Weaponised Crybullies

Is 'Free Palestine' responsible for the murder of innocents in Manhattan? It kind of depends on how it is conceived and then expressed, and the lines here are not so easy to draw.

It can be the verbal expression of either a political or a trans-political idea. In the latter case the very last thing those who say it are looking for is a conversation. 

In this way it can be one of those almost pure expressions of want, detached from need, and as such reflects a posture which is broadly common on both sides of this divide right now, sometimes formalised into a set of dogmas. 

Those who speak this way are, consciously absolving themselves from having to engage with the achievable.

Yet most have no discernible relationship with the achievable to begin with: they are, in the main, harmless if pushy windbags whose opinions seem not to actually matter, at least in regard to the real world events they ostensibly refer to. Julie Burchill has amusingly characterised this mindset as that of the 'crybully'.

Yet for a minority, this absolute and abstract discourse leads to a far from funny self-weaponisation, which can have genuinely unpleasant real world consequences, and there are two main sub-groups worth mentioning, both of whom appear to discover quite rapidly that the only available outlet for them is viciousness. 

These are, strangely enough, poles apart — those who are in a position to wield power without restraint, and those isolated by a perceived lack of any kind of power at all. 

The lashing out which results can be dressed up as 'self-defence' or 'resistance', and so on, but in this case it is nearly always maniacal and usually also self-defeating, owing to its essential disorder.

I find myself asking if there is something 'in the air' right now feeding these pathologies and certainly the cultural air we breathe these days is irredeemably cybernetic. 

Jean Baudrillard would undoubtedly have seen the problem here quite quickly: technology is making everything seem startlingly up close and personal with all events occurring in 'real time'. 

In such an environment, what he referred to as the 'phantasies' in our heads cannot easily be contained by these heads, they escape out into the immanent technologically-mediated world, where the distinctions between flawed reality and perfectibility have already broken down. 

We'd struggle to keep them in even if we wanted to, because we always have a way to expel them, almost immediately. 

And Baudrillard would have noted, I think, that it is precisely in that technologically-mediated instant when we simultaneously realise that the phantasy cannot remain just as phantasy —  and that it will never fit snugly (and thus peacefully) with the material circumstances outside of our minds — that a usually limited number of us are driven to 'act up'.