Gloating over violence corrupts us all

A friend has posted the following at Facebook: “Irrespective of how much you dislike someone, gloating over their death is a sign of low-IQ scumbaggery.” He’s talking about the outpouring of glee among some liberal quarters over Charlie Kirk’s murder two days ago. This friend is a die-hard liberal, mind you. And what he’s saying is correct (though I think the form of his criticism, with its harsh name-calling, is not helpful).

The current indulgence, among some people, in selectively condoning or even praising violence based on their political identification reminds me of the same trend two decades ago, back during the George W. Bush era. It was less developed in America then, but at the time, when I was operating under a former (now deleted) Facebook account, I noted with dismay—and I publicly criticized—some of the rhetoric that some self-identified progressive liberals were freely using to invoke violent images and ideas in their tirades against W. I mean things like referring to the French Revolution and guillotines when proclaiming their profound antipathy for Bush and all that he and his administration represented. I got pounced on by a few friends for supposedly not understanding the situation, for minimizing how awful Bush and Republicans were, for downplaying the apocalyptic gravity of the crisis they represented, etc., etc. People tried to tell me that violent language was fully justified by the circumstances.

My response back then was the same as my friend’s response to Kirk’s murder now: Literally and absolutely nothing justifies gloating, joking about, or advocating—whether sarcastically or seriously—political violence. This kind of talk can have nothing but ill effects, whether it’s liberals spouting it toward Trump and Charlie Kirk or conservatives spouting it toward Obama, Biden, and Kamala. And yes, of course, I’m well aware that people on the right end of the political spectrum are quite guilty of it, too.

Such language represents playing with fire. And the fact that the people who indulge in it try to justify it, both morally and on utilitarian grounds (“Somebody has to call out the evil people! Somebody has to stop them!”), and that such an attitude has taken root pretty broadly in some quarters, shows just how far down the rabbit hole of a polluted and corrupted social-political environment and accompanying warped media ecosystem we’ve fallen.

At this point it’s up to each of us, individually, to wake up, examine our conscience, and make responsible choices. Maybe questioning the validity of our own viewpoint and the effect of our inner state on the world we perceive, especially if that viewpoint and state are marked by self-righteousness and an attitude that demonizes and dehumanizes other people, would make a good start.

The strange freedom of choosing misery

Most of us are engaged, more or less unconsciously, in a continual attempt to convince ourselves that it’s impossible for us to be really, finally happy. We make an airtight case for our unhappiness, pinning it on various supposedly unalterable conditions and inescapable circumstances. Our life, we say—at least to ourselves, and sometimes to others in one way or another—simply won’t let us be happy.

But the truth is that no condition, whether objective/external or subjective/internal, ever forces our ultimate attitude or outlook. As Viktor Frankl famously observed in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” The external context where Frankl discovered this truth for himself was one of the most nightmarish imaginable: a series of Nazi concentration camps, where he was imprisoned for three years. One might expect an environment like that to torture the sense of attitudinal autonomy clean out of a person. But for Frankl, it was the crucible where a living awareness of ultimate human freedom was forged.

Importantly, a corollary of Frankl’s insight is also true, representing its complement or converse: We can actually choose to limit our own freedom of choice. Usually, we do this unconsciously. As Richard Bach observed in Illusions, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”

It’s a sad and, in the end, useless thing that we do, employing our freedom to convince ourselves and others that we’re not free, that our life is a miserable trap. The door is always open, but we insist that it’s closed.