Amuk in America

Yes, this blog started out with a biology focus, but since virtually all the readers appear to be friends or acquaintances I'm going to indulge myself. I suppose you could cram sociology and psychology under bio, in a pinch. I've blogged about Horowitz's The Deadly Ethnic Riot before - almost done now. But here we go again. It was this sentence that suddenly connected with something else:

In many ways, but not in the pengamok's resignation to his own death, amok-like impulses pervade the riot; and amok, however calculative in its methods, is the polar opposite of instrumental violence

- p. 537.

Horowitz writes about amok/amuk ["running amuck" in US English] as being in some ways analogous to the state of mind of participants in the deadly ethnic riot - its being a reaction to perceived insult, a period of brooding - the "lull" between a precipitating event and a riot, in some cases a belief in magical invulnerability, hypermasculinity (participants are exclusively male), discarding of normal inhibitions, the goal of killing as many victims as possible.

Amok has attracted great attention from the mental health professions, concerned about how to classify it and about whether it is a culture-bound syndrome or merely a culture-specific exemplar of a disease that is universal in its incidence.

. - p. 103

I shall argue for the latter. People don't really amuk here much any more. The last case I remember reading about in the newspapers was a few years ago when one guy jumped on a bus and cut up a few passengers, including a girl who was going to try out for a beauty pageant. However, if you consider the symptoms of amuk, it sounds remarkably similar to a phenomenon which has been occurring in the West over the last decade or so: the school or workplace massacre.

The attack is brought on by an insult or a series of affronts to self-esteem, for which redress seems impossible,. After a period of anxious brooding or depression, the pengamok emerges suddenly with a weapon (usually a knife or kris) and, in a burst of manic energy, kills everything and everyone in his path until he is captured or killed in turn...

Once you notice the pattern, it's impossible to not compare it with the stereotype of the school killer that has emerged over the last few years: an antisocial loser, bullied over a long period of time. He is too weak to stop others attacking him by direct confrontation, and too much of a misfit to stop them by negotiation.

In certain Southeast Asian societies (and some others), the heroic attack of the pengamok is a powerful cultural motif, to which people might recur in appropriately analogous situations.

Kimveer Gill, who shot a number of students on a university campus in Canada, wrote on an Internet forum that "His name is Trench. You will come to know him as the Angel of Death," and reportedly wore a trenchcoat to the university - which, if it wasn't a reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of the Columbine high school massacre in 1999 who called themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia, sounds awfully like. People have expressed concerns that over-reporting of this type of mass murder in the news media could encourage copycat acts by people with similar resentments (as with other types of self-destruction like cutting, suicide, and suicide bombings), and in this case it seems to have done so.

Anybody remember from Pemahaman Prosa Klasik [Classical Prose Comprehension] the story about Hang Jebat mengamuk-ing, chasing everybody out of the palace and raping a dayang [concubine]? He eventually killed the dayang when Hang Tuah broke into the palace to take him down, too. (It's in the Sejarah Melayu if you want to look it up.) Does this sound anything like Charles Roberts who barely a few weeks ago barricaded himself in a school with a group of Amish schoolgirls whom he had intended to rape, before killing them as police closed in?

The pengamok is engaged in an utterly defiant destruction, "a self-liberation through revolt; a soul too sensitive to suggestion, humiliated by its own conscious enslavement, at last turns in upon itself, and accumulates so much energy that the only faintest pretext is needed to release it."

- p. 106. The quotation is from Henri Fauconnier, The Soul of Malaya, OUP 1965.

..."the killings are envisaged as a means of deliverance from an unbearable situation."

- p. 107, quoting B.G. Burton-Bradley, "The Amok Syndrome in Papua and New Guinea", Medical Journal of Australia 1(7), 1968

Notice Fauconnier's physical imagery; he seems to be talking about a nuclear bomb, or a supernova. Perhaps a volcano. Such rage, exploding...

I remember crying in the bathroom when the news broke about Columbine; tears not for the victims, but for the murderers, and for my own rage and helplessness. Lashing out in that way would never have occurred to me, because physical violence is not something I'm predisposed to, and self-annihilation remained more or less a restrained fantasy (not quite sure why), but I empathised with them. Sadistic classmates and indifferent teachers easily make school a living nightmare of taunting voices, grasping hands, stealing, mocking, making you eat your own soul and tear your own flesh, becoming rawer and rawer. (I still think of Seremban as the worst place I have ever lived.) There are conditions under which the only quick resolution to your shame is going out in a blaze of dark glory.

...solitary amok, which is a socially learned but declining form...

- p. 107

He missed it. This book was printed in 2002, but surely in a few more years Horowitz would have noticed the resurgence of amuk - not in Southeast Asia, but in his own country. Young men, social outcasts, seeing nothing to live for and brooding on fantasies of a climatic death, growing in a culture that increasingly glorifies killing whether state-sanctioned or individual, kill for both their maximum satisfaction and ultimate annihilation. In Horowitz's words, "to achieve revenge and suicide in a few strokes."

The gun is more deadly than the parang. Kyrie eleison.