The second part of the comment sent me to Pete Rollins’ latest book, Insurrection: To Believe is Human, To Doubt, Divine. While I quite like the book (and most everything Pete writes), I can’t quite give it a full endorsement. It’s essentially a meditation on Slavoj Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, where the Slovenian philosopher argues (a la Chesterton) that Jesus’ cry on the cross reveals a sort of atheism, or, in Lacanian terms, that there is no big Other “out there” to save us. It’s an interesting interpretation, which, frankly, I don’t find particularly fair to the text, but that’s another blog post for another day.

Anyway, after the comment on this morning’s post, I flipped to Rollins’ section on (The) Facebook, entitled “I Wear A Mask That Looks Like Me”, which I find rather insightful:

The question then is whether the story we tell ourselves about ourselves functions in much the same way. In order to answer that, let us consider the growing phenomenon of online social networking sites.

These sites can be described as offering the world an idealized reflection of ourselves. They express an image of ourselves that we would like other people to believe reflects who we are. Indeed, more fundamentally, they enable us to construct an image of ourselves we would like to believe that we are. On our profiles we list all the films that we want people to think that we like while failing to mention some of the more embarrassing ones, or we post the books that help solidify a certain image while avoiding our guilty pleasures. More than this we will often only post pictures that make us look good and remove tags from photos that put us in a bad light. For instance, I remember being at MoMA in New York City and overhearing a young girl asking someone to take a picture of her looking at a particular piece of art for her Facebook profile. It was quite obvious that the girl had little interest in the art as such (moving on as soon as the picture had been taken), but she was interested in creating an image of herself as the type of person who would be interested in that particular painting. One could say that she desired to be the type of person who would like that piece of art or, what amounts to almost the same thing, that she would like other people to think that she was the type of person who would like that piece of art.

It would be a mistake, however, to limit our reflections to the rather mundane claim that Facebook tends to reflect an idealized version of our conscious self. We must go deeper and approach Facebook as itself derivative of a more basic psychic structure – the reality that our conscious self is an idealized expression of who we are. Our conscious self is the idealized version of ourselves that we present to the world, and our Facebook profile simply reflects that. The significant gap does not then lie between our Facebook profile and our conscious self; rather it rests in the difference between our conscious self (reflected in social networking sites like Facebook) and the truth of who we are.

We hide every day behind a mask that is a Photoshopped version of ourselves. (93-94)

I’ve been thinking about it in light of Slavoj Žižek’s thoughts in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, where he posits that what’s needed in our world is not less violence, but more. By “violence” though, he does not mean physical brutality. On the contrary, Žižek states that we must do violence to our inherited ideologies in order to engage the underlying systemic causes of physical brutality.

Is this not the “violence” needed when high ranking military and governmental officials are shocked that Marines would urinate on the dead bodies of their enemies (or are they shocked that someone videotaped it!) but have no problem with the reality of the dead bodies themselves?

To be clear: It is terrible that United States Marines urinated on the bodies of others. Isn’t it worse, however, that they’d just killed these men?

Jefferson’s summation puts it into perspective:

More American troops now kill themselves than die in combat, and female soldiers are more likely to be sexually assaulted by a colleague than to be killed by the enemy. In short, the kids aren’t all right, and it’s time for everyone to stop being shocked when they behave in abnormal, terrifying ways. War is an awful thing that irrevocably changes and destroys people, and it yields horrific, destructive behavior. If you’d like to live in a world in which soldiers don’t pee on their dead enemies, then it’s your duty to fight for a world in which soldiers aren’t killing people in the first place.

Thankfully, even such a terrible atrocity hasn’t disrupted the ongoing peace talks.