Last Monday afternoon an insane young man shot six people in the Boise Towne Square Mall, killing two of them, before he was killed by Boise police. Last Wednesday afternoon a reportedly suicidal man in Boise’s downtown was shot multiple times by police when it appeared he was reaching for a weapon. He died two days later.
Last Wednesday night, a man fired shots out of his pickup near the Boise freeway before driving into a trailer park and firing a shot at police before barricading himself in a trailer. He was later arrested without injury, which makes him a lucky shooter indeed.
By September 1 of this year, Idaho had experienced nine fatal police shootings, so this week’s action continued and intensified a trend. During the whole of 2020, there had been seven fatal police shootings. This year we’re up to eleven police-involved fatalities and it’s not even Black Friday yet. Two more, and we tie the record.
Since 2000, Idaho police have killed at least 105 people, according to the Idaho Statesman. That’s a bunch of grief for the families of the dead and for the police officers who shot them, and for those officers’ families.
Keeping most of us safe from evil people involves killing people who may or may not be evil. It’s hard to tell what a heart contained once it’s been stopped. It’s easy to tell that the police who kill in the line of duty are left with wounded hearts.
I have never killed anyone, nor do I want to. I can, however, imagine circumstances where I would kill someone trying to harm my family or me. That would be a catastrophe.
People I know who have killed other people have never gotten over it. They spend the rest of their lives denying the humanity of the people they killed as a way of avoiding the reality of what they’ve done.
The dead live on. It takes an increasing amount of effort to keep them from wandering about in the troubled dreams of their killers.
In spite of that downside, most of the people I know can name a person they would kill if they could get away with it. Most of the people I know have, in some way, prepared for it. Having a pistol in a purse or behind a nightstand places you in a narrative that you’ve imagined from start to finish, probably more than once.
Maybe you should treat your imagination with the respect due any lethal weapon.
Police who kill are enacting a larger cultural narrative, one that says the state is in charge of life and death. The state has found it expedient to move execution from the judicial branch of government to the executive. But giving the police the burden of state killing was done with little regard for their well-being.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—whose dyspepsia, neurasthenia, and phobias made him a lonely emotional cripple—made famous the will to power. Perhaps as compensation for his alienated and impotent existence, he fixated on power as the only thing worth having in life. He saw weakness as a kind of death, and he saw conventional morality as the way the culture saps individual power and destroys the human spirit.
If you escape the rules of your culture, Nietzsche suggests, you become a superman, beyond the reach of good and evil. Given the guilt-ridden struggles most of us have with morality, that’s an enviable place to be. Nietzsche’s followers saw their own immunity from moral questions as evidence they were superior to the herd. Killing someone was a quick way to prove you were a superman rather than a sheep.
But turning a real, live human being into inert blood-covered flesh guarantees you’ve killed the wrong person. If you shot people to demonstrate your power over them, you must have missed, because you’re still human and still frightened, despite whatever weapons you’re carrying. Evil is still with you. So is good, and the guilt of not living up to it.
And then the police shoot you.
The sociologist Ernest Becker, who had read Nietzsche, wrote in Escape from Evil that we kill others to conquer our fear of death. He proposed that by killing we gain the illusion of control over mortality. The problem, he wrote, is that the illusion requires constant maintenance. More and more people have to die, or we end up realizing our own mayfly existence in an infinitely old and completely indifferent universe whose purpose, if it has one, is beyond our understanding.
Becker saw human evil as the direct product of the human fear of death. He spent a lot of time explaining the mechanisms of that evil, but you can sum up his work as a repudiation of Nietzsche. No matter how hard you try, says Becker, you cannot become a superman. You will never have enough power to overcome your fear of death. You will never escape good and evil unless you become one of those emotionally amputated human beings we call psychopaths.
Nietzsche, who said he valued honesty above all else, was lying to himself and lying to the people who took his assertions seriously. A worldwide plague of authoritarianism was one result of his lies, but not the end result.
The end result, in a world full of nuclear weapons, is human extinction.
The Ten Commandments are an ancient example of what Nietzsche hated, culturally-imposed morality. But they’re also a guide to mental health. If you commit adultery, lie, steal, kill, envy your neighbor’s possessions, dishonor your parents, and don’t take a day off once a week or so, you will go insane and so will the people around you. You will find yourself at a point in your life where death looks like an escape from all your problems. When that happens it would be best if you didn’t have the means to kill anybody.
Even the Commandments about paying proper attention to God make for good mental health if you consider that God—if God exists—manifests as the still, small voice within far more often than as a burning bush or pillar of fire or wrestling angel. So: listen to that still, small voice above all others. Try not to worship Mammon, even if Mammonism is our state religion and the Federal Reserve Building our cathedral. Don’t blame God for your misfortunes or mistakes, or the Devil either. As Job found out, they do talk to each other.
Also, breaking the Commandments will harm your kids, and they will harm their kids in turn, and their kids will mess up their kids’ kids, and so on.
That covers all the Commandments, I think. They’re not just good ideas, says the still, small voice. Break them and your world will fall to pieces.
If you’re skeptical about the divine component of mental health, remember Pascal’s Wager, which states it doesn’t cost you anything if you say God exists and God doesn’t, but it can cost a lot if you say God doesn’t exist and God does.
Once you accept Pascal’s proposition, you have the problem of finding workarounds for God’s rules. Most people think that all they need to enter heaven is a reasonably competent lawyer, ignoring the fact that lawyers aren’t allowed anywhere near heaven.
If more people followed The Ten Commandments, fewer people would go insane, and fewer insane people would be shot by police. People urging police reform suggest that social workers and psychologists should be called into situations where people are threatening themselves, but in cases where people are threatening others with guns, that’s not possible.
We live in a country with a constitution that guarantees insane people access to firearms. Police don’t have any time to consider their options in a shooting situation, where it’s a given that the shooter believes in his constitutional rights even as he’s forgotten the Commandments, if he ever learned them in the first place.
Police tend to respond to a shooting by shooting the shooter. It’s hard to see how it could work out any other way, although some police departments are better at saving lives than others, probably because they have realized how much damage killing does to the killer.
Here in the hinterlands, it’s easy to decide to minimize contact with Boise and other Idaho cities with police departments. You don’t want to get caught in a crossfire in a Costco parking lot, so you show up early in the day, do your shopping for the next six weeks, gas up and get up and over Horseshoe Bend Hill before the pathologically disturbed have a chance to get dressed, and before the evening police shift has had a chance to wake up and brood on the injustice of having a job that requires contact, again and again, with evil people.
A lot of people join the police in the belief that the job will gain them cultural power, but it doesn’t take long for them to realize that if you screw up, you screw up alone. You can get hung out to dry if you embarrass the mayor or city council. You can get hung out to dry if they change their minds about something you did, even if they told you to do it.
And if you kill somebody, you’ve screwed up your relationships with family, job, and therapists for the rest of your life. A part of you is immediately disconnected from your consciousness, and a lot of your energy will go toward making sure that it stays that way.
Police departments can become bastions of grievance, tribal enclaves in enemy territory, exponents of Us-and-Them, solid blocs of hatred against the ACLU and all that it stands for. “You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. You don’t know what evil dirtbags people can be,” is their refrain to people who wonder why we all can’t just get along, why civil rights aren’t universal, and why Protect and Serve can manifest in such perverse ways.
That over time this mindset might result in insanity itself is not generally acknowledged. Still, it’s half the reason that going to Costco is a scarier experience than it used to be.
People who hear voices are generally considered crazy, but I’ve been happy that my still, small voice has been speaking in a stage whisper for most of my life. I’m even happier that it’s said, again and again, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU IDIOT?” when I was about to do something that would have resulted in my own destruction or the destruction of other people. It has provided moments of self-consciousness when self-consciousness was severely lacking, and if it hasn’t been as active in recent years as it was when I was young and dumb, that’s because I’ve come to value looking over my own shoulder. Maybe the lesson that God teaches (thanks, Pascal!) is self-consciousness.
We live in a culture that hears voices, mostly demonic ones who whisper that there are enemies hiding in the bushes, that we need to hurt or kill them, that what we believe is the right thing and the only thing, and that all we need to take our power back is to strike out at the evil in the world and obliterate it. Those voices are drowning out any request that we take a moment to wonder what we’re really doing, and if there might be a better way of doing it.
Self-consciousness seems to be an imperfect form of salvation, but it’s looking like it’s all we’ve got. If enough of us figure out what it is we’re doing and thinking, maybe we can avoid the perfect storm of rage and destruction and killing that is marching toward us from the horizon.