Rooting for the Bullet

A 1000 words on killing

We fall apart when we lose the ability to differentiate between individual people and systems.

Systems are made of people, but people are not systems.
The system, Steinbeck’s monster in The Grapes of Wrath, moves ever forward, compelling the people that pilot it, in so much as one person can pilot the monster, to lead it to more lives to consume, more treasure to hoard, and more land to take.
In The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck talks about the chain of command within the monster, the bank employees, the sheriff’s, how all each one of them could only delay the monster, because ultimately it must feed.

But the owners?
Could the owners stop the monster?
Or could they only delay, until the shareholders replace them, acting under fiduciary responsibility to the company, and themselves, the contract with the monster, the thing that makes the monster exist in the first place.

Greed.

You can’t kill greed with a bullet.

But you can kill a greedy person.

Just like you can kill a political enemy, or a figurehead, or an entire people.

Targeted killing, like all things, has a specific and limited utility. It’s maximum utility is in the killing of the single person, and after that, generally speaking, for every second order effect, it tends to lose utility… unless your goal is to make things worse.

Assassination is a terror tactic, terror being the use of fear and violence to effect political change.
It shows that, when successful, anyone can be touched, no matter who you are. It shows you that you are not safe, and it shows others that they are not safe either. It creates the fear of violent consequence in others, because it is consequentially violent to the assassinated target.

Assassination is just murder with a political bent… keeping in mind that all crime, like all art, is political in some way, just as our existence is too.

Violence compels either compliance or escalation.

Had Trump been assassinated, there would have been a lot of escalation, which goes back to my point about making things worse, but he’d be dead, and not about to become president again.

Would that have kicked off a hot phase of the civil war we’ve been in a cold version of since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox… you know, not counting the lynchings, the hate crimes, and all the other deaths that have come out of the insurgency which also became the GOP… well, it’s hard to say.

But Trump would have been dead.

Since a guy in a hoodie shot a CEO, does that mean we’re all going to get Medicare for all who want it?

No, probably not, but one of the people that benefited most from greed, from bankrupting people, and from unnecessary death, well, he’s dead.

His life free from the consequences of his greed and his cruelty, no matter how nice a guy he might have been to the people and family members in his life, came to an end as a consequence of that greed.

The maximal utility of that action was his death, whether or not he, as an individual, could have stopped the monster (he couldn’t have), he still profited disproportionately compared to just about anyone else in his company for the harm he encouraged.

Now, because of that, his children are going to grow up without their father, his wide is a widow, and his parents, if they’re still alive, have, as individuals, faced an act of violence and a loss that is incomprehensible.

Society exists under the auspice that life isn’t just. We say fair, but what we mean is that there is no justice, and we accept that, and we work to remedy that with systemic change.
You can kill people, and you can make things worse… please note that sometimes yes you need to kill someone to make things better, this isn’t Kant, there are no categorical imperatives here… and you can change systems and make things better.

Rarely does the bullet make things better on a systemic level, because the monster is not one person.

But still, that one person is dead. For good and for ill, that is always the result of a killing, at least one dead person.

The rule of law tells us that when we take the law into our hands, when we make the system of justice, the attempt at organized systemic justice in an unjust world (to say nothing of when the justice system is a tool of oppression), we move wholly into the realm of the personal, the individual.

We deny the idea that justice can exist systemically, we accept again that the world is not just, so we become saddled with meting out whatever we deem to be just, person to person, individual to individual.

And maybe that act can spark something, but usually it just makes things worse.

Why? First, because it doesn’t scale., which os one of the main problems with Libertarianism, and second, because violence speaks to our worst qualities as human beings.

We also, “theoretically” -these quotes cannot possibly do enough work here- live in a society where the systems of power can change, and improve, where things can get better without the use of violence.

And no, I am not naive about the fact the monster is part of politics too, but you could kill every billionaire, you could kill every CEO, etc. and still lose the war against the monster, against greed.

You see, you can’t kill greed, it’s a part of who we are, of what we are, so the only thing you can do is contain it, and regulate it, and over time, stigmatize it and make it no longer aspirational.

And you can’t do any of that with a bullet.

But do you know what you can do with a bullet?

Remind people that there are consequences for their actions.

The thing about that though is, they won’t learn anything because they’ll be dead, and the people like them won’t learn anything either, because their existence is proof that the world is not just.

They know it’s not, and they think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

And that’s why we root for the bullet.

As cruel, and as brutal, and shortsighted as it is, that’s why we root for the bullet.