What people do in response to violence is consolidate the myths they live by. This focuses emotion and fosters solidarity, but it also renders people susceptible to control by non-human forces, submission to which, in times of crisis, looks like virtue.
I’ve written a lot about all this. See:
I’ve also written about the artists who reveal to us the power of our myths, including William Blake and Thomas Pynchon and, of course, Auden.
If you want to know what’s really going on with us, you can’t just ask yourself what side to take in the tempest du jour. But of course very few people want to know what’s really going on. Most people are not interested in understanding anything, they want to experience powerful emotions, good or bad — “All emotion is pleasurable,” Craig Raine has said —, that make them feel righteous.
See also the myth tag at the bottom of this post.
