two suggestions:
the theories of epidemiology (e.g. atran, sperber, and others)
secondly, or in my own view, there is a tendency to understand violent
phenomena in terms of psychopaths.
One has only to look at Japan, Europe, and the US to see that many roots
are political.
There is now now internationalist project of any weight, after 1936-38 the
Comintern is virtually exterminated by what Conquest called the great
terror (e.g. the events that followed the fall from grace of Yagoda and the
Yezohvina that immediately took place against the military and the nkvd.)
in more recent times the choices by the american public and elites (the
invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war on "terror") are isolationist in
nature. Groups, like the Pound movement (Italy) the Hungarian government,
Poland maybe, the fighters of Donbass und so weiter, are the consequence of
that. The socalled lonewolf groups (exterminationists against christian
churches, jewish temples, mosques, or even peaceful gatherings of young
leftists as in Breivik's case that Lawrence Helm quotes) are not lonely.
Consider T. Mcveigh (I hope i recall the nam correctly) is part of a
movement obsessed by the Turner diaries etc.
It is most unfortunate that in the cultural areas (if one leaves out the
sciences, what remains is clowns of confused doctrines, the deconstruction,
the "Gelassenheit" the "signifier" etc.) are in the grip fo their own
idiocies. To quote a simple example, and to be short. Recently the Prague
scholar Ronell had to be fired by NYU (in NYC, NY) for harassing graduated
students. As in the worse traditions the usual cast signed a petition to
explain that she was not a case of imbecillic sexual harassment, but a
great scholar, and blah blah (letters by Zizek, Butler and scores of
others.) Their analytical capacities are zero point zero. The case is funny
since the person in question harassed, as a matter of record, both derrida
and his son... I say it only because I read the biography of Derrida by B.
Peeters.
Short conclusion, Breivik et al. are political phenomena, the interesting
question is to see in the jungle of Bannon, the american politicians, M. Le
Pen, or Salvini what is not only the a product of the crisis of
internationalism.
best To Lawrence and all (I avoid the platitude that the cesspool of
facebook & the socalled social network, that appears to appeal to all of
our antisocial, anti cooperative instincts.)
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
palma, a paolo shaul םֹשׁ ְרֵגּ
Er selbst bevorzugte undurchdringlich Klarheit
On Sat, Apr 6, 2019 at 10:30 AM Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I belong to a forum on Pentax DSLR cameras and one of its members asked a
series of questions hoping to discover a membership profile. The largest
number are old and retired, for example. One of his questions asked what
sort of work Pentax photographers had done. It seems that a
high-percentage are retired engineers. A relatively new member said he is
a retired Social Epidemiologist.
Never having heard of that specialty and knowing nothing more about it
than his title, I asked him if he worked on the Anders Breivik phenomenon.
The Moderator (whose forum name is the name of a shark) deleted my question
and some messages that followed it. Apparently my question resulted in an
argument which occurred after I had signed off and gone to sleep.
I invited the Social Epidemiologist to log onto Lit-Ideas for whatever
happens with this subject, but I don’t know if he will.
Subsequent to my asking my inflammatory question, I looked up “Psychiatric
Epidemiology” in Wikipedia. This specialty apparently explores “the
mechanisms behind how exposures to risk factors may impact psychological
problem and explore neuroanatomical substrate underlying psychiatric
disorders.”
“As an example, in an attempt to measure the prevalence of mental illness
in the United States, Lee Robins
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Robins> and Darrel A. Regier conducted
a study called the Epidemiological Catchment Area Project which surveyed
samples of the general population at five sites across America. In the
study, it was found that about a third of all Americans suffer from mental
illness at some point in their lives. This statistic is often referred to
as lifetime prevalence.” [from Wikipedia]
Apparently specialists work from statistics, that is the identification
and quantification of causes underlying psychiatric problems, but they are
not permitted to introduce stressors that might cause a psychiatric
disorder, but that is what I find most interesting. Goethe’s *The
Sorrows of Young Werther*, for example, was a stressor in the rash of
suicides that occurred after the book’s publication in 1774.
And so, while I haven’t read anything that describes Anders Breivik’s
exploits as a symptom of a psychiatric epidemic, I did read of an
Australian who killed some people in Christchurch New Zealand. Journalists
were attempting to see Breivik as this fellow’s stressor: “Ranstorp told
Swedish radio Friday that the New Zealand shooter, who killed at least 49
people in two mosques in Christchurch on Friday, claims to "have been in
contact with Breivik's sympathizers.” [From
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-15/nz-manifesto-resembles-norway-mass-murderer-s-text]
But whether or not Brenton Tarrant contacted Breivik’s followers isn’t
necessary in order to speculate that Breivik may have been the stressor to
Tarrant’s actions.
And then also, we might see a stressor, perhaps one that inspired Breivik
in the asymmetrical approach to warfare devised by the Islamists.
Does anyone have a better description of Social or psychiatric
epidemiology? Or a better explanation for the social pathology epitomized
by Anders Breivik?
Lawrence
