ON "STARING INTO THE ABYSS"

We are drawn, inexorably, towards death. This is true mentally as well as physically. The same way our bodies cannot resist the pull of the abyss as they age and fail, our minds cannot resist the pull of the abyss when we see death and tragedy. The extent of this varies from person to person, but is almost universal - nobody questions what you mean when you say you "can't look away" from a car crash. In fact, many people will stop to look at it - oftentimes after a crash traffic will come to a halt, not because the car is still in the road but because so many people will slow down to stare. Car crashes and trainwrecks are commonly understood points of reference for disasters we find ourselves obsessed with, lethal or otherwise; when a movie is so bad we can't help but watch it, we call it a trainwreck, a car crash in slow motion.

And why wouldn't we take an interest in death? It is, after all, physically inevitable. Despite our best efforts, immortality remains unattainable, and likely will forever. Some believe the spirit will never die - I will avoid comment - but the body, in every case, will. And so we find ourselves fixated on the many ways this can occur, the many times and places death offers itself to us, the events and people who carry it out. In the modern era, a new type of human being was born: the "serial killer". This new type of human grew more numerous over the 20th century and especially the late 20th century, during which another new type of human being was born, much related: the "mass killer", or more commonly the "mass shooter". These two types of beings are the subject of much fascination and disgust, typically both from the same people. In the interest of pleasing this fascination much discussion is had about them, art created and documentaries compiled, and in the interest of pleasing this disgust this discussion is typically shallow and reactionary. Often, it's used as a way to sneak ideas into people's heads which they would not agree with under normal circumstances, such as increased surveillance or lethal punishment.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. I am more interested here in the internal mechanics than the external mechanics. We seek these things out, but they are not, ultimately, enriching. Why?

When I was a child, I was as drawn to death and crime as much as anybody else. When I learned about events like murders and rapes I would seek out further information in acts of sick curiosity, as many do.

But to stop myself early: why was I curious about rape as well as death? Is it as inevitable as death? Not precisely; rape and death are both a form of destruction. Destruction more broadly is The Abyss, and death is simply its most visible, pernicious arm. The Abyss is destruction, annihilation, void, the creation of nothing where once there was something. It is the loss of something intangible, invisible. In some cases there is something physical to go along with it, but not always. Either way, we are fascinated and disgusted.

When I learned the details of these events, I often felt a strange sense of disappointment. "This is it?" I would wonder. You might tell me that this was a bad reaction to have, and it is, but it's true. I always expected some level of specialness, creativity perhaps, that was almost never there. The Abyss does not create, it destroys. It is not original, it is primal and repetitive. It is nothingness, death, annihilation, made manifest through human hands, and its methods are blunt and uninteresting. There is no interest to the details, past how grotesque they can become, which only holds value for thrill-seekers.

Some of these events do have importance outside themselves, shaping public policy or opinion, but generally this is not the case. They are self-contained, even banal. Serial killers and mass shooters are notable here because they exemplify this. They are creatures of routine; serial killers commit similar actions repeatedly and indefinitely, and mass shooters intentionally fall into patterns as the mental virus works its way through their body. They are doomed people, locked in death spirals until their role as The Abyss' vessels have been satisfied. There is absolutely nothing to learn from them, and yet we try, repeatedly, to learn from them.

One potential metaphysical reason for this would be The Abyss, as an entity, commanding our attention through its vessels. By manifesting itself in the physical world, it draws us further into it. Indeed, the explicit goal of many mass shooters is to gain notoriety. This falls apart with serial killers, though, who try to remain in secret for as long as possible, the deepest divide between the two psychoses. I do not ultimately believe that The Abyss works in this way, and that it is merely a neutral entity - if these people are hijacked, it is by something else entirely. In fact, it sometimes works the other way around - by staring into the abyss, these people become its vessels.

At other times, though there is no ultimate explanation, and the entire act of examining them becomes moot. This is the strangest part of the entire phenomenon; despite gaining no information or joy, we continue to try and glean something from these events. The average serial killer or mass shooter does not have an especially complex psychology. They do the things they do because they enjoy them, or for political reasons which would classify them more closely as a terrorist. (This line does blur at times when political reasons are used as justifications for pre-existing desires, as is the case with many recent mass shootings.) It must be asked, then, what we hope to gain from this. Again, is it simply to satisfy this fixation with death?

To some extent, I think the answer is yes, and that it's ultimately somewhat normal. We are interested in what happens when we die, in body and mind. To seek out one or two instances of a dead body, to ponder what goes through someone's mind as they die, is just as natural as wondering what happens after you die. It's clear, however, that this becomes a fixation for many people. Some do it to thrill-seek, and others do it out of a sheer dark obsession. This has grown on a societal scale, too, with the rise of mass media. Ted Bundy, Columbine, decontextualized war footage, have fostered obsessives everywhere.

There is a fundamental problem with this practice of "staring into the abyss". When we stare into the abyss, recounting the simple events of Ted Bundy's killings and the Columbine attacks or watching isolated footage of war and death, we are not actually staring into The Abyss. We gain no insight into these events. It is very rare that the events are contextualized and that any further analysis is done; most people watching gore videos do not care what happened before or after the video was taken. Deeper discussion of the issues at play in events like Columbine quickly become extremely charged and difficult to navigate, and because of this it's often easiest not to even bother, and to treat it as a purely individual event despite it arguably being closer in motive and form to a terrorist attack than a traditional mass shooting. In our obsessive counting and recounting of events, they lose all meaning. They become simple noise, floating points to be used in conversation with no light shed into what caused them or what they themselves have caused.

Part of this is a failure of empathy. The psychology of the serial killer, mass shooter, terrorist, is entirely ignored and flattened. They are treated as utterly inscrutable and thus not worth interrogating. It is true that their psychologies are typically shallow, but they are not wholly closed off, either. These people were not born to do the things they did - it is only by the context of their lives that they became doomed. If we're to obsessively replay these events, why not attempt to gain some insight into the thought process at play, if only so we can try to understand it and spot it when other people walk the path towards being swallowed by The Abyss?

The answer is simple: the psychology at play in staring into the abyss is just as shallow as that in staring into The Abyss. The events, as they are replayed, are not treated as true tragedies; they are treated as entertainment. Any value to be derived from trying to reach out into The Abyss is ignored in favor of the self-serving act of staring into the abyss. When we stare we put our hands over our hearts and marvel at what the world has come to, congratulating ourselves for not falling to that point, as if there was ever any doubt. There is no empathy for the victims, either, despite constant protests to the contrary. If there were, people would remember their names, and not those of their killers, and we would not have to be reminded every time of who they were, what their names were, and why, by participating in this self-serving entertainment of staring into the abyss, we are actually doing them a great service. To look again at the external mechanics of the situation, it is a corruption of our natural drive towards death which exploits our fixation for attention. Often, the intensified repetitions of the events drive people further into their own abyss of anxiety and paranoia, thus driving them to give even more attention to the worst events in our collective histories. It is a bloody, pathetic machine.

As long as we hold ourselves at a distance from it, there is very little to be gained from staring into the abyss. The Abyss is nothingness, and so we are trying to find depth in a flat object. It is only after adopting and embracing its logic of spiritual death, as a religious man does the logic of physical death, that we can begin to truly understand it and the ways and reasons it manifests.