, and illness are used to control every last aspect of their behaviour and even thinking.
But if I threatened you with all those things, over and over again, every day, and made good on it — well, that would be violence.
So why is America is steeped in ultraviolence? Because it’s a predatory society. America is the world’s pre-eminent Nietzschean society. It operates according to the following belief system. The strong survive, and the weak perish, and that is what is economically deserved, morally right, intellectually sound, and socially correct. As in any Neitzschean system, the strong’s job therefore becomes to winnow out the weak. How else do you prove you’re strong — if not by subjugating the weak?
That is why American values look like a perverse, twisted caricature to the rest of the world. It wonders, why are Americans so mean to each other all the time? Why are they so selfish? Why are they always mocking and hurting and belittling each other? Why don’t they seem to know how to be nice, kind, gentle, warm, friendly? Turn on the TV, or surf the internet — and you’ll see what I mean: the American that the world knows all too well, someone who laughs a little too loud at hurting someone else.
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The world doesn’t get that this kind of attitude — a predatory one — is what Americans are socialised and acculturated into. The values of a Neitzschean society, which believes the strong survive, and the weak perish — what are they? Ruthlessness, cunning, selfishness, cruelty, brutality, indifference. If you’re to be strong, in a place where weakness is death, then you cannot care about anyone else, genuinely, for even a single moment. That is the kind of vulnerability which might cost you everything. You must only ever be in it for yourself — and inure yourself to whatever price is paid by anyone else, or even yourself.
All that adds up, of course, to violence.
It’s not a coincidence that America became a Nietzschean society. Neitzsche’s greatest — and only — acolyte, really, was Ayn Rand. The rest of the thinking world, which might have admired Neitzsche, also thought he went way too far. No, the “will” to “power” wasn’t the purpose of existence, and having it didn’t mean being a “master” who proved it by oppressing “slaves.” Life wasn’t just about being an ubermensch — and society wasn’t just about producing and worshipping them.
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But America ended up seduced by Neitzsche, in the form of Ayn Rand’s pop-culture fictionalisations of his thinking. John Galt, the uberman, who bends the world to his will, rising above the mediocre person, by way of indifference, ruthlessness, cruelty. Now there was someone to celebrate. That idea went nuclear in America. American economics is explicitly Nietzschean — you’re supposed to be a selfish, profit-maximising predator. American law and social thinking, built on that, normalise it, making it both legal, and socially worthy.
Thanks to Ayn Rand, America became a Neitzschean society, red in tooth and claw, selfish, materialistic, indifferent, while Europe and Canada, for example, chose the path of friendship and warmth, laid down by far better, truer, nobler thinkers, like Camus, de Beauvoir, Sartre.
But you might suspect there’s more to the story than that — and you’d be right. America was seduced by Nietzschean thinking for a very obvious and very good reason. It was vulnerable to it.
What kind of society do you suppose might be waiting for someone to come along that said ubermen are “masters” who have the “will” to dominate and subjugate and exploit “slaves,” thus proving how powerful they are? That that bitter, brutal dance, that dynamic, is the only reason a society should exist, because that is the only point of life?
A society already divided into masters and slaves, of course. One literally cut up that way. Welcome to America.
We all know that America’s original sin was slavery, by now — well, at least some of us do. But do we know how badly it’s legacy has poisoned America to this day?
America became a Nietzschean society because the mentality of slavery made it profoundly vulnerable to being one. The idea that the world is naturally divided into “weak” and strong,” that the strong are “masters” who prove it by exploiting the weak slaves — well, that was all sweet sweet music to Americans’ ears. That is what they’d believed for centuries, after all. So when Ayn Rand came along and popularised all this, capturing the spirit of Neitzsche’s twisted, warped philosophy, sugar-coating it in true-blue fictionlalized American entrepreneurs — well, a whole society fell under the spell.
But the mentality of slavery has a price, too. It demands that the strong be the “masters” by inculcating a certain set of values. Indifference, brutality, cruelty, selfishness. To be a “master” of “slaves” means to enact and express these values. But you can hardly then pick and choose. This is the kind of person you are.
You have become incapable of a certain set of qualities. Empathy, warmth, friendship. Truth, beauty, goodness. Nobility, self-sacrifice, a higher purpose. You have made your choice to be a “master,” and that choice entails becoming a certain kind of person.
A predator.
It’s hardly a coincidence that the world looks at America, and is baffled. That even many Americans look at America, and are baffled. Doesn’t the average person care? About any of these things? 1.4 massacres a day? The omnipresent denial of the basics, from food to water to shelter to money to healthcare? Kids pretending to die in “active shooter drills”? People forced to work until their dying day? Life lived at the constant threat of violence?
The answer, sadly, is that the average American is where Nietzsche wanted him or her to be. Beyond good and evil. Nietzsche put it that way precisely because his point was that a master feels nothing but indifference seeing the suffering of a slave, because a slave is not human, or maybe just merely human and not superhuman, since he is weak. The master feels nothing.
That’s the price of becoming an uberman, a superhuman. The world, and certain Americans, despair — don’t Americans care? The answer isn’t that they do, or that they don’t. It’s that they can’t. That they don’t know how to. That they have lived so long in a vacuum and a void, of emotion, decency, truth, goodness, that even if they wanted to — where would they begin?
America is a place beyond good and evil now. Nothing matters in it anymore, and that is why. It’s a society incapable of the most basic decision on the most monstrous things. Should there be more than one massacre a day? Everyone knows the answer to that question, but in America, it’s “debatable” — precisely because good and evil have ceased to exist entirely.
So what’s left? What Nietzsche — and Rand — said there should be. Will. Power. Master. Slave. Predator. Prey. That’s it. You can make a billion dollars by embezzling a retirement fund? Awesome, do it. You shot up a school? Shrug, I’m carrying my assault rifle to Starbucks anyways. You don’t have healthcare? You must be weak, I guess you deserve to die.
All that’s left in America is raw will, which is contesting absolute power, over and over again, in more and more violent ways — without any social or cultural norms or political lines or boundaries or limits left. Theocracy? Cool! Fascism? Great! Authoritarianism? Excellent — let’s try a coup.
This is what it means to be a failed state. In the truest way there is. To be a place that is what Neitzsche and Rand wanted. A place beyond good and evil, where everyone hopes to be a predator, in the hopes of not being today’s prey. A society ruled by “master morality,” which says that if you can exploit, subjugate, dominate someone — then you should, because the just price of weakness is death.
The price, though, even for the master, is indifference. Left incapable of relationships, trust, warmth, empathy, American society has collapsed. The evidence is abundant, by the way — trust has imploded, Americans don’t trust each other, it’s ranked as a flawed democracy, social bonds don’t exist anymore, the list is endless. Nietzsche and Rand are smiling beatifically in hell.
When you’re incapable of warmth, empathy, decency, truth — because you’ve become the master of slaves — what’s left in you? Only violence. In all its forms. Greed, selfishness, abandon, exploitation, dominance, subjugation, control. That’s where America is now. That’s why it’s ruled by ultraviolence. The violence lives in Americans. They don’t know how to exist without it. Take away the brutality, cruelty, selfishness, greed, materialism, rage, indifference, competition of American life — and what are you left with?
Nothing.
That’s the null point America’s imploding to. Because what Nietzsche and Rand never understood was this: a society of predators only has one endpoint. It consumes itself, in widening gyres of rage, despair, and violence, each person pulling the next down, harder, faster, more viciously, to climb above and beyond faster, good and evil ceasing to matter, will and power all that’s left — and in the end, no one has gone anywhere at all, and nothing is left.
Umair
April 2021
WRITTEN BY
vampire.
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