Photograph by Mike Licht for NotionsCapital.com
First, consider today’s breaking news: Thursday evening, a lone gunman calmly approached the screening area outside the Pentagon and opened fire. According to officials, the shots grazed “two Pentagon police officers before they returned fire”.
This incident occurred around 6:40 p.m., according to Pentagon Police Chief Richard S. Keevill. Keevill also stated that the gunman, with “no real emotion in his face”, approached the officers outside the Pentagon Metro station. As the officers asked him for his entrance pass, the man produced a weapon from his pocket and started shooting at the officers from a few feet away. ”He drew a gun,” Keevill said, “and just started shooting immediately.”
The two Pentagon Force Protection Agency officers returned fire with the suspect, critically wounding him. Keevill commended the police officers for acting “quickly and decisively to neutralize him as a threat” without hurting anyone else. The incident is currently under investigation by the Pentagon police department, the Arlington County Police Department, the US Secret Service, as well as the FBI.
Multiple news sources have since identified the gunman as John Patrick Bedell. According to the Washington Post:
Bedell left behind numerous written, video and audio manifestos on the Internet. In an audio address, he suggested that the U.S. was infiltrated by a cabal of gangsters called the “coup regime” after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He believed the group was probably behind such things as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Iraq war, and continued to manipulate the country “up to the present day.”
For the moment, officials are assuming Bedell’s conspiracy theory of a “coup regime” served as the motivation for his attack at the Pentagon.
Now, second, consider another recent report: Just before 10:00 am, on February 18, a man named Joseph A. Stack flew his single-engine aircraft into the Echelon building in Austin, TX. Stack died in the crash, and his attack wounded two others. The Echelon Building Stack crashed into houses the offices of the Internal Revenue Services (IRS), the US tax collection service. And apparently, the motivation for Stack’s attack on the IRS was similar to Bedell’s at the Pentagon. Both men were driven by political frustration, resulting from a government they perceived to no longer serve in their interests.
In regards to Stack, the Times Online has reported:
In a lengthy manifesto posted on a website [Stack] administered, he recounted his numerous struggles with the IRS and concludes: “I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”
The remainder of the manifesto reads like the angry, frustrated ramblings of a man who felt ignored by his Government and the people who were supposed to represent his interests. Mr Stack cites the government bailouts of banks and auto companies and the “murdering [of] tens of thousands” by the greedy insurance companies while his government representatives sit idly by and only help the rich.
Mr Stack added: “I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say [...] I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand,” Mr Stack wrote before declaring: “I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure [sic] nothing will change.”
We should be extremely careful, here, when trying to make sense of these two, unconnected, yet similar cases. US officials have labeled both cases acts of terrorism, which they rightly are. But the articulated motivations behind them are different from Islamic fundamentalist rationalizations of terrorism. There obviously is no religious rhetoric in the cases of Bedell and Stack.
What does exist in the two above cases, and what Bedell and Stack’s rationalizations share with other terrorist rationalizations for violent acts, is a sense of despair. And “despair”, here, is meant in the psychoanalytic sense.
To say this plainly, “despair” is a psychological state, which results from a sense of meaninglessness, coupled with a sense of being unable to change one’s existence into a meaningful one, in any way.
The result is what Viktor Frankl calls, “existential frustration”. Such “frustration” is experienced as intense anxiety, that results in aggression—which can then result in violence if unaddressed, as per the extreme cases of Bedell and Stack.
As Frankl says, “When there is a sense of meaninglessness, people do meaningless things.” And violence is the “meaningless thing”, par excellence, which can result from such despair. Here is Frankl, on American television, discussing these matters:
All this, of course, does not excuse Bedell and Stack’s violent actions. We are each responsible for the consequences of our own actions.
But personally, I have spoke in previous articles, about the need to have a public discussion about human psychology. And I have spoke, too, of what the resulting conclusions would demand, for changing society accordingly into a saner one—one which meets the needs of human psychological development.
And the very lack of such a discussion is exemplified perfectly in the attacks by Bedell and Stack, as well by the phenomena of terrorism in general. At this moment in history, though, I do not see governments as being able to provide such a sane discussion. It must come from a cultural change from the “bottom up”, so to speak.
Until then, we should expect to see more violence, as a tragic symptom of our faltering society.
Editor’s Note: Stephen Dufrechou is a college professor in Memphis, TN. He is Editor of Opinion and Analysis for News Junkie Post. Please follow this author on Twitter. His archive may be accessed here.
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Excellent analysis. I have to say that I fear things are going to continue to get worse. There is a deliberate atmosphere of paranoia, fear, and hate stemming mostly from the right which is setting off unstable folks, who only need a little nudge to go postal in the first place.
Exactly. I’m also highly concerned that we may be witnessing the beginning of a series of these kinds of domestic terrorist attacks. Only time will tell…. But both you and I were predicting as much last year in print…. It all seems the logical outcome of the confluence of mass poverty, institutional under-education, and systemic psychological underdevelopment…. Add an increasingly hostile, security-obsessed, militaristic right-wing populist movement to the fray, and you easily get all this chaos….
I’m tempted to be “Hegelian” about these social conflicts, and read them all as signs, which will in the end produce historical progress. At least that way, there’s a silver lining to it all.
FROM THE RIGHT lmao You are BLIND there is no right left they are controlled by the same people…
You’re free to “lmao” all you’d like, Tim. But I wasn’t talking about “control” in the first place. So your comment is a straw man… Rather I was referring to the psychological distinctions between contemporary liberal and conservative movements.
The latter movement is strikingly less developed than the former. The current GOP and its base are composed mostly of “strict father” authoritarians and hysterics… That much is evident at a cursory glance at the statements and positions issued from that group. But one could easily go further in explicating this.
And it’s not a news flash, either, that both parties are “controlled by the same people”. It’s been that way since the Jacksonian Era of American politics…
The two-party system is not actually a “two party” system at all, but a one party system (of the capitalist party, so to speak), which is splintered into two factions, the Republicans and the Democrats. And neither faction has the basic needs of the population in mind, unless they somehow coincide with State’s profit motive. The two factions simply, and only, differ on how to “do” capitalism–and that difference is largely informed by their psychological differences of development, which in turn informs their moral outlooks, which in turn informs their differing ideologies.
Nevertheless, thanks anyway for your reactionary comment.
Often violence stems from feelings of powerlessness and disfranchisement. It is very possible that we will see more of this kind of activity in the future. As the economy worsens and citizens continue to lose faith in our government, especially those who now feel dejected over what they believe to be Obama’s failure to deliver, I think people in despair will resort to violent acts in order to be heard.