Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Aaron Amat
April 2, 2013 |
The following is an excerpt fromEros Over Logos: A Revolt of the Instinctual Mind Amidst the Madness of Modern Life by Salvatore Folisi.
I
am repeatedly struck by our country's incredible capacity for
criminalization and incarceration, our unending fascination with
criminal court proceedings—such as Judge Judy and the televised trials
of famous persons like OJ—, and the rise of TV shows about criminal
investigations and prison life, such as CSI Miami, Women Behind Bars,
and weekend-long MSNBC ―Lock-Up documentaries. We have become a culture
completely obsessed with all aspects of crime and punishment, with law
enforcement, the justice system, and
violence as entertainment.
Every night we look on with a mixture of horror, disbelief, and glee as
the TV news features the latest crime, the latest high speed chase, the
latest indictment, and the latest ruling or prison sentence.
The
fact is, these kinds of news stories fascinate us. But why? Does life in
a modern technological world breed individuals who are more criminally
incited or inclined? Is it somehow more difficult for us to cope with
our lives, with our basic instincts and needs, in societies which are
cut off from nature? Through disconnecting and dividing us from our true
instinctual inner nature, has modern technological society distorted
and deformed our souls into criminal forms of madness? Or does our high
level of sensationalizing interest in crime and punishment, in violence
as entertainment, point to something else?
The list of television
shows based on crime and criminal investigation which one can watch on
any given night is too long to list. It is simply mind-blowing. In fact,
these kinds of TV shows dominate the air waves, and it is sometimes
difficult to find a program on a major channel that is not focused on
criminal matters, that does not feature the lethal wielding of a gun or
depict a bloody and cruel mortification of the body. Is this
criminally obsessedstate
of the media a projection of our own guilty conscience, social
anxieties, and mistrust of an expandingly impersonal, mechanized, and
out-of-control world? If so, is it also a kind of reflection of the true
state of the union in which we live, and thereby intended to help us
adapt to the chaos of
the real world?
Perhaps our
interest in crime and prosecution is indicative of our interest in power
and control, things we desperately need as a result of how powerless
and out of control we actually feel in this society of surveillance and
increasing impingement on our individual liberties and freedoms. Does
our love of crime, prosecution, and violence as entertainment, both in
reality—as in the news—and at the movies, reveal a secret wish we harbor
for living the exciting and dangerous lives of criminals, police, or
FBI agents?
Through vicariously experiencing their thoughts,
motivations, feelings, and actions at the cinema are we relieved of our
own pent up frustrations and feelings of vengeance at having been
sharply instructed on what we can and cannot do, can or cannot feel or
want, by our parents, teachers, bosses, government officials, and law
enforcement—at having been socially repressed—our whole lives? Or are we
simply
takenby the archetypal dynamics of the pursuer and the
pursued, the hunter and the hunted, the triangulation of criminal,
victim, and prosecutor? What inner psychological need is met through our
mass obsession with crime and prosecution?
We revel at the movies
when the criminal gets away with the perfect crime, just as we revel at
the news upon hearing of real life criminals—be they ex-football
players, politicians, or just ordinary citizens—who are convicted of the
crimes they committed and sentenced to years in prison. Either way, we
love to see people roll the dice with their lives. In fact, we seem to
rely on these people and their dramas to make us feel more alive, more
pumped with adrenalin and filled with energy. Perhaps the dramas of
their lives shake us from the numbing boredom of our own ...
***
When
I first saw the television show COPS, I was working at a group home for
troubled teens. They really got into this show and viewed it often as
one of their favorites. They expressed vocal, guttural, and emotional
reactions as the burglar was chased through back yards and eventually
brought down by the COPS. I never liked this show. To me, it seemed
ridiculous because it portrayed our society celebrating its own disgrace
and demise, dressing up the tragedy of crime as a kind of
entertainment.
But the teenagers loved it. I guess they placed
themselves into the dramas, into the dynamics of cops and robbers, of
police and criminals, of the persecuting authority figure nabbing the
bad guy, who, like themselves, was a sort of outlaw living on the
fringes of society. Perhaps they unconsciously identified with the
criminal who, through his or her transgressions against the rules and
norms of society, became a victim of the justice system, became
condemned, labeled as a convict, and sentenced into a life of
incarceration and surveillance that was akin to life in a group home as a
teenager.
Many of these teenagers had been abused or abandoned by
their parents and were, at various stages, working through their guilt,
anger, and grief. They had been victimized as children, which in turn
had driven many of them to become misfits and outcasts, maladjusted in
schools and in society at large. Due to these factors, I could
understand how these youth might more easily relate to the COPS show,
but for the everyday, normal American this overwhelming interest in
crime alludes me.
Perhaps the Freudians are right, and everything
does boil down to our collective struggle with repressed aggression and
sexuality. Freud talked about the enormity of these instincts; by the
looks of our movies and our current rate of crime and incarceration, it
appears as if he was correct.
More than crime alone, our society
is completely engrossed by all kinds of expressions of aggression, from
military maneuvers and wars, to movies, sports, angry talk show radio
hosts, and heavy metal music. If aliens were to descend upon our planet
and view humanity, including all the media we produce, they‘d no doubt
be impressed by our propensity to beat, punch, slash, shoot, maim, and
murder one another—as well as crash cars and blow shit up!
Murder
and brutality as entertainment betray a deep inner collective shadow of
rage that we hide from one another beneath our social niceties,
politenesses, and deceptive personas. It is, in fact, overwhelmingly
difficult for us to be honest with one another about what we‘re really
feeling, what we‘re really thinking, fantasizing, desiring, or fearing.
Ironically,
people who fantasize or daydream are often deprecated for wasting their
time by being lazy, not accomplishing anything, or simply engaging in
an escape from reality. Yet those who watch TV all night are not.
Perhaps, this is because in our culture we are conditioned from birth to
become someone we are not, to feel what we don‘t feel and not feel what
we do, to think what others want us to think, to stop daydreaming and
to want only that which is socially sanctioned. No wonder we‘re so drawn
to displays of aggression; we‘re fed up with being oppressed! Acts of
violence enable us to feel vicariously freed from the invisible cage of
our lives, if only for a moment.
It seems as though we‘ve grown
numb by means of our dull lives of classroom education, offices,
suburban living, and a way of life that focuses on the head, the brain,
the concept, the idea, the intellect and the ego; alongside a sly
refusal of our instincts, our human heart, the knowledge in our guts,
our intuition, and the
natural inner animal, the bodily senses,
inner impulses and drives, the creative and spontaneous mystery that we
are. Even this process of communication through the written word is a
form of abstraction, of symbolic expression that has been assigned
meaning, almost arbitrarily, by humankind.
Words
referto
real things, to ideas, feelings, objects, and interactions. However, as
the old Zen masters say, words are fingers pointing to the moon, which
is to say that talking about a steak will not fill our bellies. Words
cannot replace experience or who we are, just as reading about geography
is not the same as walking around and actually exploring physical
terrain. Ultimately, the body and its life cannot be replaced by
concepts.
***
Although some would say that it
is only through applying the mandates of the mind upon the impulses of
the body that any kind of social order or cultural harmony can be
attained whatsoever, it appears that disembodied cultures such as our
own, whose inherent impulses tend to be more repressed, are more apt to
orient towards crime and punishment, as well as violence as
entertainment.
In this sense, an interest in crime would indicate
an unconscious attempt to resolve the intolerable situation of our
collective societal repressions, which include a displacement of the
body from its central role as mediator between self and world to a third
party position of objectification, in which it is mainly viewed as a
nuisance, or as something which we must merely keep in good repair and
maintain— like a house or a car.
The essence of crime, in theory,
is the presence of something devious or deviant to the normal
functioning of the individual or the society. A crime is defined as an
aberrant act of rebellion, a going against the grain, a transgression of
laws that we hold to be essential to the sanity or sanctity of society.
Therefore a crime is an attack on the principle of Logos, which
signifies order, logic, and reason.
Perhaps this is another way of
understanding our obsession with crime and violence. Because Logos―the
rational principle—has become so ubiquitous in its rule over our lives,
crime and violence as entertainment have arisen as a compensatory
function in our attempts to cope with the utter obliteration of our
instincts, or the principle of Eros, which I take to refer moreover to
love and the passions of the heart, the soul, and the body than to only
sexual desire.
When the body, the instincts, the passions, and our
innate spiritual desires for a deeper and more fulfilling kind of
communion with life and the world of others is denied us by our culture,
crime and violence become attractive alternatives.
Through acts
of crime and violence, the impenetrable walls of restriction—by which we
are sequestered from our true wholeness—are violated, are temporarily
destroyed, thereby allowing us to make connection with portions of
ourselves and the world with which we are normally disallowed. Just as
drugs and alcohol can also give us glimpses into areas of our
personality and dimensions of the world beyond our normal and socially
regulated purview, crime and violence—when they are committed as ritual
acts against the arbitrary rule of order—provide us with a momentary
sense of freedom.
Upon more extensive analysis, it can be seen
that our societal fascination with crime as entertainment is really a
calling to address a deeper need of the human spirit. Although we may be
perpetually drawn to that which is taboo, the way we drink from the
fountain of bloodshed and violence—whether at the movies or news of the
latest war—is rather morbid, and should alert us to wondering why we
have become so numb as to have to continually shock ourselves into
feeling anything at all.
Asking ourselves what it is that we truly need, I think we will find that we need
to feel.
We need to feel alive. And we need to feel connected to ourselves and
to the world. We need to feel the healing presence of the earth, of
nature, and the magic of being alive. We need to live in some kind of
harmony with our instincts and find meaningful ways of expressing who we
are. Lastly, we need to live in an authentic and nourishing
interrelationship with the social world around us.
Violence as
entertainment is truly a form of diversion, both a cleverly symbolic
reflection of, and a distraction from, the state of our own tormented
souls. Although violence as entertainment appears to be a good way to
wake us up, it is truly a meager way of living. Violations of any kind
are really desperate attempts at connection, just as drunk guys fighting
in a bar are secretly striving to have some kind of fulfilling
camaraderie.
But living vicariously through actors who shoot one
another, or through criminals who break the law, is just another way of
avoiding your life, of refusing to take responsibility for your own
desires or to live in accord with your own true nature.
Copyright © 2012 by Salvatore Folisi. Reprinted with permission of Xander Stone Ink.
Salvatore Folisi is a published poet and writer who has just completed his first book of philosophy Eros Over Logos: A Revolt of the Instinctual Mind Amidst the Madness of Modern Life.
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