One of the reasons that people enjoy playing video games is that, among the entertainment options available to the average person, video games are by far the most successful at helping users to achieve a flow state. This is a relatively elusive quality, which some games possess in greater abundance than others, but which game studios know is a crucial feature of their product. Morally, however, the quest for flow generates a slight problem, which is that the challenge in many games involves shooting people, and so the flow in question can only be achieved by having the player perpetrate mass murder on an almost unimaginable scale. (This is one of the difficulties facing television and movie adaptations of video games – think Fallout or The Last of Us. They have to edit out most of the violence, in order to get the resulting product down to just extremely violent, instead of preposterously, over-the-top violent.)
Reveling in violence unfortunately has the potential to interfere with the average person’s enjoyment of the game, at least among those with some trace of conscience. Most games are careful therefore to provide some pretext for the violence. The easiest way to do this is of course just to put the enemies outside the usual circle of moral concern, by making them aliens, insects or robots. In other cases, the game seeks to provide the user with some reason to commit murder – although in fairness, some of these get weirdly convoluted. (A player who is new to the Bayonetta series, for example, might wonder whether one should really be killing angels by stuffing them into iron maidens, or disemboweling them on the “treadmill of blades”? Turns out, however, that this is not just gratuitous cruelty, but rather payback for the suffering inflicted upon witches by the lord’s minions over the years. With those feminist bona fides established, one can go on to enjoy the torture kills. And they do have their moments. As one reviewer put it: “The feeling that comes over you when you deliver a nasty combo to one enemy, dodge another enemy’s assault just in time for Witch Time and then counter with a bloody torture attack can only be described as euphoria.”)
Sometimes the pretext is so thin that it becomes, in itself, a source of amusement. My favorite example of this is the Just Cause video game series. The third installment was particularly good at inducing flow. It was not only a smooth third-person shooter, but it featured fully destructible environments, with lots of explosive items (fuel tanks, electrical transformers, etc.). The game awarded “chaos points” and had a “havoc meter,” registering both the magnitude and tempo of your destruction, with some game objectives attainable only by getting the havoc meter above a certain level. The game was extremely effective at tapping directly into the human appetite for destruction, creating a state of almost transcendant joy.
Needless to say, all of this mayhem risked becoming a bit too anti-social. The physics engine encouraged experimentation, so one of the fun things to do in the game was to find new and creative ways to carry out what gamers refer to, affectionately, as “environmental kills.” For example, one could dispatch hostile police officers by tethering them to a fuel tank and then blowing up the tank, effectively launching them into orbit. Some games, I should note, make no bones about the anti-social impulses they are channeling. The most conspicuous example is the Grand Theft Auto series, where the core fantasy is simply that of being a criminal, able to hurt and kill others with impunity. This is the major reason that some people (myself included) find it impossible to enjoy these games. The makers of Just Cause, on the other hand, found a simple, fantastically cynical solution to the problem. They just put a big sticker on the box stipulating that all of your in-game actions are performed in the service of a just case. Conscience salved, problem solved.
Our ambivalence toward violence, along with our need to be given permission to enjoy it, has been the subject of fairly deep exploration in cinema. As has often been observed, violent movies typically offer audiences a pretext, which gives them permission to enjoy the violence. Different people may find that their mileage varies with this. For example, I myself am unable to enjoy zombie movies, because they seem to me just thinly veiled fantasies about killing one’s fellow citizens. The 2021 Netflix movie Army of the Dead was particularly transparent in this regard, channeling pandemic-era frustrations, with a plague creating a good excuse to start murdering one’s neighbours. (All those guns you’ve been hoarding in your garage, finally you get a chance to use them!) The movie even features a Youtube influencer, who travels to the epicentre of the outbreak, just so that he can livestream himself killing people who have been infected. As someone who remembers the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, the underlying fantasy struck me as uncomfortably close to the surface, and probably not a productive contribution to civic comity at the time of release.
Some movies are self-conscious about this dynamic and play with it in various ways. David Cronenberg’s film A History of Violence is particularly effective at tormenting its audience on this point. Cronenberg repeatedly builds up tension, giving the audience license to enjoy the explosions of violence that ensue, but then rather than allowing the catharsis to persist, turns around and makes the audience regret the momentary pleasure they took. Each new episode of violence, far from solving any problem, simply makes things worse. Cronenberg uses this to punish the audience, saying in effect, “Here you go: is this really what you wanted? Did you really think this was going to solve anything?”
The tension between our darker impulses and the rationalizations that we accept arises, not just in entertainment, but in real life as well. Some of the most dangerous situations occur when a higher moral purpose also creates an opportunity, or gives cover, for individuals to satisfy their anti-social impulses. There are many ambiguous social contexts, in which individuals could be acting out of a high-minded concern for justice, and where some of them no doubt are, but where others are simply indulging their taste for conflict, hatred, or violence. Under the circumstances of struggle it can be difficult to tell these motives apart, and many people will be reluctant to fracture their coalition by distancing themselves from those with more dubious one. This can create situations that risk spiraling out of control.
An example that comes to mind is the case of post-apartheid South Africa. For decades, the Black population was ruled by a government that had forfeited all claim to legitimacy. This meant that almost any form of anti-government violence could be justified as resistance to the regime. Then suddenly, almost overnight, majority elections were held, Nelson Mandela was elected President, and the government switched from being one that was completely illegitimate to one that was perfectly legitimate. In principle, this meant that everyone was now obliged to obey the law, respect the police, and so on. And yet, somewhat unsurprisingly, it soon became clear that many of the angry young men in the townships, who had been necklacing police officers and town councilors, had not all been motivated by principled objections to apartheid. Some of them were actually just indulging the human taste for violence and cruelty – dark impulses that, having been released, were going to be difficult to stuff back into the bottle.
This is an extreme case, but the basic problem is quite common. Anyone who has spent time in left-wing activist spaces, for example, knows that Antifa is not really a movement, much less an organization. It’s just a general term adopted by young men who have a somewhat excessive appetite for violence, and yet don’t want to be mistaken for mere hooligans or thugs. So they adopt the more high-brow goal of “fighting fascism” and gravitate to the left. Talk to any of them for a while and it’s pretty easy to tell which end is the cart and which is the horse. And yet many people on the left find these guys sometimes useful to have around, and so are willing to overlook this aspect of their motivation.
This tension between surface justification and deeper motive can be observed, not just with our appetite for violence, but with many other anti-social impulses. It can be seen quite clearly in the case of in-group solidarity (what Jonathan Haidt calls “groupishness,” or what people used to call “tribalism”), which creates one of the fundamental tensions in identity politics. Everyone likes the feeling of have a side, or being on a team. The pleasure comes not just from the warm sense of belonging, but also from the feeling of antagonism and hostility toward those who are on the other side, or the rival team. And yet because this sort of groupishness is a source of conflict, especially in pluralistic societies, we are normally called upon to suppress it in the service of universal values. There is, however, an important exception to this, which arises in the case of oppressed minorities. If you belong to such a group, it allows you to exhibit partiality toward the interests of your group, and so to indulge your atavistic impulses, without formally violating any universal principles. For example, it gives some people an opportunity to enjoy all of the visceral satisfactions experienced by racists, without the danger of actually being called a racist.
This is why, as I have sometimes remarked, minority nationalism is such an irresistible force among left-wing intellectuals. Generally speaking, nationalism is frowned upon among the educated classes, precisely because it is atavistic. Intellectuals are expected to be cosmopolitan, exhibiting an equal, impartial concern for all human beings. This has obvious merits, but it also contributes to a sense of rootlessness among intellectuals and alienation from the culture and society in which they live. It denies them access to one of the most important sources of identity in modern society, which is the sense of belonging to a nation, and a people, with an historical destiny (forged in struggle, yadda yadda). Minority nationalism, however, allows some to have their cake and eat it too. In this case, partiality toward the oppressed minority coincides with the demands of impartial justice. It allows them to become emotionally invested in what amounts to a parochial, often exophobic political movement, while nevertheless convincing themselves that they are engaged in a struggle to realize universal human values.
I was able to see this up close for many years among friends and colleagues in Montreal who supported Quebec separatism. One friend of mine, in particular, worked at Radio-Canada in 1995, during the last referendum on secession. The night of the referendum, a group of employees, including several prominent journalists, gathered to watch Jacques Parizeau’s concession speech live. Many were visibly disappointed by the victory of the “no” side. But what upset them a great deal more was the point in Parizeau’s speech when he blamed the loss on “money and the ethnic vote.” This caused several people — grown adults — to burst into tears and leave the room. Just to be clear, these were people who had voted for separation. The problem is that, like most francophone elites at the time, they were deeply invested in the idea that Quebec nationalism was a form of civic, not ethnic nationalism. Parizeau’s remark made that conviction – or to put it less kindly, that self-deception – a great deal more difficult to maintain.
This is why minority nationalism is such a powerfully seductive force for the left – it basically slaps a “just cause” sticker on what amounts to an anti-social impulse. (I say this, by the way, not to disparage Quebec nationalists. One of the things that Quebecers sometimes fail to appreciate is that English-Canadian nationalism is also a form of minority nationalism, in this case vis-a-vis the United States, which plays the role of despised majority/outsider.) The point of these observations is not to encourage anyone to police the motives of their fellows, but rather to suggest that we all ask some hard questions of ourselves. How much of our anger is genuinely righteous, and how much is sublimated aggression? Is it even possible to tell the difference through introspection? The older I get, the less certain I become.
Further reading on moralistic aggression: Donald Black, “Crime as Social Control” (1983).