Here’s my new YouTube video, which looks again at the American gun cult and the sissification of postmodern men.
And below the video are the notes I used to prepare for this video
Cheers!
American gun culture, but more like a cult: Hollywood mythsof power, manliness, and heroism (Westerns, gun fights, meme of American military “performing brilliantly” (22,000 hits on Google)); cops and robbers TV shows, NRA, survivalism, and Christian apocalypse fundamentalism; mysterious in Canada, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere which don’t celebrate guns; Question: Why is the gun cult an American phenomenon? Two-part answer:(1) the US is conservative, whereas most modern societies are more liberal, and conservatives pride themselves on being more masculine (authoritarian, honourable, absolutist; see Jonathan Haidt); (2) the US is the most powerful country so the power spills into its culture and Americans reconcile themselves to their domination with militaristic myths, which entail the worship of guns
Question: Why is the gun culture grotesque and pathetic? Two incomplete answers: (1) Feminization, emasculation thesis (Bill Maher and Fight Club novel and movie): rise of women and machines (globalization); men can’t compete and have lose their sense of masculinity; the gun cult is meant to restore or protect masculine values, whereas masculinity in modern societies is clearly in decline; (2) Freudian gun-as-substitute-penis thesis
Gun cult fails to reenergize men, because guns are for sissies: guns don’t augment martial virtues or inspire masculine heroism, since guns kill in a relatively cowardly fashion, allowing the shooter to kill from a position of complete safety, as in sniping and drones; the gun does most of the work and merely has to be triggered with a finger flick to shoot; compare with ancient bow and arrow and spear, the difference being that in the ancient world, men used those weapons to hunt (to kill for their own food); even when they used those weapons in war, their cultures were authentically masculine, because they didn’t have machine as slaves to take care of the necessities of life; compare Bill Maher’s statement that the 911 terrorists weren’t cowardly, contrary to what the US politicians said (the terrorists were infantile, deluded, and irrational, but not cowardly, since they obviously put themselves in harm’s way as they killed their so-called enemies, as opposed to shooting from a distance)
Manly weapons are swords, knives, or fists, since it’s much harder to kill without putting yourself in jeopardy; true, whenever almost everyone has a gun, as in the US, no one is safe, but you still don’t have to get your hands dirty when you shoot, versus killing an animal with a spear, which teaches you the horror of death (similar to the two views of war, those of soldiers and civilian politicians: the more distance you have from war, the more gung-ho you tend to be, since you’re ignorant); the gun dual is meant to make the fight perfectly fair, but it still doesn’t teach masculine virtues, since it makes the fight turn on a flip of a coin; in modern war too, it’s mostly a matter of luck whether you get shot since bullets fly from all directions, as WWII soldiers found out when they stormed the beaches (low US casualty rates recently, since it doesn’t fight real wars against near-equals)
Rise of mixed martial arts addresses the poverty of the gun cult, since fist-fighting obviously takes more heroic kinds of courage and skill
Gun cult an indicator, then, of modern decadence: impotent, doomed defense of manliness; absurdity of bragging about gun collections or killing in gang warfare, because that modern weapon makes you less of a man; it doesn’t teach you humility or honour; it makes you a monster (psychopath), a coward, or PTSD victim (if you experience the chaotic, dehumanizing nature of modern mechanized warfare)
