MONA LISA IS NO MYSTERY FOR MICRO-SOCIOLOGY

The Mona Lisa is considered the world’s most famous painting, chiefly because of its mysterious smile.  What is so mysterious about it? Art critics have projected all sorts of interpretations onto it, and these are endless. There is a more objective way to analyze the Mona Lisa smile, using the social psychology (or micro-sociology) of facial expressions.

           

As the psychologist Paul Ekman has found, analyzing emotions in photos all over the world, emotions are shown on three zones of the face: the mouth and lower face; the eyes; and the forehead. Our folk knowledge about emotions concerns only the mouth: the smiley face with lips curled up, the frowning face with lips turned down. These intuitions  also make possible fake expressions. The mouth is the easiest part of the face to control. You can easily turn up the corners of your mouth, and this is what we do on social occasions where the expected thing is happiness or geniality. Arlie Hochschild, in The Managed Heart,  calls this emotion work. In the contemporary fashion of political campaigning, politicians are required to be professional producers of fake smiles.

The muscles around the eyes and eyelids are much more difficult to control, and along with the forehead these are usually outside one’s conscious awareness. So a fake smile—or any other fake emotional expression—is easy for viewers to catch, because we are unconsciously attuned to the entire emotional signal all over the face. One reason we like photos of small children is that they haven’t yet learned how to fake emotional expressions.

If we examine the Mona Lisa face, zone by zone, the reason for its mysteriousness becomes clear: there are different emotions expressed in different facial zones.

Her mouth, as everyone has noticed, has a slight smile.

Her eyes are a little sad.

Her forehead is blank and unexpressive.

We will see further peculiarities as we examine each in detail.

Mouth and lower face.  Smiles come in different degrees. As Ekman shows, stronger smiles—stronger happiness—pull the corners of the mouth further back (from the front of the face). Corners of the mouth may tilt up but they don’t have to; very strong smiles, which pull the mouth open and expose the teeth, often have the line of the upper lip more or less horizontal. What makes the smiley mouth is more the rounded-bow shape of the lower lip, and especially the wrinkle (naso-labial fold) that runs from the corners of the nose diagonally down to the beyond the corners of the lips. In very strong smiles, these triangle-looking folds become deeper, and are matched by a flipped-over triangle of skin folds from the chin to the outer corners of the lips, giving the lower face a diamond-shaped look.

Compare the Mona Lisa. This is a pretty pallid smile. Yes, she does turn up the lip corners a bit, but this is more of a conventional sign than what we see in a real smile. More importantly, there are no naso-labial folds running downward from her nose, nor any mirroring triangle up from the chin. Real smiles raise the cheeks (as we will see in a moment, this affects the eyes in a smile), but Mona Lisa hardly has any cheek features at all.

Eyes and eyelids.  Smiles, especially stronger smiles, make wrinkles below the eyes, more or less horizontal, slightly curved across the bottom of the eye socket (deeper wrinkles the more the cheeks are raised). This has the effect of narrowing the slit of the eyes, as the lower eyelid is raised.  This is a tell-tale detail, since narrowing eyes can also happen in other emotions; in happiness, the lower eyelid may be puffed-out looking but not tense. (By contrast, angry eyes have very hard-clenched muscles around them; fearful eyes are wide-open and staring; sad eyes we are coming to).  For the happy face, all these muscle movements cause crows-feet wrinkles to spread out from the corners of the eyes.

 

Mona Lisa’s eyes? The lower lids do look a little puffy, but there are no wrinkles below them; her cheeks if anything are flaccid. And no crows-feet.

Sad eyes.  Sad eyes are passive. The lower eyelid is weak, and there is no horizontal wrinkle below it, since the cheek is not pushing up. Whereas in a smile the upper eyelid is open, so the eyes brightly look out, the sad upper eyelid droops a bit. Even more noticeable is the brow, which tends to collapse and sag downwards; this makes the skin of the upper eye socket droop almost like a veil slanting over the outer corner of the eyes. This is particularly noticeable in the picture of the Middle-Eastern woman below right; next to it is a photo of a woman at her lover’s funeral. The photo on upper left is a composite, with sad eyes at the top, and neutral lower face.

 











Mona Lisa’s eyes. They are not brightly exposed and wide-open as in the happiness photos above, where the upper eye-lid is generally narrow as can be. Mona Lisa’s upper eyelids are partly closed, so are her lower lids; and the skin at the outer edges of her eye sockets droops a bit.  These are sad eyes, although only mildly so.

Mona Lisa is a combination of sad eyes and a slight smile, but the way she is painted makes her even more mysterious. As already noted, she lacks the naso-labial folds and chin folds characteristics of happy smiles.  Leonardo da Vinci did very little with the cheeks, but concentrated a great deal on the corners of the lips and eyes. This was his famous sfumato technique—a smoky look producing deliberate ambiguity. This also has the effect of obscuring just the places where important clues to genuine smiles are found; there are no crows-feet around her eyes, but then there are no expressive wrinkles in this painted skin anywhere.

Was this the actual expression Lisa Gherardini, La Gioconda, had on her face when Leonardo painted her? Probably not.  Leonardo worked over all his paintings a long time; the Mona Lisa took him four years, and was still unfinished in his estimation. He kept experimenting with the portrait, quite likely upon just these features. The idea that Leonardo was trying to portray a specially mysterious lady was a favorite with romanticist 19^th century art critics, as was the very unlikely idea that he was having an affair with her (he was apparently a homosexual, once charged with sodomy, and was never known to have a relationship with a woman).  He was an artist in an era when artists were rivals over the super-star status of their time, and technical innovations made for fame. What we are viewing is less a real emotional expression at a moment in time, as a virtuouso experiment at the frontier of what could be pictured.

No eyebrows. Another reason the Mona Lisa seems strange to us is that she has no eyebrows. For many emotions, the brows are important points of expression; as we have seen, somewhat subtly in sadness; in happiness, mainly by contrast with other emotions—unmoved eyebrows are generally part of the happy face, unless it is really over the top:

For anger, the position of the eyebrows is the strongest clue—the vertical lines between them as the facial muscles clench make even a stripped-bare cartoon emblem of anger.

So eyebrow-less Mona Lisa gives us less clues than usual to emotions; all we see are the bare ridges of her upper eye sockets through the haze of Leonardo’s sfumato, making even the sad expression less clear to us. There was nothing intentional about this; in the late 15^th century shaved eyebrows were a fashion for European ladies, as we see from the Fouquet madonna (painted 1452) and the Piero della Francesca portrait (1465; the Mona Lisa was painted 1503-6).

 

This may be one reason why the Mona Lisa was not particularly well known in its day, nor was it considered mysterious, nor was there much comment on her smile. Leonardo da Vinci was famous but less so than his contemporaries Michelangelo and Raphael, and his most celebrated painting was The Last Supper. The Mona Lisa was a minor work until the 1850s-60s in France, and the 1870s in England, when it became the object of gushy writings by ultra-aesthete art critics, led by Théophile Gautier and Walter Pater. (The history of how this happened is told by Donald Sassoon, 2001.) Mona Lisa and her smile became mysterious, in fact the mysterious Feminine, an Eternal Spirit with all the Capital Letters. And not just the benevolent Earth Mother but a Cleopatra-Jezebel-Salomé temptress. This sounds like fantasies of mid-Victorian males—perhaps understandable in an era when women wore bustles and men hardly ever saw much more than their faces. As Sassoon notes, women were always much less taken with Mona Lisa than were men.

 

Is there any truth in the interpretation, that Mona Lisa was a subtly flirtatious sexpot?  Again we can call on some objective evidence, how erotic emotion is expressed on the face.

Sexual turn-on, at least for female faces, has a standard look (as can be seen by thousands of examples on the web): eyes closed or nearly so, mouth fallen open. The woman’s face is otherwise slack, no fold lines like other emotions; it may be happiness but the expressions are quite distinct.

Marilyn Monroe made the eyes-half-closed expression virtually her trademark.  The sex idol of a less explicit era than today was also a great actress in her line.

Mona Lisa? If there is any sex in her face, only a repressed Victorian could see it.

So this is micro-sociology?  The purpose of micro-sociology is not to be an art critic. I only make the venture because so many popular interpretations of the Mona Lisa blunder into social psychology.  But reading the expressions on photos is good training for other pursuits. Paul Ekman holds that knowledge of the facial and bodily expressions of emotions is a practical skill in everyday life, giving some applications in his book Telling Lies. And it is not just a matter of looking for deceptions. We would be better at dealing with other people if we paid more attention to reading their emotional expressions—not to call them on it, but so that we can see better what they are feeling. Persons in abusive relationships—especially the abuser—could use training in recognizing how their own emotional expressions are affecting their victims; and greater such sensitivity could head off violent escalations.

Facial expressions, like all emotions, are not just individual psychology but micro-sociology, because these are signs people send to each other. The age we live in, when images from real-life situations are readily available in photos and videos, has opened a new research tool. I have used it (in Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory) to show that at the moment of face-to-face violence, expressions of anger on the part of the attacker turn into tension and fear; and this discovery leads to a new theory of what makes violence happen, or not.  On the positive side, micro-interactions that build mutual attunement among persons’ emotions are the key to group solidarity, and their lack is what produces indifference or antipathy. And we can read the emotions—a lot more plainly than the smile on Mona Lisa’s face.

References

Ekman, Paul. 1992. Telling Lies. Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. NY: Norton.

Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen, 1984.  Unmasking the Face. Prentice-Hall.

Hochschild, Arlie. 1983.  The Managed Heart. University of California Press.

Sassoon, Donald. 2001.  Mona Lisa. The History of the World’s Most Famous Painting.  London: Harper-Collins.

MATERIAL INTERESTS ARE AMBIGUOUS MOTIVES; INTERACTION RITUAL FOCUS IS BETTER PREDICTOR OF POLITICAL BEHAVIOR

In discussing politics and writing history, we typically explain what people do by their interests. But interests are often in dispute; people are accused of doing things that aren’t in their own interests and failing to recognize their best interests-- when they vote, go to war or not, follow a particular economic policy, etc. “Interests” are the rhetoric of modern politics, not an accurate predictor of how people rise into action.

Of course there are other motives besides material interests: power, honor, prestige, sympathy, religious or ideological values. But even if we put these aside, and confine ourselves to material interests--- people seeking money, property, and the luxuries and necessities of life-- interests still do not predict very well what people will actually do in a specific circumstance. There are two main reasons: (a) interests are generally ambiguous; and (b) interests do not determine the tactics people will use to reach them.

If interests aren’t a good predictor, does this mean the political and social struggles of history are inexplicable, a chaotic fumbling in the dark? Not necessarily; a better theory is the success or failure of interaction rituals (IRs) in motivating collective action. As I argued in Interaction Ritual Chains (Collins 2004), IRs that focus group attention and generate high levels of shared emotion create emotional energy (EE)-- confidence and enthusiasm towards symbolically-defined goals. These shape the cognitive component of action-- how people define their goals; who are their fellows and opponents in seeking them; and what tactics seem appropriate. I am not arguing for a dichotomy between material interests on one side, and “irrational” or “emotional” forces on the other; I am pointing out that material interests by themselves are too vague to determine specific courses of action in most situations. Even the most hard-nosed material interest becomes a motive for action only when a successful IR focuses attention on it, making it a conscious goal with enthusiastic energy mobilized towards attaining it. Strong commitment to material interests does exist, but it has to be socially created, through interaction rituals.

INTERESTS ARE AMBIGUOUS AS TO COMPATRIOTS

Take for example the interests of the working class. Presumably these are better wages, better job conditions and job security. But who does one share these interests with? Possibilities include (a) class-wide organization of all workers; (b) a particular occupational sector, such as all skilled crafts, or just one particular profession seeking monopolistic licensing; (c) a local organization of workers in a particular place or business. Within each of these choices there are further sub-choices. Taking (a) again, what does the class-wide organization do: aim for massive strikes? for political influence to bring government intervention? for socialist ownership of production? All of these, in the abstract, can be said to be in workers’ interest; but the interest doesn’t determine which one to seek. Any program that claims to be in someone’s interest is a theory, better yet an ideology, that tries to persuade people this is the best way to attain their interests.

Ideology and organization thus become a crucial part of interests. Ideologies try to argue that this ( _______ fill in the blank) is the only way to truly secure your interest; but that is not true. The (a-b-c) list above is ordered roughly from the most inclusive to the least inclusive coalition, and the argument tends to be that bigger is stronger and will deliver more goods. But it is also in someone’s interest to descend even further on the continuum and pursue advantage for a small group of friends or kin, or just for oneself. We get the best-paying jobs and others don’t; I get the promotion and too bad for you. Ideologists trying to organize as a larger group condemn this as unethical, and organizers often claim that everyone will do better if they all stick together, even the token favorites; but that depends on other conditions-- the argument that going your own way is not in your interest is an iffy one. Enthusiasm for joining a larger organization does not typically come by rational calculation; strong unions don’t just try to persuade individualists that it is in their interest to join the union-- they establish coercive rules (if possible enforced by state regulation) to make individualists join. One reason white collar workers are hard to unionize is that they tend to think their careers have a chance of moving upward into management; they lack class solidarity because they regard their situation as temporary. I am not making an argument here for or against unions or individualists, but pointing out that it is not simply a matter of material interests. If everyone pursues what they think is their own best interest, all sorts of organization (or lack of organization) are possible.

Even with a union organization, a segment can pursue their interest over other members. Seniority rules protect older workers’ jobs while younger workers are laid off. Another variant is an ethnic/racial group that monopolizes jobs for themselves. This can be condemned as immoral, but it is certainly not against the interests of the ethnic group that can get such privilege. The argument for inter-racial solidarity has to be made by moralistic rhetoric, not by simple appeal to interests. A similar logic applies to racial tokens; a black man taking a position as a conservative Supreme Court justice, for instance, might be accused of selling out his people, but there is nothing irrational about it from the point of view of his interest. Similarly with gender. Feminists demanding equal access and equal pay in all jobs would seem to be in every woman’s interest; but there is nothing irrational about an individual woman who decides that her best career path is to marry a wealthy man, especially if she has the opportunity and the personal qualities to do well on the marriage market. This is not to say that a rich lady could not join a feminist movement (and in fact this is how the movement originated in England); but that comes from other conditions than their own material interests. Arguments for the widely inclusive, high-solidarity path cannot sway individual motivations just by appeal to interests.

The same problem of compatriots arises in every interest, in every economic class and sector. When declaring something is in your interest, who is included in the “you”? It cannot simply be decided by an abstraction: choose the course of action that has highest probability of benefits vs. costs. In real life, not only do you rarely know those probabilities, but the deciding conditions are much more in the tactics than in the goal.

INTERESTS ARE AMBIGUOUS AS TO SHORT-, MEDIUM-, AND LONG-RUN

The wider the scope of the organization, the more it can appeal to long-term interests. The party claiming to represent all workers is most likely to push a long-term solution to their interests, such as socialism. The trouble is, the more long-term the solution, the less certain that it will actually come about; if the event is a long way in the future, the present generation of members is not pursuing their own interests at all, but an altruistic dedication to someone else’s interests. The key to long-term commitments, then, cannot be strictly in the realm of interests, but must depend upon social mechanisms of moral commitment.

It has been a trope of moralizing ever since the ancient Greek philosophers that very short-term gains can be foolish diversions from your own interests, even in the not-so-distant future. True enough, but how far into the future is it rational to calculate? If you never enjoy anything in the short run, you will never enjoy it in the long run, since every moment of time arrives as another short run. Weber’s concept of the Protestant Ethic and similar theories of economic motivation solve this problem not by rationally calculated interests, but by religious and other emotional dispositions to work, invest, or consume. It is sometimes assumed that very short-run attraction to material benefits is due to being irrationally overcome by emotion; but one can argue just the opposite, that long-term self-discipline is also due to emotional forces. What I want to emphasize are two points: that viewing one’s interests in short, medium, or long-term perspective is an extrinsic condition, not contained in the interests themselves; and which time-frame persons happen to focus upon comes from outside themselves, from the social groups in which they experience emotional rituals.

INTERESTS DO NOT DETERMINE TACTICS

Once an economic or political interest group has gotten organized, that is still not the end of it. Take the example of a working-class movement; or an ethnic/racial movement; or a gender movement. This history of modern politics, ever since parties came on the scene in the 19th and 20th centuries, has been made up of parties that defined themselves as representing a particular interest; but over time all parties twisted or split along lines of what tactics to use. Liberal/left parties have had the choice of being reformist, seeking small incremental changes where they could get them; radical and militant, using strong rhetoric, demanding big changes, and (another variant) using demonstrations, strikes, and disruptions instead of (or along with) electoral politics and courts; or revolutionary, seeking overthrow of government and property by violent means. This is a continuum, and factions could take up positions nearer or farther from the different main points (left and right wings of socialist parties, or of anti-clerical/anti-monarchist republicans, etc).

The key point is that the major splits and controversies of party politics happen along tactical lines within groups espousing similar interests. This is especially true of organizations identifying themselves as workers’ movements. In early 20th century Germany and most other European states, the labor party split into a parliamentary, gradualist wing, and a militant wing; a series of such leftist splits generated the Spartacists (whose uprising failed at the end of WWI), and the Communists. On the centrist side, liberal or Catholic parties from outside the working class might join the gradualist wing, supporting workers’ interests out of charitable motives or a concern for social peace. On the revolutionary side, another tactical split was between socialists or communists who aimed to change the property system through control of the state; and anarchists who aimed for the same thing but by avoiding the state entirely-- regarding parliamentary politics as a fraud that always worked against themselves, and the state as an instrument that would introduce new forms of inequality. The anarchists were mostly right on both counts, but their own tactics-- such as in Spain their violent seizures of local property, assassinations, and destruction of churches as their hated symbolic enemy-- were too uncoordinated to produce victory, and chiefly stirred up resentment. Although in the abstract it might seem workers’ interests would be stronger if held together in one organization, which organization this should be could not be agreed upon. Political organizations became passionately committed to their particular tactics, and often their most bitterly fought enemy was their former compatriots who split over just such tactical issues.

The terms Left and Right, since the time of the French Revolution, have generally been used to refer to the degree of militancy in tactics. But the usage is confusing-- Left/Right could also designate lower vs. upper classes; or it could mean change-oriented versus stability-oriented. None of these usages yield a clear and uncontradictory picture; revolutionary militancy could appear on the Right, with the Fascists, especially if the liberals or the Left held political power. The contradiction comes from assuming there is a perfect line-up between a social class, its interest both in economic matters and in stability, and its tactics. This is empirically wrong, and tactics almost always swamp the neater identities as classes and interests. Nevertheless, it is hard to resist falling into Left/Right terminology, and this is all right in particular historical contexts, provided we think through just what we are talking about.

Besides splits along the continuum of reformist-vs.-revolutionary, there is what might be called a meta-split between opportunists and principled ideologists. This is not merely the same thing as reformists (who are willing to make deals with parliamentary opponents to attain some of their interests) in contrast to more militant or revolutionary groups. Principled ideologists can occur at any point in the political spectrum. The Tea Party movement in the US since 2010 is an instance of a conservative single-issue movement, that refuses to make deals and regards consistent defense of their principle as the cardinal virtue. But unyielding ideologists vs. opportunists are found on the revolutionary left as well. The success of the Russian Bolsheviks in autumn 1917 came from willingness to appeal to peasants in overthrowing the government by endorsing their seizure of farmland; since the peasants were taking land as individual private property, the Bolsheviks were going against their own principle of collective organization of agriculture, although eventually once they got secure power they went back on their promise. The Bolshevik slogan “Bread! Land! Peace!” also was opportunistic about ending the war; this was a temporary expedient to stop the futile fighting against the victorious German army, but almost immediately the Bolsheviks resumed fighting in a 3-year civil war that lasted until 1920. The analytical lesson here is not that the Bolsheviks were especially perfidious bad guys. They were part of a spectrum of liberal and left groups that had been struggling against the Czarist regime for almost a century; broadening our perspective, they were part of a European family of squabbling reform-minded parties. The Russians were very familiar with the different options. Instead of regarding the Bolsheviks as genetically imprinted from the outset, we should regard them as the movement that happened to fill the opportunistic niche as it emerged at a particular moment. The Bolsheviks were not opportunists of the parliamentary type (like the Social Democrats in Germany of the 1890s, or later the Mensheviks in Russia); they were opportunists among revolutionists.

THE SUPERIOR POWER OF OPPORTUNISM

Opportunism has a bad name, but it is generally the most successful tactic, especially if it is employed by a militant, violence-wielding organization. The Bolsheviks triumphed in Russia because they opportunistically sought state power; their tactical line was to do anything that strengthened the cohesion of their own party and the strength of the state. Hence the creation of the Red Army, the security commissars, and all the other means of organizational discipline. This could be justified theoretically in terms of interests-- the strong state will get us to the workers’ interest-- but so could all the other tactics chosen by rival left movements. Russian-style Communists thus became the organizational identity embodying the left-opportunistic style. Their opportunism was a great advantage in struggles with other left organizations. During the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, the Anarchists’ scatter-gun tactics and extreme consistency of revolutionary ideals made them unpopular with most other members of the anti-Fascist coalition; the Spanish Communists burgeoned because they advocated social order and group discipline, and could opportunistically declare the defense of private property during the emergency of the civil war, thereby gaining allies both in the Republican middle class and in the army. A similar opportunistic line was taken by Mao’s Chinese Communist Party as it fought a guerrilla war in the countryside in the 1930s and 40s; theoretically they favored the landless peasants, but they were willing to make deals and protect the rich peasants if they needed them in a particular circumstance.

Of course, the Communists were lying when they publicly took one of these opportunistic stances, ostensibly against their socialist aims. They knew that their line was only temporary and tactical, and that they would go back on it when the opportunity came to push through full communism. Here we need to explain why there are different types of opportunists. Why didn’t the Communists become like the German Social Democrats or the British Labour Party, wedded to the parliamentary route and gradually becoming indistinguishable from a non-revolutionary party working inside the framework of capitalism? The Communists maintained more long-term consistency, even throughout their tactical opportunism, because they had a dual inner/outer structure not found in other leftist parties: a core of dedicated, career-professional revolutionaries organized in a hierarchy of small groups, holding secret meetings where they encouraged and criticized each other, renewing their commitment not only to doctrine but to discipline as a group. Philip Selznick (1949) called this The Organizational Weapon. What made the Communists strong was a conscious recognition that their organization was the key to victory, and that their ideological line was secondary.

These Communist cells, meeting frequently (often weekly or more) were also a discovery of political Interaction Rituals, carried out at the small-group level. They were successful IRs from all ingredients: the secret meetings excluding outsiders and keeping up a strong focus of attention; the shared emotions of revolutionary danger, of secrecy itself, and the immediate emotions of mutual criticism issuing in solidarity on their public line at the end of the meeting. This inner cadre organization had been created to fend off police agents, but it unexpectedly enabled the Communists to be successfully opportunistic. Where a parliamentary workers’ party might stray from their original interests by befriending bourgeois politicians and enjoying the perquisites of office (what Robert Michels charged against the German socialist SPD in his 1911 Political Parties), Communists did not pal around with their erstwhile allies, at least not on the backstage. The Communists had a superior backstage that generated much more emotional energy, along with more solidarity and more commitment to their sacred objects and beliefs. But this was a sophisticated, two-level belief: what we are really doing, and what we are pretending to do temporarily for practical reasons, and this sophistication was built into their organization. The Communists dominated in so many places because they consistently took the opportunistic niche in revolutionary political space; because they developed an organizational structure that supported this; and because they harnessed IRs not just at the level of mass public meetings, but in backstage small groups to keep up revolutionary dedication.

Opportunism vs. principled consistency is a fundamental, but generally unrecognized, dimension of politics. The opportunists usually win, in any part of the political spectrum, whether the deal-making center or the militant wings. (When opportunists lose we will consider later.) This dimension operates on the militant Right as well. The Nazis differed from other right-wing movements in Germany of the 1920s, not because their interests and ideologies were different-- there were nearly 100 movements calling for social order, invoking the solidarity of the Nation and the People, and spewing anti-Semitism. The Nazis gradually outcompeted the other movements, recruiting better and eventually absorbing the others, because they were opportunists of the violent revolutionary wing. The Nazis were not the type of opportunists fostered by parliamentary participation; the core of their organization were their street-fighters. As Stefan Klusemann shows, Nazis were innovators in political IRs, not only in their pageantry of uniforms and swastika-symbols and Heil Hitler! greeting rituals, but the tactic of using violence as a ritual, marching into workers’ neighbourhoods and taverns and provoking fights that they were better organized to win. Thus both Bolsheviks and Nazis were IR-innovators, although of different kinds.

Nazi ideology reflected their preferred tactics, “Action!” rather than decadent parliamentary discussion that never led anywhere. But once they dominated their rival Right-wing street-demonstration movements, around 1930, the Nazis violated a cardinal principle of their own ideology by running candidates for parliament. This shift in tactics provoked a split between the SA (street-fighters) and Hitler’s more political followers, and eventually led to the bloody purge of the former. But Hitler’s opportunism enabled Nazis to become a dominant faction in the despised parliament, enabling him to become chancellor and then to dissolve parliamentary government from above. The most important Rightist revolutionary movement, whose primary tactic and explicit ideology extolled violence, nevertheless took office legally through electoral process. This was also true for Italian Fascists, whose showily dramatic march on Rome in 1922 paid off with the King appointing Mussolini prime minister (just as German President Hindenburg appointed Hitler). On Right as well as Left, opportunism pays off more than intransigent ideologies.

INTERESTS DON’T PREDICT OUTCOMES, BECAUSE OF MULTIPLE CAUSALITY

So far I have argued that interests are too ambiguous as to compatriots and time-frames to guide action; and the spectrum of tactics is not determined by interests but is the main source of organizational splits and loyalties in the political arena. Here I add a third reason interests are poor predictors: whatever happens in a conflict is the resultant of all the different forces in play. A socialist or revolutionist line will not reach its aim if anti-revolutionary and capitalist forces are too strong. But neither will a reformist, parliamentary deal-making tactic necessarily yield much; with sufficiently strong political opponents on the right, and disillusionment from its own militant wing provoking splits on the left, reformists may simply become ineffectual or personally corrupt. Not only cannot the payoffs be predicted from the interests; nor can they be predicted from their choice of tactics alone-- it is always the tactics of each group as they stack up against each other.

And there are many other contingencies that affect which interest group will take power: economic crises; wars won or lost; religious, ethnic and other cultural controversies. Timing of a crisis is especially important. If a party is strong enough to be in office (possibly as part of a coalition) when disaster happens, it will get the blame for it. All over the world, elected parties in office at the outbreak of the 1929 depression were punished by being voted out, whether they happened to be right or left. The Russian government in spring 1917 that decided to continue a losing war thereby set themselves up for takeover, even though Kerensky himself was ideologically socialist. The best crack at revolutionary or deeply transformative power is to be a strong second, outside of office at the moment when confidence in government breaks down through a major crisis; the worst position is to be in charge during war defeat or economic collapse. On a milder scale, this is the problem of the Obama administration, which inherited an economic crisis peaking just after the 2008 election.

Electoral politics is a blunt instrument when it comes to making major policy changes. Voters essentially have a yes/no choice; either you take the incumbent government as a whole and keep it in office; or you throw them out. The non-controlling party (or parties) always tries to argue that the crisis (economy, war, social unrest, etc.) can be solved by their own ideology; this may or may not be true (and given multiple causality, can hardly be a very reliable predictor); so it may often be irrational for voters to get rid of the incumbents, since the policy of who will replace them could be even worse. This appears to be the case with the American national election of 2012. But the extent to which people vote by the “misery index,” indicates they are making a binary choice; they know what they don’t like, but they cannot articulate what they really want and how to get it. The structure of an election as an Interaction Ritual focuses attention on the binary, the ins vs. the outs; the more emotional the mobilization for the election, the more people brainwash themselves into believing that flipping the binary will make all the difference.

Another reason why interests do not predict outcomes is that politics often goes through enormous swings on rebounds. The all-out effort of one side to put their program into action can result in a massive conflict; a revolutionary’s best efforts can lead to a victory for the authoritarian right; this was a result of the anarchist mobilization in Spain in the early and mid-1930s. But also Fascists’ program of conquest provoked enough counter-mobilization in the world to destroy and delegitimate fascism both in Europe and Japan. Whatever your interests, no political pathway will predictably get you there.

Having an interest and a tactic doesn’t mean you will get it; virtually no one gets what they aim for. Conversely, almost anything you do can be construed as against your interest, on some theory in hindsight about what would have been the correct thing to do. Hindsight has among its advantages over real life that it is never experienced through the same emotions that prevailed at the time when the future was still unknown. History-writing in this mode is a retrospective game of blame or praise played by fantasy advisors outside the action. It is the chief fault of writing by journalists.

Who benefited from some particular policy does not show why it happened. Wars often cost much more than the victor gets out of them. Capitalists might think that a war is needed to protect property, or gain markets and materials, or just as a matter or patriotism or zenophobia; these become causal forces, not because they are true, but because of the fervor with which they are believed. Bad reasons are just as good explanations of what happens as good reasons (if we restrict that to mean economic calculation). In either case, the reasons people consciously give for whatever they do become powerful motives only to the extent that reasons are formulated in IRs, and thereby are pumped up with confidence, commitment, and belief.

SUCCESSFUL INTERACTION RITUALS PREDICT CHOICES BY FOCUSING IDEOLOGIES AND INTERESTS

Does the argument apply only against the left? Workers’ interests, tactics and calculations may be ambiguous but capitalists might be better at it. After all, Weber describes modern capitalism as the omni-calculation of all factors of production. But it is dubious that this applies to capitalists as political actors. As Michael Mann shows, whether a national economic policy succeeds or not depends on timing and what other economic powers in the world are doing. Interest-oriented policies only fit particular situations, and capitalists on the whole are not much better than workers at choosing policies that will pay off. Capitalist monetary policy during the Great Depression shows that capitalists do not necessarily have a clear idea of their own interests downstream; capitalism was rescued by liberal policies that capitalists resisted at the moment. One might assume that capitalists (or at least their economic advisors) become shrewder over time, but events since 2000 hardly bear that out. Empirically, the case for capitalists being more rationally calculating in political matters is far from proven; theoretically, all the generic problems apply as to time-frames, political tactics, and multiple forces bearing on outcomes.

To be clear: my argument is not about whether political people talk about interests-- they often do, although sometimes they also talk in idealized rhetoric. They may even believe what they say about their interests, and for that matter what they say about their ideals. Sincerity is not an important question in politics, because sincere belief is a social product: successful IRs make people into sincere believers. People become insincere and manipulative mainly when they go through a range of different IRs, switching from one camp to another; or in the case of the Communist back-stage organization, when they use one strong IR to anchor their beliefs against another more public IR which is not as emotionally intense. This leaves room for the cosmopolitan opportunist, who believes in nothing because s/he superficially surveys all factions but belongs emotionally to none. But such persons are rare in politics, probably because strong EE, which is so impressive in leading other political actors, comes from being deep into emotional IRs; pure manipulators are uncharismatic and off-putting. Yes, Hitler was manipulative; but he lived at the center of very strong IRs, and Nazi ceremonial made him a true extremist for Nazi ideals. In the end, he was so pumped up with self-confidence (EE) that he destroyed his regime by taking on overwhelming geopolitical odds. At any point in time, we can predict the lineup of persons with varying degrees of commitment to ideas and ideals, by looking at the degree of success or failure of the IRs they experience.

IR theory is an explanation of what people will think, as well as what they will do. At any particular moment, people are speaking certain words or thinking certain thoughts; the thoughts that go through one’s head are internalized from previous talk with other people; more innovative thoughts are assembled out of the ingredients of verbal ideas already internalized. The world is a network of conversations, and what people think at any point in it is a product of what has circulated in previous conversations. There is a crucial emotional component: ideas are better remembered, and make more sense, if they were associated with emotion when they were previously talked about. Thus even in spontaneous private thinking, it is those emotionally-laden ideas that spring to one’s mind. When persons strategise, or vent, or otherwise try to express their aims in words, these are the words that arise in one’s head, and on one’s tongue.

Put more fully: the world is a network of conversations that have different degrees of success or failure as IRs. Successful IRs are those in which the assembled group attains a high degree of mutual focus of attention, sharing a common emotion, and experiencing Durkheimian collective effervescence. Successful IRs in political life can be speeches and rallies, if they generate enough emotional high for everyone; especially dramatic are riots and atrocities; for some professional politicians, the most important IRs are their private consultations with other political devotées. What kind of IR it is will have an effect on what kind of political commitment it creates; the mentality of the street-fighter, the parliamentarian, and the campaign planner differ because of the contents of the IRs that are most successful for them. The important contrast is with IRs that fail, or are merely mediocre; rallies can be unenthusiastic, parliamentary sessions can be droningly routine or boringly gridlocked; riots and wars can end in dispersion as well as in solidarity. In political life as in everything else, each person gravitates towards the emotionally successful IRs and pumped up with their way of thinking; and we move away from the IRs that don’t work, and have little attraction to thinking in their symbols.

I have argued that material interests are ambiguous as to compatriots, time-frames, tactics, and estimates of success. But in the flow of real life, people who take part in political action-- going to public meetings, talking with their acquaintances, engaging in backstage planning, joining rallies, riots, wars, etc.-- become part of a discourse that defines what interests we think we are furthering, and who are in it with us. It is not the interests that holds us together, but our shared talk about interests: it is these symbol-formulated-interests that carry the Durkheimian solidarity of membership. For that reason, people in a political interest group can become committed to material interests in a moralistic way. (At one time in my life, I contributed regularly to an organization dedicated to lowering utility bills; eventually I realized that I was putting more money into the organization than I could possibly get out of it. That is typical of supporters of many, perhaps most, material interest groups. No researcher has yet shown empirically that most contributors to political campaigns-- including the candidates themselves-- make a profit on what they contributed. Some do; most don’t; we need a more refined theory of conditions.)

The same mechanism of success or failure of IRs determines whether people think of their interests in a short, medium, or long time-frame; on the whole, they need stronger IRs to sustain belief in long-term interests. Thus the more “fanatical” movements have the strongest IRs, including the greatest barrier to outsiders, to prevent contaminating their members’ attention. And the IR mechanism chooses which tactics people become committed to, and which tactics they reject. Tactics become a focus of attention, and often the most heated topic of conversation. Most political factions do not differ among themselves so much in what they are aiming for, as in their tactics for how to get it; and it is around these tactical issues that the most vehement splits have taken place. A political group’s favorite tactic becomes the basis of their identity; their opponents’ favorite tactic becomes the symbolic dividing line which emotionally frames their worst enemy.

A good example is the “struggle meeting” developed by Chinese Communists in their guerrilla strongholds of the 1930s. In a struggle meeting, the poor peasants of a village criticized the rich peasants and put pressure on them to mend their ways. Presence of armed communists gave the oppressed peasants confidence; but the meeting was not just an angry outburst or a lynch mob-- as in traditional uprisings-- because it was institutionalized, i.e. repetitive and official. The communists restrained the poor from killing their class enemies, and instead encouraged them to apply continuous group pressure, to make their change their views. This became the prototype of “thought reform” tactics-- really an application of small group psychology, in a deliberately manipulative mode-- that were used through the 1960s Red Guards movement, no longer purging class enemies but communist administrators themselves. Like the Russian Bolsheviks (and in a different way the Nazis), the Chinese Communists were both distinctive and successful because of their innovations in micro-sociology of group discipline. And it was these innovations that made them appear so sinister to their enemies.

Interests do not become conscious motives until they are socially defined. There is no basic instinct of private property, or of collective property, or gift-giving, or plunder; all these have been practices, in many variants, in different societies since human origins. People have to be taught to be capitalists, or union members, or reformers or revolutionists (or for that matter gang members), and the way they are “taught” is not so much by admonition as by their own experiences in IRs that give them emotional energy in talking about and performing these practices.

True, some material interests are easier to focus upon than others. If you already have a routine material practice, having it disrupted makes you pay attention, and that will generate a protest or a counter-attack if other persons gather with you to focus on the same grievance. Negative interests are easier to see clearly and easier to mobilize around than positive interests. Workers who are fired, or peasants who have their rents raised, can more easily see their interests than workers pondering what might they do in the future to give them higher incomes. Hence reactive movements-- responses to economic downturns, threats to property from the state or other political movements-- are easier to mobilize, and generally more emotionally aroused than positive movements seeking a better future. All this flows through the micro-mechanism of IRs. Negative interests-- losing or feeling a threat to one’s material resources-- tend to easily fulfill the conditions for successful IRs: assembling a group, focusing attention, enhancing a shared emotion about the object of attention. Positive interests, because they are more ambiguous and lead into a multiply branching future, are harder to focus on clearly; and emotions are harder to attach to them-- joy and hope has to be generated in the group assembly itself, whereas in a loss or threat to what one already possesses, the emotion is generated individually and then is amplified by the group process. Movements for transformation have to do more IR work than movements defending the status quo.

Defensive interests are not always unambiguous. If landlords are taking more of the peasants’ crops, that is clear; but if an anarchist or socialist movement threatens your property, the movement may not be as threatening as it appears-- their threat is pumped up by their rhetoric (which may be sheer ritualism), and they may be incapable of carrying it out. On the other side, an anti-leftist movement may be successful at generating emotional hysteria about the alleged threat-- one of the main tactics in conservative crackdowns. Property threat from the left is not always a myth; but at the moment of conflict it is hard to judge how serious it is, and hence there is a large element of social construction, via IRs, even in negative interests.

To summarize: material interests do not simply exist and thereby drive struggles among classes and interest groups. They must always be socially formulated, in words and symbols; and this is done when Interaction Rituals are successful in generating more focus of attention and more shared emotion around certain ways of construing interests than other ways. Not to say the material world doesn’t exist; of course it does, and our bodies (and the numbers of people who take part in one ritual camp or another), weapons, vehicles, money, and all the other economic and technological resources make a difference in how the action is mobilized, and who wins. But it all has to go through the eye of a needle, which is the social definition of what we perceive our interests to be, and that is done by the degree of emotionally shared focus in IRs. Material resources are inert and blind until they are put in action by focused networks of humans in full emotional/ cognitive communication. Different ways of organizing and focusing interaction rituals are the key to political action. It is not surprising that the most colourful movements throughout history, for good or for evil, have been those that generated the most political energy.

REFERENCES
Mann, Michael. 1986-2013. The Sources of Social Power. 4 vols.
Michels, Robert. 1911. Political Parties.
Klusemann, Stefan. 2010. After State Breakdown: Dynamics of Multi-party Conflict, Violence, and Paramilitary Mobilization in Russia 1904-1920, Germany 1918-1934, and Japan 1853-1877. PhD. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Selznick, Philip. 1949. The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics.
Thomas, Hugh. 1986. The Spanish Civil War.
Walder, Andrew. 2009. Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guards Movement.

CLUES TO MASS RAMPAGE KILLERS: DEEP BACKSTAGE, HIDDEN ARSENAL, CLANDESTINE EXCITEMENT

What can the micro-sociology of violence contribute to understanding the mass killings in Aurora, Colorado, and similar incidents? In the immediate shock of public attention, there is an imperative to give policy answers. I could join the chorus advocating a ban on weapons in the USA. This is a hope; it is not a guarantee. Mass shootings are very rare events. There are about 15,000 homicides per year in the USA; the great majority are single-victim killings. Less than 1% are mass killings (4 or more victims in the same incident). Spectacular mass shootings, where many persons are killed or wounded, have been happening at a rate of about 1 or 2 per year, in the 30 years since 1980, for the most common type, school shootings; shootings in other venues, apparently imitating school shootings, are rarer but on the rise. It is their rarity that attracts so much attention, and their out-of-the-blue, seemingly random relationship between killer and victims, that makes them so dramatically alarming.

This rarity means that very distinctive circumstances are needed to explain mass killings, and that widely available conditions cannot be very accurate predictors. There are approximately 190 million firearms in the civilian population in America, in a population of 310 million. The vast majority of these guns are not used to kill people. Even if we focus on the total number of yearly homicides by gun (about 12,000), the percentage of guns that kill someone is about 12,000 / 190,000,000, or 1 in 16,000. Another way to put it: of approximately 44 million gun owners in the US, 99.97% of them do not murder anyone. It is not surprising that their owners resist being accused of abetting murder.

My aim here is not to enter the political controversy over banning guns. Many people who own guns are gun-cultists, for whom guns are symbolic objects, connected with their identity and lifestyle (analyzed in Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains). The political argument over banning or retaining guns has strong emotional overtones on both sides. Anti-gun-cultists dislike not only guns but the lifestyle and the values of the people who have them; this is evident in the case of anti-hunting movements, including the recently successful anti-foxhunting movement in England. (US surveys indicate the favorite TV shows of liberal Democrats are comedians satirizing conservatives; conservatives' favorites are college football. Experian, 2012) Both sides blur the gun issue with symbolic politics. What can be said analytically is that banning guns is trying to manipulate a variable that is a very weak predictor of mass homicides. It resembles TSA procedures of searching everyone who enters an airport gate area; airplane terrorists are also extremely rare, and thus the vast majority of the persons who are searched are innocent.

More successful ways of heading off terrorists have focused on their organizations and networks (Sageman 2004). In the case of mass homicides, micro-sociology can help by examining the details that make this kind of murder distinctive.

Mass murders are mostly committed by a solo individual, almost never by more than two. Typically their target is a public gathering of 10 to several hundred persons. Not everyone is killed; usually the number of wounded is larger than the number killed; and many escape injury, since mass murderers resemble other violent persons in this respect: they often miss their targets.

In mass rampage killings, the killers are not aiming at particular individuals at all. The victims are anonymous, representatives of a collective identity that is being attacked. Hence mass attacks generally take place in institutional settings: mainly in schools, or work places, although recently also in exercise gyms and in churches. The Aurora, Colorado attack in July 2012 was unusual (or the harbinger of new settings), in a movie theatre; the Norway shooting attack of July 2011 was on a youth camp of a political party. The number actually killed is misleading; the attack is an effort to destroy an institution through the people who belong to it. In that sense it is a symbolic attack-- a deadly symbolic attack. The motivation and tactics of the mass killer are very different from most homicides; here it is not a matter of a personal grudge coming from ongoing conflict with a particular individual, as in the nearly half of all homicides which are among personal acquaintances; nor the targeted killing between gangs; nor the instrumental or accidental killings which take place in the course of another crime such as a robbery or rape. Most other types of homicides are impulsive or emerge from escalated situations; mass rampage killings are elaborately planned in advance.

Rampage killers tend to attack not only a place but an event. The ritualized gathering has a symbolic meaning-- in the Durkheimian sense, it is where the group celebrates itself through communion with its sacred objects. Thus Holmes, the recently failed graduate student who shot 70 people (12 killed, 58 wounded) at a movie theatre in Aurora, chose the night of the premiere of an eagerly awaited Batman movie. From a sociological point of view, being an entertainment fan is a major identity in contemporary youth culture. Holmes, by imitating the costumes of characters in the Batman series, was entering deeply into a popular cult. His apartment was decorated with Batman paraphernalia. Without having the details of Holmes' life experiences and personal thoughts, it can still be said that the killer was simultaneously participating in a ritual of popular youth culture, and attacking the members of that cult. (Of the 12 killed, 10 were in the age range 18 to 32; 7 of them within 3 years of his own age, 24.) The movie-theatre mass rampage killing resembles school shootings, where the killer is attacking his own institution and its members-- the scenario of the rejected member.

Not very usable clues are the patterns that rampage killers are low status isolates, or recent academic or career failures, or introverts. Like availability of guns, here again the explanatory variable is too common; there are a tiny number of rampage killers, but incidents of career failures are widespread; the number of introverts in the population is probably around 40 percent; victims of school bullying comprise 5 - 15% of students; since there are about 13 million secondary school students in the US, bully victims would total around 650,000 to 2 million. About two-thirds of school shooters are bully victims, but there are other ways to be low status in the youth culture, so the number would be higher. The correlation of these predictors with rampage killings must be extremely low.

Better clues come from considering the micro-sociology of this kind of violence. Any kind of violent confrontation is emotionally difficult; the situation of facing another person whom one wants to harm produces confrontational tension/fear (ct/f ); and its effect most of the time is to make violence abort, or to become inaccurate and ineffective. The usual micro-sociological patterns that allow violence to succeed are not present in a rampage killing; group support does not exist, because one or two killers confront a much larger crowd: in contrast, most violence in riots takes place in little clumps where the attackers have an advantage of around 6-to-1.

Another major pathway around ct/f is attacking a weak victim. But in almost all violence, the weakness is emotional rather than physical-- even an armed attacker has to establish emotional dominance, before he can carry out effective violence. One might think this is simply a matter of using a gun or displaying a weapon, which automatically puts the armed person in the position of strength, the others in a position of weakness. Nevertheless, detailed analysis of incidents and photos of armed confrontations show that groups without guns can emotionally paralyze an armed opponent, preventing him from using his weapon.



Guns provide emotional dominance when an armed individual threatens a peaceful group and they try to hide or run away. This depends on the style of the victims. When rival street gangs clash, they do not turn their backs; they are used to gesturing, with and without guns, and most such face-to-face confrontations wind down. Running away has the effect of confirming emotional dominance; it is easier to shoot a person in the back than in the front; and turning away or attempting to hide one's face has the effect of removing one's greatest deterrent-- eye-contact with the opponent. Thus the hundreds who piled on the floor in the theatre at Aurora, or who ran from the attacker on the Norwegian island, may have saved some percentage of themselves; but they collectively could have saved more than ended up being killed or wounded, if they had used their superior numbers to confront the attacker. I don't mean just the possibility of physically overcoming him, but taking advantage of the fact that groups are always emotionally stronger than individuals, if they can keep themselves together and put up an emotionally united front: they could probably have made him stop shooting.

If this sounds implausible, consider how rampage shootings usually end: in a 1997 school shooting at Paducah, Kentucky, the solo killer, a 14-year-old boy who opened fire on a prayer group in the school hall, allowed a teacher and the prayer leader to come up to him and take his gun away as soon as he had shot 8 girls and boys (who were facing away from him). I will discuss this case in detail below. The Aurora theatre killer gave himself up to the police without resistance after he left the theatre. Even Breivik, the Norwegian killer, who stated a strong ideological motive for his killings, gave himself up without a fight once armed authorities arrived on the island, although he had plenty of ammunition left. The key point here is not simply that the Norwegian police were armed, and the teenage campers were not; but rather that the police confronted him, while the teens ran away and turned their backs. Rampage killers almost always give themselves up peacefully, or else commit suicide. A rare exception is the Columbine duo, who exchanged fire several times with the police, at long distance and ineffectually, before killing themselves in a lull in the action. This is another respect in which rampage killers differ from other types of violent persons.

Why Rampage Killers are Not Suicide Bombers

Rampage killers do not approach their victims in an angry or threatening mode; they give no warning until they start firing. In this respect their pathway into violence are not at all like disputes that escalate into violence; nor like confrontations among gangs or other ostentatious tough guys, who often do more blustering than actual violence. Rampage shooters are more similar to suicide bombers, whose tactical advantage is pretending that the attacker is just an ordinary, innocuous person until the last moment when the bomb is set off. Political organizations that use suicide bombers do not select belligerent persons, but the most mild-mannered, self-controlled individuals. Rampage killers are even farther at the end of this continuum.

But rampage killers differ from suicide bombers in ways that reveal what is central to their motivation. The suicide bomber kills him/herself at the same moment as the victims; this has the advantage of not seeing the carnage one has made. Suicide bombers are usually idealistic individuals who believe in a cause, and have never engaged in violence before; so the tactic is ideal for keeping any notion of violence out of their mind-- the most successful pathway is to keep one's mind focused on the normal details of routine activity, or on one's ideological message (see Collins, Violence, for analysis of the last dialogue of suicide bombers, including a recording in the cockpit of the airline downed on 9/11). But rampage killers are obsessed with their attack; they want to see the token representations of the hated institution die. A minority of rampage killers commit suicide, but only after they have experienced the process of killing that they have fantasized about for so long.

Motives and rituals of confrontation also affect the weapons they use. A remote bombing attack-- where the attacker places a bomb at the target and detonates it later from a safe distance-- does not fit the psychological scenario the rampage killer seeks. Disgruntled students often fantasize about blowing up the school, and this is perhaps their most common form of rebellious rhetoric; but it is entirely verbal ritualism (and circulation of a cultural cliché), since virtually all mass killings in schools have been carried out by shooting rather than bombs. And this is so even though many of the killers collect an arsenal which includes bombs; for instance the two killers at Columbine High School in 1999 brought nearly 100 explosive devices, and managed to explode 8-to-10 of them, but caused all their casualties by shooting. It appears that bombing is not sufficiently confrontational for the psychological scenario that a mass institutional killer seeks.

Suicide bombers belong to an organized group, a movement with a long-term goal that they hope to advance, beyond the deaths of individual contributors; whereas rampage killers engage in purely personal revenge. Why this should affect the scenarios they choose? Suicide bombers have an abstract agenda; rampage killers are persons who have been personally humiliated. What they want is to reverse the scenario that has dominated their lives-- being looked down upon by others in that institution; the habitually dominated seek a moment of dominating others. This fills their horizon; the rampage killer rarely plans what happens next. In all his elaborate planning, he has made no plans for escape. The mass killing is the final, overwhelming symbolic event of his life.

Insulating Oneself from Direct Face-to-Face Contact with Victims

Even when an armed individual threatens a large unarmed group, he needs to circumvent ct/f -- the debilitating tension that makes violence so hard. He needs a technique for insulating himself from the persons he is going to kill. There are several ways to do this, and recent massacres show some of the techniques.

The Aurora killer wore an elaborate black costume, assembled from military and police supply businesses, including helmet, gas mask, throat guard, assault vest, leggings and gloves. This somewhat resembled Batman-- also an ordinary person with a secret identity-- who goes into violent action transformed into a bulked-up dark costume and head covering. Holmes's costume also let him fit in with the crowd of fantasy fans, as the style of dressing as comic-story characters has become popular at youth-culture gatherings (e.g. Comic-Con in San Diego-- his home town-- which took place just a week before the Aurora shooting). Before donning his helmet and gas mask, Holmes displayed his flamboyant shock of hair dyed bright red; this attracted attention but eased him into the role, as he told people he was the Joker-- thus imitating both the arch-villain and the super-hero. He waited until the action of the film was under way before tossing smoke bombs into the theatre and starting to shoot. A witness described the atmosphere: "smoke, explosions-- bats flying across the screen because the movie's still playing-- it's dark." When the lights came on, Holmes stopped firing and left the theatre.

Psychologically, his bulky costume put a layer of insulation between himself and the world, and his bizarre-looking gas mask gave him an artificial face. The normal tendency of a focused interaction between persons is to reflect emotional signals back and forth, so each becomes entrained in the other person's emotions; mutual eye contact and full face-to-face concentration brings a strong sense of the other person's humanity, and makes it difficult to carry out violence. The would-be rampage killer needs to distance his social emotions from his own awareness; masking or disguising one's own face is one way to do this. In general, masks or hoods either on the faces of the aggressor or the victims increase the amount of violence, by destroying the normal human link in face-to-face eye contact. Later I will describe a case where the killer, just before opening fire in a school, puts on shooting-range ear-plugs; these have no practical value but insulate him from the sounds and sensations of normal social interaction.

Breivik, the Oslo killer, followed an even more sophisticated pathway. He likewise took on an alien role, wearing a police uniform with a helmet and face shield that obscured his face. In preparation, he practiced meditation techniques, to keep himself detached from the human reactions of the persons he was preparing to shoot. He also extensively practiced violent video games; of course, tens of millions of other youth did too. But Breivik incorporated it as preparation for a real-world attack; unlike the usual frame in which game-players recognize what they are doing as unreal, he consciously connected it with the need to steel himself from any pangs of human sympathy; in effect, he recognized ct/f as an obstacle he would train himself to overcome.

Deep Backstage

Almost everyone has a backstage, a region of privacy (the bathroom, your own bedroom etc.) where you prepare for and recuperate from the frontstage social interaction that is typically the center of your life. Some individuals-- introverts, isolates, the socially excluded-- spend much of their time in the backstage. Many persons build elaborate fantasy backstage lives that becomes a substitute for successful interaction rituals on the frontstage, especially in today's world of the Internet and electronic games. This is particularly common among young males, the upper age rising from teens through 30s in recent decades with the postponement of adult careers, inflation of educational requirements, and underemployment. The demographic is the same as most rampage killers, although only a tiny proportion becomes violent. Information-technology-obsessed "gamers" have become a recognized category among teenagers-- a low status at the far end of the spectrum from the extroverts and athletes who dominate school and leisure activities.

Mass rampage killers-- and an unknown penumbra of wannabes-- go even further. Their obsessive backstages have two distinctive features. First, their private obsessions concentrate on their vision of a personally inimical world: not the standardized war and fighting fantasies of mass-marketed games, but their own real-world hatreds and institutions. They become increasingly drawn into preparing their counter-attack.

A second feature is that a rampage killer makes his backstage into a super-successful ritual, while also keeping it ultra-private. It resembles a personal religious cult, with its own ceremonies, sacred objects, and moral standards. Of course, many innocuous pursuits can also be built up in private into a quasi-religious obsession. The would-be rampager's success, in building an emotionally compelling world that is completely antagonistic to other people's, is so extreme because he has found a unique source of emotional energy: clandestine excitement.

Ordinarily, motivations are generated socially, by successful interaction rituals; mutual focus and emotional entrainment with other people build up collective effervescence; an individual's emotional energy (EE) is tied to an arena of successful social membership, and to its collective symbols and moral standards which guide action. Spin-off rituals exist, such as solitary prayer or artistic creation, but such practices are first learned in a group that fills them with sacred significance, so that individuals can take them further in privacy. But clandestine solitary rituals are not like this; they are never shared with a group, and collective ritual can't give them a jump-start. So how can a totally solo ritual generate enough emotional energy to outshine every other motivation?

The answer is clandestine excitement: the energy that comes from successfully keeping other people out of one's backstage. The backstage of the would-be mass killer is illicit; he knows it cannot be revealed to others without provoking severe condemnation. This distinguishes it from other kinds of obsessive backstages; boys caught up in video games and electronic cults do not generally hide what they are interested in, and multi-player games and on-line contacts subject them to a degree of social control, reinforcing a standardized construction of social reality. The would-be rampager is playing a much more exciting game, hiding from others his horrendous plans; and this excitement feeds the emotional input that drive his private ritual. His backstage ritual is in a deepening spiral, a unique source of emotional excitement: as the prospective rampager gets into increasingly serious preparations, the excitement level rises. It is not just the excitement of what he is going to do, in the great showdown event-- this may actually be frightening to contemplate. The positive energy comes from the ongoing adventure of doing something illicit, collecting weapons and hiding them, making specific plans-- the excitement is that of carrying out a secret mission. From an alienated life, the future rampager now has many moments of excitement, every time he has to fool someone who might notice what he is doing. On the whole, these are easy tasks, risks that he can handle. His daily life of clandestine planning now gives a feeling of confidence, initiative, enthusiasm-- the very definition of EE. The preparing rampager gets a buzz from successfully duping persons around him while going through the motions of everyday life. He is playing a higher-order game of social attunement-- pretending to be attuned to them so he can control their perceptions of what he is really doing.

The Backstage of a Young Teen Killer

We can follow the construction of a deep backstage in a high school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky in December 1997 (investigated in detail by Katherine Newman, Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shooting; quotes from pp. 25-6). A 14-year old boy, Michael Carneal, opened fire in the school lobby on a Christian prayer circle just at the beginning of the school day, killing 3 and wounding 5.

The sequence of events begins with struggle over low rank in the social hierarchy of the school. In all known school shootings, the perpetrators were outside the popular group; many of them had been manhandled, punched, trapped in a locker or thrown in a garbage can, taunted and jeered at. For Michael, the worst was when a gossip column in the school paper implied that he was homosexual, precipitating a further barrage of taunts. Like most school shooters, Michael was unathletic, unattractive, and easily dominated: a clear counter-ideal by which the teenage status hierarchy could remind itself of what it is not, and an easy target for attacking the weak. He did not fight back when attacked.

Rampage shooters are not only humiliated by the school hierarchy, they hide their humiliation. They try to go on faking it on the outside, not admitting that the bullying and put-downs are getting to them. This gives an additional significance to the pattern that they rarely confide in teachers or parents, much less their compatriots, about their feelings of humiliation. This is not just an instrumental issue of failing to get help; being unwilling to confide is in fact a realistic assessment, if the problem is regaining status in the student hierarchy, which is lost by enlisting adults as allies against students. But this cuts off an avenue of expressing shame which could have turned the emotional dynamics away from the cycle of bypassed shame and humiliated rage (emphasized by Scheff 1991).

Bullied rampage shooters are not entirely passive nor entirely isolated; generally they have some friends, rather outside of school than in it. Although they do not fight back against being attacked, or meet taunts with counter-taunts, they may attempt of their own. Michael, who was repeatedly hazed by the school band members -- the one organization he did belong to -- also carried out pranks to annoy the teachers and other students, episodes of clowning, ostentatious noise-making and mild physical intrusions like slapping other’s heads as he walked by their seats. He responds to victimhood by taking on the role of the clown, simultaneously staging the impression that they are not humiliated but take it all in fun, while also attempting to get the group’s attention. This is Goffmanian frontstaging, leaving the humiliation hidden on the backstage. And it is a strategy that fails; higher-status students find it annoying, and retaliate by increasing their level of harassment. Hence a build-up of taunting, physical attacks, and character assassination, as the dominants defend what they feel is their legitimate status hierarchy.

A deep backstage gets constructed from a spiral of backstage activities. In middle school, Michael was already involved in a number of personal backstages: the fact that he did not fight back against bullying nor express his feelings about it, kept these feelings reserved for a private backstage. He was also adept at presenting himself to adults as normal and well-adjusted, including covering up for his own pranks.

His backstage manipulation of frontstage impressions took a further turn when he moved to high school, and tried to gain admission to an alternative counter-culture group. These were the Goths, ostentatiously dressing in black, displaying pagan religious symbols, and rhetorically challenging the dominant school status hierarchy. Michael as an awkward freshman received little status in the Goth circle either. He tried to bribe his way into the circle, stealing money and a fax machine to give to them. So far he was stepping into the criminal pathway. But in fact he did not go far in this direction; his backstaging took another twist when he began to pretend to steal CDs (alternative music being the central interest of the Goth subculture) to give to them, but in fact taking them from his own collection. Michael was now trying to impress the Goths with his criminality, itself a pretence; he was not even a straightforward thief.

Around this time Michael became acutely conscious that other people had hidden backstages. He was impressed with the Goths’ charges that the Christian prayer group which met in the school lobby every morning was itself just a show. Behind the facade of pious purity, the Goths said, they were just as sexually dissolute as anyone else. This was just the most obvious form of hypocrisy. The ostensibly altruistic Christians upheld the school status hierarchy of athletes and popular sociables which mercilessly put down nerdy kids like Michael. Around the same time, Michael wrote a short story in which he declared “there is a secret in my family that my parents and my sister know... I am always excluded from things... I overheard my parents debating whether they should tell me or not.” His perception was not entirely fantasy. The school status hierarchy is omnipotent in its time and place; children who have friends in their neighbourhood or through family networks nevertheless may be ignored by the same friends at school because of their different ranks in the school status hierarchy (Milner, Freaks, Geeks and Cool Kids). Michael’s older sister, who belonged to one of the popular groups, treated him very differently at home and at school.

Michael was becoming obsessed with backstages, recognizing that others had a backstage just as he did. Now he was formulating layers of his own backstages, deep backstages on which he contrived to pretend to belong on more conventionally alienated backstages like the Goths; he was descending into an inner world in which he was suspicious of the layers of staging everywhere.

His final round of backstage activity was to develop a plot around guns. During Thanksgiving holiday, after taking part in the ritual dinner with his family, he visited the home of a neighbourhood buddy at a time when he knew the family would be away having dinner with their relatives, using his insider knowledge of their doings to find an opportune time to break in. He must have been secretly observing details of the layout for some time beforehand, since he was able to find the hidden key to the gun case, and take several weapons, which he hid in a duffle bag and carried home on his bike.

“Affecting a nonchalant air when he arrived at home, Michael parked the duffle bag by some pine trees outside his bedroom window, and went in to greet his parents. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, when they asked about his day. Once upstairs, he locked his door, climbed out the window, and retrieved the bag, stashing it under his bed. Michael carefully screened the weapons from view by moving Lego boxes in front of the bag. He went downstairs to watch TV for a while but was too excited to sit still for long." He returned to lie on his bed.

This is a significant detail. In previous months, Michael had developed a phobia about sleeping in his bedroom, believing that a monster was under his bed who would drag him under while he was alone; instead he slept on the living room couch. But he used his bedroom to store his possessions, and now it hid his cache of guns. The monster no longer threatens him; it has merged with himself, or rather with his weapons, which are stored in just the place where he imagined the monster to be.

"Lying awake on his bed later that evening, Michael felt a satisfaction that had eluded him for a long time.

'I was feeling proud, strong, good, and more respected. I had accomplished something. I’m not the kind of kid who accomplishes anything. This was the only adventure I’ve ever had,’” Michael later told a psychiatrist.

This is an extension of his earlier backstage activity of stealing, or pretending to steal, gifts for the Goths. The plotting, breaking and entering, disguising the guns to transport them on the street, sneaking them into a hiding place in his room, interspersing these moves with normal appearances before his parents to avoid suspicion -- all this was an antinomian adventure. He is excited by the backstage action; it is the same kind of appeal that exists whenever someone has a clandestine backstage and a secret hiding place, whether it is drugs, pornography, stolen property, or weapons; Jack Katz (Seductions of Crime) shows that the allure of shop-lifting is chiefly in the staging excitement, not in the intrinsic value of the items stolen. Carrying out backstage activity in front of unsuspecting audiences is itself a thrill. Michael seems to have deliberately repeated the thrill during the weekend, sneaking the guns out of his house again, carrying them hidden in the duffle bag on his bike to another friend’s house, where he displayed them, and even took turns shooting in their backyard. On Sunday afternoon of the vacation weekend (the night before school would begin Monday morning), Michael displayed his cool by playing chess with his father; at night he took two more guns from his father’s closet and added them to his cache under the bed.

Monday morning there was more clandestine action. “Michael came downstairs with the rifles bound together with duct tape, covered by blankets. On top of the blankets he piled the sheets from his bed and, when asked, told his mother that the cat had thrown up on them and that he taking them to the laundry room. Michael went into the laundry room and deposited the sheets, but then went directly outside and put the bundle of guns in the trunk of [his sister’s] car. The pistol and ammunition were stuffed into his backpack. He got into the car with his sister and rode off to Heath High, eager with anticipation.”

Michael is full of clandestine excitement. This is no ordinary backstage. He is evading detection while under the gaze of those who might detect him; he is taking advantage of his usual condition of low status and remoteness from the center of attention to build a threat that only he knows about. He is enjoying his backstage, no longer furtively withdrawn into it, but purposively and agentfully. More emotional than the ordinary backstage, we might call it a deep backstage; it is the thrill of carrying off on the backstage what would be a difficult confrontation on the frontstage. Michael’s confrontational tension and fear is ordinarily so high that he cannot respond to ordinary bullying and taunting; now he has turned that tension into a clandestine energy. His months of activity on various fronts have made him an expert at backstages. In this arena at least, he has some emotional energy: the confidence to carry out his fantasy of overcoming confrontational tension/fear.

Is there a precipitating moment? Michael has planned and fantasized about guns for months. But it is not clear when he is riding in the car to school that he will shoot anybody. Even if he has fantasized about it, there is still the barrier of ct/f to overcome. Many violent confrontations abort at the last minute; it may well happen that he will change his mind.

Michael arrives at the school and carries his bundle of guns into the lobby. To a teacher, he says that it contains his English project. He is not yet ready to confront. He heads for the group of Goths, 5 or 6 boys standing in a circle on one side of the lobby. Nearby the Christian prayer group is forming. Michael is between the two groups: both of them ritual groups, indeed performing counter-rituals to each other. After a contingent moment he will turn from the first to the second and fire at them. He is making a choice between ritual loyalties. As he drops his guns to the floor, making a metallic clank, the Goths pay him scant attention. The leader of the group says, apparently sardonically, “Sounds like guns to me.” Do they actually know Michael has guns? In the past they have engaged in plenty of violent talk, which Michael has attempted, without much success, to join. They are primed to interpret more talk about guns from Michael as a ritual; even bringing guns into the school, in itself a serious violation, an antinomian act of rebellion, is probably perceived by them as an act of bluster, an attempt to raise his status in the counterculture group. Two sides of the Goths’ perceptions converge here: on one side they might well interpret Michael’s presentation as indeed bringing guns into their presence, since they fantasize about it rather openly themselves; on the other side are a series of reasons not to treat him seriously: that he is a young nerd trying once against to raise his status in their group; that their own talk about guns is bluster and no more; that to go any farther with the guns would get themselves in trouble, whereas their bluster is end enough in itself. They turn their backs on Michael and proceed to talk about punk music CDs.

This is the situational turning point. Michael has now been doubly humiliated: by the mainstream status system of the school, epitomized before his eyes by the prayer group a few yards away; by the counter-culture group, who put him at the bottom of their own status hierarchy, reject his best efforts to live up to their antinomian standards, and now literally turn their backs on him at what he had intended as his moment of greatest impressiveness. No one looks at him as he reaches into his backpack and puts on a pair of bright orange ear plugs which he has pilfered along with the guns and ammunition. This is the paraphernalia shooters wear on firing ranges to protect their ears from the blast of the shot. No one in either group looks at him as he takes out the pistol, loads a clip, and raises it into firing position, following the posture of the shooting range. Probably all these moments are on the cusp of the turning point; but still no one gives him any attention. He waits until the last words of the prayer are finished, and pulls the trigger, first in a quick burst of three, then deliberately finishing the rest of the clip.

Why does he stop shooting? Students watching the scene describe it as a mixture of shock and unreality as the bodies fall. The pistol in the enclosed space sounds to one of them like little popping noises of firecrackers. This is in keeping with the experience of soldiers and police, for whom the situation of firing, the apex of confrontation, is dissociated from their normal senses; a large majority of these shooters report the sound of their own guns, or of guns fired at them, sound tiny and far away, perhaps not even heard at all (Artwohl 1977). The earplugs are not really necessary, since Michael probably would not hear the shots anyway. The chief effect of the earplugs is to heighten the sense of unreality, cutting out normal sounds that make other bodies in the vicinity seem active and real, not just pictures on a screen. He has reached the point of isolation from all social feedback. Of course he had been heading that way for months, with his succession of backstages; now he has reached the bottom of the tunnel.

As soon as he finishes his clip, he starts to come back into the social world. Although he has plenty of guns and ammunition, he makes no effort to reload. He takes off the earplugs and turns passive as authority figures -- the big senior male who leads the prayer group, the school principal -- confront him. Now his backstage has turned into frontstage, his emotional energy has disappeared; the confrontational barrier becomes real again, and he freezes, unable to shoot any more.

The Strongest Clue: a Ritualized Hidden Arsenal

Most of the characteristics of mass killers-- low status isolates, bully victims, school failures, gun owners, players of violent games, even persons who talk or write about fantasies of revenge-- are far too widespread in the population to accurately predict who will actually perpetrate a massacre. A much stronger clue, I suggest, is amassing an arsenal of weapons, which become the center of an obsessive ritual; the arsenal is not just a practical step towards the massacre, but has a motivating effect that deepens the spiral of clandestine plotting into a private world impervious to normal social restraints and moral feelings.

School shooters and other rampage killers generally amass an arsenal of weapons, bringing far more to the shooting site than they actually use or need. Michael Carneal brought a total of 8 guns, wrapped up in a unwieldy bundle as well as in his backpack: a 30-30 rifle, four .22 caliber rifles, 2 shotguns, and a pistol, and a many boxes of ammunition; but he used only the pistol. The pair of 11- and 13-year old boys who killed 5 and wounded 10 on a school playground in Jonesboro, Arkansas in 1998 carried 7 pistols, 3 rifles, and a large amount of ammunition, of which they fired 30 shots.

The two shooters at Columbine HS carried a semi-automatic handgun, a carbine, two sawed-off shotguns, and almost 100 home-made bombs; they fired 96 shots from the carbine, 55 from the handgun, and 25 from one of the shotguns; their magazines held 240 rounds, of which they still had about 100 rounds, plus 90 of the bombs, when they committed suicide. In the first 20 minutes of their rampage, they killed 13 students and teachers and wounded 21. Then their emotional energy seemed to run out-- they even laughed sardonically that the thrill of killing was gone. They left 34 students unharmed out of 56 who were hiding under desks in the school library, and merely taunted other students while they wandered the halls firing aimless shots, before shooting themselves 25 minutes later, synchronizing their last action with a chant: "One, two, three!"





CCTV image shows the Columbine killers in the deserted cafeteria, 10 minutes before they killed themselves. One looks down, as if dispirited; the other paces restlessly.


Holmes, the Aurora killer, carried a shotgun, an automated assault rifle, and 2 handguns; previously he spent 4 months amassing equipment in his apartment, including multiple ammunition magazines and 6000 rounds, of which he used only a small part. He also constructed 30 explosives out of aerial fireworks, refilling them with chemicals, a task that must have taken many days.

Brievik had 4 guns, 2 of which he took to the island. He spent two years acquiring the weapons, since guns are hard to get in Europe, and Norwegian regulations are strict. Nevertheless he persevered through the official steps for a hunting license and undergoing training at a police-approved shooting club to get a pistol permit. To create a massive car bomb (which he used in the first phase of his attack, at a government building in Oslo), he spent several years acquiring a remote farm as a front for buying fertilizer and chemicals. He was busy in his hidden backstage, video-game training, writing propaganda, and making a fake police uniform and identification. On the island, he used his police persona to assemble the youths, ostensibly to announce precautions, before starting to shoot them at close range. He brought over 400 rounds with him, fired 186, and still had over half remaining after fatally shooting 67 persons and wounding 33. He too seemed to waver towards the end of his 70-minute shooting spree, making several phone calls offering to give himself up (at 40 minutes and 60 minutes), but then resuming shooting until the police finally arrived.

The stockpile of weapons is symbolic overkill. These guns are for showing off -- both to intimidate others, but mainly to impress oneself. They are the sacred objects of the private backstage cult that builds up the rampager's obsessive motivation to the massacre. Once at the sticking point their emotional energy never seems to carry them far enough to use all their weapons. Whether they bring all their weapons to the massacre or not, their primary significance has been during the build-up; i.e. the guns they bring are from the focus of their cult activities-- they are a kind of security blanket.

To be clear about the diagnosis: I am not saying that anyone who collects guns is a potential mass killer. The crucial signs are: first, the guns are kept secret, part of a deep backstage. In contrast, most gun owners are quite open about them; they may be involved in a cult of guns but it is a public cult, visible as a political stance, or a well-advertized pastime such as hunting or target shooting. (See Kohn, Shooters.) It is the hidden arsenal that is dangerous-- psychologically dangerous. Second, the rampage killer amasses a large, unrealistic collection of weapons as far as their actual use is concerned. This symbolic aspect sets them off from other kinds of criminal users of guns.

The symbolic aspects of weapons go beyond their sheer physical availability. Hand-guns are widely available through illegal channels in lower-class urban areas; but they are not used for mass school shootings, but typically in street crime or gang vendettas. Up to 22% of inner-city students say they could get their hands on a gun; and between 4 and 12% report they have brought them to school; overwhelmingly their stated reason is protection against other students -- i.e. in the gang milieu of these communities (Klewin 2003). Many of these claims may be exaggeration and bluster for the sake of the local status system; and some of the gun-carrying students use them not for defense but to intimidate or retaliate against others; but in fact they rarely use them in the school itself, and virtually never in mass institutional shootings but only in targeting specific individuals. (From 1992 through 2000, 234 students were killed at US schools and 24,406 away from school, a ratio of less than 1 percent (DeVoe 2004). The school is not their turf; their violence has a different symbolic focus and ritual location: their rival streets. In contrast, virtually all the institutional mass murderers have been middle-class whites, and recently, high-achieving Asians.

Guns in the hands of gang members and their youth cohort counterparts are potential murder weapons. But these young men are not potential mass murderers, nor institutional rampage killers. They do not stockpile weapons in hidden caches, secretively protecting them with fake-normal behavior; on the contrary, they show them off to each other at every occasion. They don't have a clandestine backstage the way a nerdy rampager does. They don't need it, because their emotional attractions to violence, or at least ritualized bluster, are part of their public interaction rituals. By the same token, their IRs push them towards intermittent individually-targeted killings, but not impersonal mass rampages against unarmed members of hated institutions.

Why split hairs? Why not say, all guns are potentially dangerous; the solution is to get rid of all of them. I will not repeat the practical arguments made at the outset; and Breivik shows that even very strict regulations can be evaded by a sufficiently obsessed perpetrator. If we are looking for ways to actually prevent violence, in the sequence of events and emotions that make up people's lives, we need to be aware of the different pathways leading to different kinds of violence. Since the pathways are different, we need to find solutions to each type at a time. The things that will diminish gang and street turf violence are not the things that will work on heading off school and other institutional rampage massacres. For these latter, I suggest there is a very strong clue that a massacre is being prepared: an isolated individual (or possibly a duo) engaged in an obsessive clandestine ritual around a hidden arsenal of weapons. To point this out is not to solve all the practical problems of taking action on it. But it is a step.


Sources: news reports; Wikipedia; U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics;
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Collins, Randall. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton Univ. Press.
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DeVoe, Jill, et al. 2004. “Indicators of School Crime and Safety.” U.S. Dept. of Education.
Experian Simmons. 2012. "Top TV Programs Among Voter Segments." Reported in Los Angeles Times, August 30, B3.
Katz, Jack. 1988. Seductions of Crime. Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil. NY: Basic Books.
Klewin, Gabriele, et al. 2003. "Violence in school." in Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan (eds.), International Handbook of Violence Research. London: Kluwer.
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