I hadn’t planned to write anything but as always, the shower is Where The Thoughts Catch Up With You. This morning I was thinking about a few pieces of media related to the shooting that I have consumed lately. The first is this New York Times interview with three columnists; predictably, Dr. McMillan Cottom’s remarks are the worthwhile ones. She mentions the concept of moral economy, which I have written about here, taking inspiration from Nate’s (apparently) idiosyncratic reading of E.P. Thompson.
Though the term predates Thompson, we’re working with it as developed in Thompson’s 1971 essay, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (which I really ought to read, for how much mileage I get out of it). I’ll keep it short and sweet — Nate and I have been using it as a way of reading the moral valence around the economy, which is similar to but different from how Thompson used it (to describe the feudal economy based on common values of mutual obligation, rather than the capitalist economy based on abstract values of supply and demand and the like). Dr. McMillan Cottom is also using it in a similar sense as Nate and I: “markets have moral economies” and “our moral economy sucks.” Indeed!
I’ve also listened to a few podcasts about this that have been interesting. The most recent TrueAnon episode with Joshua Citarella (I'm sorry for no direct link but linking to SoundCloud is so annoying here, I'll figure it out later) is an interesting deep dive into Mangione’s background, online activity, and trajectory of radicalization. This Canadian critical theory podcast that I quite enjoy had an interesting discussion as well. Both of these, though, are sort of orthogonal to What’s Really Going On. The TrueAnon episode chronicles the particularly rancid and decidedly not left-wing intellectual environment of the techie “digital nomad” world that Mangione was immersed in, and PillPod tried to scan the event as strategic left-wing action (a failure in that read) or terrorism (perhaps a success in the Baudrillardian sense) and talked at length about ideology, mostly vis-a-vis the media.
But here’s the main thing, I think: on their own, each of chronic pain, dealing firsthand with American health care, and the Online of the past four years in particular are more than enough to disarrange anybody’s brain. The Online point bears emphasizing; McMillan Cottom and others (including me!) have written about the syncretic scramble of the privatized internet, where fringe right and spiritual left really do horseshoe together, oscillating in and out of weird phase space. One of those unlikely superpositions and amplifications happens in particular in the ideology of “tech,” whose creepy focus on self-optimization and human biology seems to take equally from the long and storied lineage of scientific racism and from the LSD-soaked countercultural left.
Anyway, I digress. What I mean to say here is that I don’t think those of us, myself included, who were raised on the social construction of the ideological spectrum as such, with two opposing poles characterized by expressed differences in political beliefs, really understand what is happening here. We keep trying to read it through “ideology” understood, again, as expressed political belief that can be arranged as a graded spectrum from left to right. I don’t think that is any longer an appropriate metaphor for describing either conscious political belief or ideology in the very different sense I am intending to use it, attributed to Zizek, of “what we don’t know we know.”
I saw a TikTok video of a Gen Z girlie saying something to the effect of — you were the ones who normalized the possibility of any one of us, at any time, getting blown away with an assault rifle sitting in third grade homeroom as Just The Way Things Are, and now you’re aghast that we’re laughing about this? I think this captures some of the “chickens coming home to roost” vibe that is hanging in the air.
I think this is what is so scary to the media class and political establishment about the reaction to the shooting. It is nonpartisan. Everybody hates their health care. The moral economy of health insurance and of 21st-century American capitalism more broadly — your life has zero value or intrinsic meaning and can be ruined or otherwise taken from you at the whim of an apparatus that you cannot fight back against or control — has seeped down into this ideological subsoil. You can even see this in Mangione’s extremely brief manifesto, basically two paragraphs saying “I haven’t really done all the reading about this, but I knew I had to smoke this guy.” This was an expression of what everyone in America doesn’t know they know. I think the prospect of this bubbling up into conscious admission is terrifying to a lot of people, because it’s bubbling up into a variety of brains that hold a variety of conscious beliefs about, well, everything.