The news about the six shooting deaths in Queensland filtered through as I read the early pages of Scorched Earth by Jonathan Crary.
People everywhere were asking what caused the shootings and although he was remote from and writing in absolute isolation from what happened in Queensland, Crary points to a reason behind those shootings.
He wrote: “For the majority of the earth’s population on whom it has been imposed, the internet complex is the implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration. All of its touted benefits are rendered irrelevant or secondary by its injurious and sociocidal impacts.”
What happened in Queensland is a product of that internet complex, which in and of itself is a product of the modern world and economic system in which it is rooted.
So rather than look far afield for the answers, we can find them right here in the Goulburn Valley and it is something about which I have a sliver of guilt.
My personal history with this newspaper group goes back to the early 1960s and I’ve always done what I could to ensure its success unaware, or oblivious I suppose, that its fundamental philosophy reflected some aspects of Crary’s précis.
Was that a bad thing, not necessarily, rather simply an illustration that the thinking of the broader community, myself included, was captive to the dynamics of the modern world.
The world is awash with conspiracy theories; deluded individuals groups and, in fact, whole communities meaning any person, group or community troubled for one reason or another can easily find themselves caught up in Crary’s “implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration”.
That “sliver of guilt” mentioned earlier arises from about 1995 when I played a part in encouraging this newspaper to “go digital”; that is become a part of what Crary describes as the “internet complex”.
The digital world was seen personally, I suppose, through rose-coloured glasses and yet lurking within it, abetted by an economic and political philosophy that championed the individual and discounted, absolutely, the importance and value of community was a cloud of Crary’s addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness that has descended upon us.
People personally entangled with those problems he described articulated their crashing confusions at that remote Queensland farmhouse when two brothers and a wife shot and killed three people, including two police officers.
The killers died in a subsequent gunfight.
A recent editorial in The Age stated: As O’Neil (Australia’s Home Affairs Minister) said, radicalisation is not new but, as she pointed out, “it is absolutely clear from events here and around the world that conspiracy theories, disinformation and misinformation problems as old as time are being turbocharged by technology into terrible acts of violence. They’re presenting a new kind of threat to national security”.
ASIO director general Mike Burgess described the behaviours as a “cocktail of views, fears, frustrations and conspiracies” in February.
He linked them to “anti-vaccination agendas, conspiracy theories and anti-government sovereign citizen beliefs”.
A friend has long described people who hold such views of the Queensland killers as “bat-s*** crazy” and if those disillusioned “bat-s*** crazy” ideas can appear and take hold in remote Queensland then they can just easily erupt here.
And in listening to the utterances of family, friends, workmates and others, we need to remember the adage attributed to Philo of Alexandria — “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle”.
Sometimes people lose that battle and the outcome could be what we saw recently in Wieambilla.
Robert McLean is a former editor at The News