A sole conjecture or opine on the Lone Wolf attack in London

A Conjecture on Lone Wolf Terror incident – The London Attack

The March London attack reminds us of the fact that no man can actually act alone without some little help from friends, family or inspiration. The London attacker, who will remain nameless, was a coward and acted on this principle of hurting or killing as many people as he could by using an SUV to run over people and then stabbing a policeman as he made his way into the Parliamentary yards.

His attack was a textbook assault described in the ISIS manual of war to inflict mass injuries or casualties by the means of raw weaponry e.g. car, knife and blunt force. He knew he could get away with it but also knew he would get caught as he chose one of the heaviest guarded places in London to carry out his hate-motivated terrorist act.

What is interesting about these lone wolf acts is the action behind the scenes that creates such drama and bizarre moments of thoughts to kill others in the name of religion or other political causes. It is interesting to follow the bouncing ball and see where this ideology comes from.

In London, a city now divided by both ethnical and religious means, the problem is just starting. This act was not perpetuated by a lunatic. He was sane and cautious enough not to be detected and deterred before he committed his heinous crime.

So where do they get their inspiration from? What spurs them to act the way they do? I suspect it has a lot to do with apathy and a radical approach to political disconcerted ideas that emboldens violence and hate crimes. Of course, that is merely my opinion but I am certain there are some undercurrents within society that stokes such emotions and thoughts.

The United Kingdom is somewhat unique in background motivational thinking. I believe the election of a Muslim as the mayor of UK’s largest city has a lot to do with the boldness and violent extremes that have been prevalent in the UK region. Call it a hunch but I believe it is more than that.

Examining this Muslim mayor and his latest rhetoric that terror attacks are “part and parcel “in all big or major cities is ludicrous. His assumption basically translates into a surrender or submission on terrorism and allowing it to be part of the culture of the community. Is the mayor downplaying terrorism in his own city?

For me this is a statement of ‘surrender’ or submission rather than resistance to the matter. It gives me the impression that the mayor’s tacit approval to commit violent acts is just another part of the growing pains of big cities. That is a false perception and shows lack of depth in the manner public safety is approached.

I suspect that he is comparing London with Baghdad or Istanbul or any other major Muslim city in the world. London is not such a city, it is not yet dominated by the Islamic faith and customs and practices.

Or is it? Have the Londoners lost their paradise and surrendered the city’s parcels of land, the communities and neighborhoods to the immigration flow of Muslim immigrants?  There is room for thought on this matter and sticking to the facts, we can see a political and cultural shift happening in what was once a proud and traditional European nation.

 The mayor is absolutely a liberal and Muslim sympathetic as he himself would never turn away from the Islam religion. He doesn’t deny terrorism but claims it to be a part of living in the big city.

How false is that? Is this too ridiculous and why would you even have to ask?  Are we saying that Washington DC, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles as well as many more cities are to expect ‘terrorism’ to be part of living in the big city?  

Is he making excuses for Islamic terrorism created and carried out by radical extremist out of control and out to kill innocents in the name of their prophet Muhammad and Allah, their god? Are massacres acceptable to elected officials in the western world today?

So here is my problem. Some may say there are no lone-wolfs out there and base that on the fact that they thrive as criminals within a selected environment. An environment that is nurtured by hate and religious extremism that causes people to think differently than their neighbors or in general Muslims versus Christians as Muslims are dominantly members of the Islam faith.

Offering London as a ‘sanctuary city has offered an environment for radicalism and extreme thinking. Making London or any other city, whether in the UK, France, Belgium, Canada or the United States as a sanctuary for Muslims who preach radicalism is dangerous. Lone wolf perpetrators are products of their environment.

Can you see where I am going with the Lone Wolf theory? Do they really act alone like we think they do or are they supported by a social structure that creates them or organizes their thoughts to help carry out violent attacks?

If you or surround yourself with violence, you, yourself will eventually become violent. Mix that up with a mindset, an ideology you believe in and you are the poisoned apple looking to kill the innocent apples as they disagree with your own behaviors and thinking patterns.

This environment is not limited to where they live. It is also a reflection of where they work, where they eat and where they hang out socially. This broad spectrum of social and theological influences is limitless. It’s an infinity to deal with physically and psychologically. If you live amongst the jihadist, you will eventually become a jihadist unless you have the ability to move away from it and it doesn’t follow you. Family members are likely to be the greatest influences after the principles of the Quran and Imams in the community.

Another perspective is the fact that violence is prevalent inside prisons and there, the person committing the violence may differ a little as it is a world between prey and predator. However, they too share the uniformity of common or familiar languages or vocabularies, race, gangs or more intimate things like traditions, behaviors, codes or cultural expectations and thinking patterns.

Unfortunately, there are more predators than there are prey and that makes the case that in order to survive, you have to become a predator aka a perpetrator or a criminal of sorts. In order to survive you choose your clearly marked commonalities and stick with the numbers it gives you for your own personal safety. That is instinctively how the human reacts to dangers. Thus I agree, a lone wolf may indeed act alone but is created or morphed into a creature influenced by his or her environment.

Timing is irrelevant but it does exist as a factor. Over time, whether it be the past or present, it can cause a trigger to spur actions. The reason for that comment is that terrorism is not new and is perpetual to time. Time and space control the events that shape today and tomorrow. On the other hand, time and space of the past has often influenced the future.

Terrorism is spreading because of the environment it feeds from. Hatred is too common to find and when found, causes a rejection and often an act of rebellion or violence. This trigger, this stimulus is what sets the lone wolf off and drives him or her into a frenzy of hate and vehemence.

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Solitary Confinement - The Apathy of the Concept

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Neglect or Deliberate Indifference?

Deliberate Indifference

Sometimes we have to ponder, what is worse than deliberate indifference? How does a billion-dollar industry like private security services survive tort claims of what some people call reckless or callously indifferent behaviors as a lesser intent of carelessness or neglect? Should it not be a higher form of neglect? For a lack of a better word, it seems that deliberate indifference is done with some sort of premeditation.

How do you address workplace conditions that run opposite of the polarity or context taught during the training process? Do you risk being vocal or file a written complaint, knowing you are a probationary employee and risk termination for incompatibility with the company? Where do we go if the standards taught are not being upheld in the field?

This sets up an attitude or behavior of what is best known in any business as ‘premeditation’ in the fact that ignoring certain workplace conditions establish a proven standard of culpability for someone in the chain of command. Some people call it ‘willful blindness’ 0r the ‘lack of will to change’ what has always been done a certain way and not worthy of a management review or assessment to make changes. In the tort law, we have a continuum that consists of negligence, gross negligence, deliberate indifference and wanton or egregious indifference.

However, technically, what is worse than deliberate indifference? What is reasonable to claim to have been ignored or put at risk because of this lack of will to make a change or willful blindness? What is a reasonable defense or rebuttal for such behavior where a higher source of authority, a judge or a jury have to decide by the preponderance of the evidence which is the most unreasonable?

If I were to research this matter in the industry, I would find a substantial amount of cases of analogous situations where people were put at risk where they were mistreated or ignored by management because of downright neglect or indifference. The problem can be solved by merely addressing the matter timely and completely.

Instead of addressing those issues at hand, management chooses to ignore or ask for an extension to look into the matter or answers with an answer and not an option or motion to change or dismiss the complaint and lastly, chose the option or motion to not change or address the complaint without looking at the evidence, documentation or even the core of the complaint and label the employee a ‘disgruntled’ or ‘problematic’ employee. I am unable to go mano a mano with the industry. In regards to my concerns, it would do me no justice or good to complain about something that others would call ‘whining’ and irrelevant to the quality or efficiency of the supervision provided by management on the job.

I know they can make me look weak by virtue of the fact that I am but a mere hourly employee and that the span of control is not within my reach or that of the person I logged the complaint with at the time. In the specific area of concerns, I need to document it without biases or discriminatory behaviors. I need to show ‘a pattern-and-practice’ and establish facts, not opinions. Hence, my reliance to show cause for concern hinges on my ability to document and show proof and truth – two elements often challenged even when overwhelmingly clear and real.

What is a collective consciousness?

Collective consciousness – fact or theory?

Today, the term “collective consciousness” is overused and implies to a condition of the subject within the whole of society, and how any given person or individual comes to perceive themselves as a part of such given group. Whether or not the term reflects any facts depends on the mindset of the person using the terminology to express their own opinion or theory.

Many social theorists [key hint] like to explicate how an autonomous individual comes to identify with a larger group or structure. One could cite either political groups such as Black Lives Matter or social groups such as Facebook or Twitter as a source of such “collective consciousness.”

Definitively, “collective” means “[formed by a collection of individual persons or things; constituting a collection; gathered into one; taken as a whole; aggregate, collected.”

Likewise, “consciousness,” (a term which is slightly more complex to define with the entirety of its implications) signifies “Joint or mutual knowledge,” “Internal knowledge or conviction; knowledge as to which one has the testimony within oneself; esp. of one's own innocence, guilt, deficiencies,” and “the state or fact of being mentally conscious or aware of anything”

By combining the two terms, we can surmise that the phrase collective consciousness implies an internal knowing known by all or a consciousness shared by a plurality of persons. The easiest way to think of the phrase (even with its extremely loaded historical content) is to regard it as being an idea or proclivity that we all share, whoever specifically “we” might entail.

Many other theorists have engaged the notion and have made it a social term that implies factual collective thinking or ideologies. The term has specifically been used by social theorists to explain how an autonomous individual comes to identify with a larger group/structure, and as such, how patterns of commonality among individuals bring legible unity to those structures.

Society should be concerned with the making of the subject as an aggregation of external processes/societal conditions. Unfortunately, most of these rules are developed on the ideas or mindset and beliefs of socialist with their own theories. This could hardly be accepted as a factual source but rather just what it is – a theory. Society is desperate to know what causes people to think and to act in similar and predictable manners.

There appears to be a social mantra or mandate that if they (we) don’t submit to the conventions of society, e.g. if I don’t dress, talk, act or conform to customs and practices in society, I might be ridiculed, or provoked into social isolation. A form of isolation in which I am kept and punished for not following the collective train of thought on matters of social importance.

This makes it a social fact that needs to be recognized by the power of external coercion which it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals, and the presence of this power may be recognized in its turn either by the existence of some specific sanction or by the resistance offered against every individual effort that tends to violate it”

Thus, humans come to act in certain ways via a kind of reward/punishment system enacted at the level(s) of both The State and the social spheres; subjects are trained in a kind of inward-outward movement; the individual may have certain barbaric proclivities, but the assimilation process into the social sphere corrects those tendencies by the distribution of positive or negative reinforcements.

Collective consciousness is the effect of the trained subject—through the process of becoming a subject, an individual learns to be common: to dress, speak, and act like her neighbors. The “socially conscious” subject is the legible subject, one who exists in a degree of visible sameness in relation to the other members of the group/society.

At the top of the structure is the government or commonly referred to as the state, which aims to control the bottom (the individual subjects) through a series of institutional mediations. Secondly, this training process or orientation of information to the public comes in every imaginable formats that include social media, public education, the media, reforms in law and religious principles, etc. these sources have or attempt to apply their direct power to the public the subjects (people) at all times drilling them with a honed effort from the outside into the subjective format that becomes suggestive in nature and upholding the intended spirit or thought developed by the state, media or other sources.

This applied power that is subjected in an inwardness of an individual member of the public is born from a lifetime bombardment of external coercion-- individuals come to fulfill certain common duties, have common aspirations, follow common life-trajectories, etc.

The “consciousness” of each individual is not something which originates from a singular interior spirit but rather is pressured into being by the external devices of the State. Thus, collective consciousness again represents the individual’s relationship to a larger group or structure but marks the sameness (the same set of principles sources applies to all subjects) among members of that group, which act to make that group a cohesive whole.

The aforementioned prescriptions of collective consciousness express the phrase as the internal representation of external conditions present in any given society. These are exerted upon the subject in a variety of ways and then assimilated into the subject’s consciousness. The idea is that the collective is a mass of like-minded persons who will (re)emerge to reproduce the production force.

Thus, collective consciousness is the affect/effect upon and inside of any given public whose thoughts and actions are constantly mediated by outside pressures. The notion of collective consciousness also owes a tremendous amount to the emerging popularity of psychoanalysis in the 20th century.

Certainly, if one looks closely to the coined term you can denote the conclusion of shared contexts and meanings of individual dreams or thoughts consciously or subconsciously. Hence the development of pre-set ideas or thoughts exists that set-off motives or meanings of ideas or images that can be found in the myths of one’s own race or those of other races. In some way, these myths develop biases or bigotry which yield a collective meaning, making it a common property of what we call mankind or the human race supported within our society.

The unconscious is the portion of the self of which the individual is unaware, yet which still exerts control over the behaviors, desires, and drives of that individual. As such, unconsciousness is never entirely divorced from the consciousness within the individual, and one necessarily informs the other. One of the main goals of psychoanalytic speech is to bring the unconscious into consciousness, so that the patient may become aware of why she behaves in certain fashions.

The “collective unconscious” is important when considering its other, “collective consciousness” because it suggests an original set of models common to all members of a group, and out of which they formulate meanings, contexts, and patterns within the group. Certainly, you can see the ‘power of suggestion’ at work here.

These mental processes or psychoanalytic readings presents a more classic meaning of collective consciousness, yet its discursive qualities ring true for the ways in which we presently think of the term as a foundation of media studies with the term

media defined as an “extension of man,” indicating that humans create the world and their tools in their image, likening technological apparatuses after their senses. Media, in this vein, is intimately linked with the word medium, described as “Something which is intermediate between two degrees, amounts, qualities, or classes; a middle state”. The internet is the ultimate medium; it provides a virtual meeting place for persons to gather and perform daily rituals of subjectivity (even at the micro-level of person to person discourse) all channeled through a technological network.

Collective consciousness is a term much needed by media theorists because it postulates one, if not the effect of media—whose broadest primary function is to convey, carry or transmit messages it deems important to their core values. Ensuring their message gets sent and received in many places at once can carry with it both social and political power.

Some suggest that this infringes on the will of free people and their free-will power as it binds or bonds them with a message that is distinguished to be from another -will source. Hence the free become unfree of the social pressures applied.

Instead of a multiplicity of singular wills or a disharmony of different spirits and personalities, subjects are transcribed into codes operating via variations of ones and zeroes.

Present media theorists sometimes link the notion of collective consciousness to signal the internet as a major intermediary in the creation of a truly global society. Herein lies my message to my readers – the goal of a truly global society aka United Nations is at stake here. Using the consciousness of Internet culture as “this idea that we live in an age of mechanistic, false individualism and that we are now on the threshold of a new mutation...We all share a collective mind.”

This is the eradication of the "thinking humanity" – the destruction of a singular biosphere transferred into an evolutionary system in which the human recognition is freed from the confines of a single body or a purely organic body and turned into a whole new mechanically developed body.