John Brunner immediately comes to my mind as events continue to develop in our over-crowded and hyperventilating, hyper-mediated world:
True, you’re not a slave. You’re worse off than that by a long, long way. You’re a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren’t fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter against with your head until you get punch-drunk and stop worrying. No, those bars are the competing members of your own species, at least as cunning as you on average, forever shifting around so you can’t pin them down, liable to get in your way without the least warning, disorienting your personal environment until you want to grab a gun or an axe and turn mucker.
Brunner, J., 1999. Stand on Zanzibar, London: Millennium.
‘Mucker’ is a word coined by the science fiction writer John Brunner in his great novel Stand on Zanzibar. The word derives from ‘amok,’ which will require a bit of history. It is a Malay word, and a person who goes violently insane, rushing through the village and murderously attacking everyone in his path, is said to have ‘run amok.’ In what was an egregiously idiotic statement, even for him, the eminent French critic Georges Bataille called running amok the purest manifestation of revolt, “the movement by which man rises up against his own condition and the whole of creation.” (Bataille never ran through the streets of Montparnasse madly slashing with a kris, so he either lacked the courage of his convictions or was a hypocrite with a small — a very small — modicum of brains.) The Malays, inevitably, were and are more sensible: they kill those who run amok.
A ‘mucker,’ then, is someone who runs amok; the times havin’ a-changed, now they use guns. As always, they are people driven to murderous madness by intolerable frustration, repression and conformity, whether in an isolated kampong or the Postal Service. So far muckers seem to have been mostly Americans, but just the other day the radio carried news of one in Germany.
It does Mr. Brunner’s prescience great credit to have foreseen the need for this word, back in 1964; and it does the rest of us no credit at all, for letting such a word be needed. — Cosma Shalizi
And then there is Firmin DeBrabander article in the NYT: The Freedom of an Armed Society. I have been known to say, lecturing, “There are three freedoms on the US: the freedom to shop, the freedom to get gunned down in the street, and the freedom to be lonely.” Of course, an extreme position, and containing a cynicism that gained depth over the years by virtue of subjective observation of the system in the US, and many other systems elsewhere. But imho, a small dramatic exaggeration not far off from the reality.
DeBrabander’s argument is profound, and despite the mis-statement about ‘high-calibre’ (an M-4 is distinctly not high-calibre, but rather high-energy & high-velocity, a difference that those in the know will quibble about), he explores the effects of the mere presence of a weapon. Ever see the looks of unarmed civilians around the world in the presence of armed intruders or militias? No free speech under those conditions. Ever had the situation of being around someone who is openly armed and there is a verbal conflict going on? Ever been armed in such a situation, when the Other is un-armed? The dialogue takes on a certain form. And that form is not open.