A stroll through Threads; vigilantism

I don't think it would be controversial to say that buddhist morality is less concerned with following "commandments" than it is maintaining a View, and acting according to that View. View points to a whole way of seeing reality, and then intention and action follow rather naturally from this. "Naturally" doesn't mean there aren't difficult scenarios one can find oneself in, but simply that there is a path one can return to for clear guidance.

Traditionally, for example, keeping to the bodhisattva vow means, at the level of intention, that you never deny your buddha-nature, for instance by falling into despair, giving up, and you never reject another being, in the sense of committing yourself never to help or care about someone, in a sense erasing them.

I don't actively use any other social media but Reddit, but I periodically scroll through Threads to get a sense of where the culture is, or at least where the social media-using culture is -- I sometimes forget that this is possibly not representative of America. Nearly every time I have done so I tell myself aftewards that the experience didn't enrich my life, and that I should just let it go. Maybe that will happen, maybe even soon. In any event, I just had a scroll yesterday, and once again came away ... depressed. And shocked.

One of the causes this time is something specific. It is the glorification that we are seeing of Luigi Mangione. And I mean glorification: it's really something. Post after post, each with many supporting responses, sometimes many dozens or more. This was a really disturbing experience.

I say this as someone who very much agrees with the critique of America's health care system that is given as a justification for Mangione's act of murder. Absolutely. The for-profit system we have seems to me something of an abomination. Every human being should have an equal right to health care, and the highest quality available, solely by virtue of their humanity. I've read all too many of the heartbreaking stories too.

But Mangione is no hero. Had he made his point non-violently, by, for example, going on a hunger strike, then that would be another story. But he murdered the CEO of a company who is not responsible for either creating or maintaining the system he is a part of. That company will simply replace him. That company's shareholders will expect to continue making as much money as they have in the past. It is the entire way we conceive of the human individual that is the issue here. Brian Thompson's life was as precious to him, and his family, as anyone else's life is to them and their family. Buddhists don't believe in "an eye for an eye." That life was destroyed as a scapegoat, and no one had a right to take it.

Those rejoicing in his death believe it was "deserved" because he is said to be "evil," and this is where the buddhist view can shed much-needed light, because it doesn't recognize that there is an "essence" to us. Actions, of course, can be helpful or harmful, along a wide spectrum, but both meditative practice and contemplative analysis find no discrete, independent "soul," only a mindstream inseparable from the rest of phenomena and influenced by literally countless causes and conditions.

It is puzzling that many of the same people who are opposed to capital punishment on moral grounds are nonetheless cheering on this killing. Puzzling, and very troubling, because it does suggest that there are millions of people in this culture who, by so doing, are basically expressing a support for vigilantism. What does this mean? It means that it is permissible to murder simply if you believe the person you are murdering is a Bad Guy. It is a rejection of the rule of law and of civil society. America's health care system has, indeed, fatally failed far too many people who would have been taken care of in any other Western country, and this is an appalling truth. But even if Brian Thompson had been the actual, literal murderer of others -- and he was not; he was the CEO of a corporation which is effectively governed by its shareholders -- we should not be valorizing those who gun down others in the street.

Buddhism doesn't say there are absolutely no circumstances under which a human life can be taken, but the bar is extremely high there. As I understand the teachings, only where a life, or lives, are going to be imminently lost if one does not intervene, and then only where intervening via killing that person is the only way to stop that potential tragedy, can we do so. And even then, we don't rejoice afterwards. It's not about hatred; it's simply about saving life.

We seem to be sliding into a whole lot of moral confusion in this society, and I am concerned about the possibility that political violence may increase. The incoming president is responsible for degrading discourse, and decency as a whole, beyond what I ever imagined a single person could accomplish, but there is even more going on than that, and it has to do with the very nature of social media, which I'm convinced is one of the great poisons of our time.

Where does this end? A great many Republicans believe that Democrats (or liberals, progressives) as an entity are evil, even "satanic," according to many of them. And vice versa. Social media allows each to say this within a group which then acquires, by sheer numbers and peer pressure, ever greater conviction in that belief. The rhetoric has gotten ever more extreme in recent years, and I am concerned about how we pull back from it all, from all the dehumanization. This recent development strikes me as a further descent.