Designed and Executed to Maximize

    The recent release of the initial results of the investigation into the shooting in Las Vegas confronts us 

once again with the senselessness of that act.  As he announced the report’s publication, Sheriff Lombardo 

of the LVMPD stated that it “is not going to answer every question or even answer the biggest question as 

to why he did what he did.”  And the report itself matter-of-factly states that “nothing was found to 

indicate motive on the part of Paddock”. Thus, in spite of their obvious wish to facilitate some 

understanding of that horrendous event, the investigators have been unable to shed any light on the aspect 

which, as the sheriff rightly pointed out, troubles us most.

 

    This disappointing lack of a plausible, let alone definitive, motive seems to confirm the point made by 

Elif Batuman (“Searching for Motives in Mass Shootings”,The New Yorker, 11/27/17) with regard to the 

motives of attackers like Paddock.  She argues that the usual reasons given for moments of such violence 

are unsatisfying because they do not really explain the incident in question. Rather, our attempts to 

understand through a process of associating an attacker with political extremism, religious fundamentalism, 

poverty, domestic disfunction, racism, homophobia, mental illness and so on is basically a matter of 

labelling them and their actions in a way that merely separates us from them.  The establishment of a 

motive in this manner amounts to little more than a claim of complete unrelatedness. Batuman is certainly 

not saying that we share to any degree in the guilt of those who perpetrate such crimes, but that, by merely 

satisfying a demand for this sort of distinction, we fail to recognize the ways in which we may actually 

make them possible. The dissatisfaction we feel, then, ultimately comes from and will be perpetuated by 

our own tendency to dispose of such profoundly disturbing moments with superficial, face-saving 

rationalizations.

 

    Paddock’s case is particularly disturbing, according to Batuman, precisely because he does not fit into 

our usual categories of motivation and, therefore, it is more difficult to deny the likelihood that something 

in our cultural assumptions and commitments produced the conditions for his murderous assault.  She 

argues that we need to take this possibility seriously and take a long, critical look at our society in order to 

see how and where we might be contributing to the potentiality of such monstrosities.

 

To do so, we can begin with what we know from this latest report. The internet search histories
found on the multiple computers collected by the police strike particularly close to home. They show that 

Paddock was researching locations, events and hotels much as any of us would go about planning a 

vacation and, in a sense, with the same general purpose of getting the most out of the planned activity. 

Furthermore, most of the other details in the report - the concentration of so many firearms, so much 

ammunition in high capacity magazines, the use of bump stocks on practically every weapon, the targeting 

of the crowded concert, the choice of a huge field of fire, the measures taken to delay or complicate the 

response by law enforcement, and so on, ad nauseum – show that Paddock used the same logic of 

maximization to propel his actions across the line into the unthinkable. Thus, the operation of the concept 

of maximizing effectiveness, which our society embraces almost without question, seems to be implicated 

in Paddock’s crime, at least to the extent that its cultivation and implementation can be pushed beyond 

legitimate moral and rational boundaries. 

 

    This mode of denying ethical limitation is evident in other recent events.  The scandal at Wells Fargo, 

for example, revealed a single-mindedness in the pursuit of market share and profit that was truly 

corrosive to our ideals.  Again, no one is calling them terrorists like Paddock or condemning business as 

such, but the fact remains that the managers responsible were carrying their logic to a similar extreme - 

they maximized the effects that they wanted to produce by over-extending legitimate economic methods 

and, thereby, reducing trust and integrity to mere obstacles to be overcome.  And by enforcing an 

impossible sales goal with the threat of dismissal to indirectly establish the conditions for this 

abandonment of trust, they also knowingly granted themselves the safeguard of “plausible deniability”. 

While certainly differing in degree, doesn’t the logical character of this negation of trust correspond to 

Paddock’s negation of the value of human life?  And doesn’t the shamelessly proactive evasion of 

responsibility correspond to our tendency to deny the possibility that our own cultural determinations have 

something to do with the results of this way of thinking?

 

    Likewise,  the revelations of the shameful behavior of performers, producers and others in the 

entertainment and news industries disclose a comparable anti-ethical logic.  Aesthetic value and the 

purpose of journalism have been degraded into a matter of getting the most notice. Celebrities and media 

companies simply accept the compulsion to continually increase the level of provocation, arrogance, 

vulgarity and emotionalism in their representations of reality, as they intrude into our consciousness in 

order to distinguish themselves.  As it progressively dominates perception, this intrusion actually erodes 

moral objectivity by negating legitimate cultural and ethical expectations like that of personal privacy and 

common courtesy. Thus, the media sources and “personalities” that are solely in the business of 

relentlessly exploding “taboos” and uncovering the “real” story actually undermine the boundaries that 

give reality to dignity and respect.  Thus, in addition to the physical and sexual outrages that have come to 

light, this maximization of attention does real violence to the sensibilities that constitute experience itself. 

Furthermore, this methodical excess is exonerated of all the damage it does through clever public relations 

strategies and the disdainful insistence that any sort of restraint, internal as well as external, would amount 

to censorship.  Surely, this obsession with tearing down any and all barriers also paves the way for those 

who might seek to express their personal effectiveness in absolute, deadly terms.

     As a society, however, we refuse to acknowledge, let alone critically examine, the perniciousness of 

these forms of maximization.  The accumulation of wealth is generally applauded no matter how it is 

acquired, and any ethical or other limitation on profit-making is harshly rejected.  Thus, firms like the 

pharmaceutical companies that produce opioids are absolved of responsibility for their role in the ruin of 

human lives, while addicts are condemned for being unable to withstand temptation that is generated by 

sophisticated marketing tactics that leverage the authority of the medical profession.  Likewise, ever more 

intense popular attention is accepted as the validation of who or what ever it focuses on, despite the fact 

that its relentless expressive license clearly fosters conspiracy mentality and fake news, as well as the 

merely banal, trivial, vulgar and repugnant, all at the expense of the sensibilities of the “unsophisticated”.  

In both cases, the obligation of cultivating and maintaining a sense of restraint is shifted in its entirety onto 

others in the name of maximizing, respectively, the freedom of the market and the freedom of expression.

    It is as if we pretend that moral constraint is an external compulsive force that can simply be taken for 

granted, while freedom is made out to be merely a matter of escaping this compulsion to the greatest 

possible extent.  The management at Wells Fargo, the chauvinists in Hollywood and Paddock were all 

determined to get away with as much as they could get away with. And this logic pervades our culture, 

because the cliched assertion that “the rules are there to be broken” is taken literally by practically 

everyone, and because its relentless implementation is justified as the only route to material progress and 

justice.  We all seem to be unquestioningly committed, these days, to maintaining the opportunity for 

anyone and everyone to do anything and everything that must be done to “win”.

 

This notion of maximization constitutes the sort of corporate moral failure that Batuman describes. It 

amounts to the transfer of the obligation that every individual has to practice self-legislation onto others. 

Since freedom bestows the capacity to do wrong as well as right (just as the internet can be used to plan a 

family vacation or a massacre), an internal and self-imposed restraint is a necessary complement to liberty. 

 And the social obligation to facilitate the development of individual conscience cannot be dispensed with 

because no-one can serve as the conscience of another, while the imposition of order from without is a 

shabby, materialistic substitute for real responsibility. Together, we give form and meaning to our world 

largely by honoring the limits that both constrain us and give scope to that which we value. But this 

commitment to the constantly renewed maximization of our personal capacity pushes those limits so far 

that, rather than being affirmed, legitimate value, genuine love and truth itself are crowded out altogether 

or compressed and distorted into horrifying inversions and perversions. We devalue prosperity itself as we 

secure our own at the expense of the material well-being of others. We degrade consciousness as we 

exploit the possibility that one can overload and occupy the attention of many. And we diminish and deny 

the value of human life and spirit as we insist that there is no value but more and ever more. Simply put, 

our unqualified, unyielding embrace of unconstrained maximization creates the conditions that allow 

individuals like Paddock to give bloody expression to that commitment. 

 

Our pathetic response to the murders of the school children in Newtown, Connecticut, constitutes one of 

the most shameful manifestations of this failure. In the wake of that horrific day, politically mature citizens 

would have been united in a call for a ban on the weapon used in that attack, at the very least. They would 

have known that such an expression and reaffirmation of the sense of personal responsibility by all citizens 

was precisely what was needed. Each individual would have, thereby, renewed his or her moral obligation 

to their fellow citizens by acknowledging them as the source of individual rights, and even reasonable and 

legitimate guns owners would have been reassured. Most importantly, the spirit of democracy would have 

been renewed as we, the people, directed our representatives and other political leaders to do what was right. 

What actually occurred, as we all know, was a disgusting scramble to acquire that weapon in the name of 

the “right” of every individual to be in the possession of the greatest possible capacity for deadliness. We 

chose to ratchet up the tension in our country with this abdication of responsibility, even to the extent of 

denying the reality of that day, in order to cultivate a palpable and external sense of ethical necessity, a 

sense of unmitigated and absolute conflict with someone or something else. We chose to silence our 

conscience, as we had consistently done regarding moments of irresponsibility in our economic and 

aesthetic lives, so that we could give political expression to the absolutist concept of maximization that 

promises to deliver a substantial reality. That reality, however, has turned out to be an ever more intensely 

palpable terror. Yet we persist in our commitment to maximization and the passive acceptance of its 

dictates in every facet of our lives, so that we can pretend that we are experiencing a reality that we are not 

responsible for and can do nothing about, even as it demands the barbaric sacrifice of our children. 

 

Postscript:

As this piece was being finished, the first reports of the shooting in Parkland, Florida, were just being 

broadcast.  Below are excerpts from the news that confirm the increasing depth of our moral failure.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43066226

Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted that the shooting was "designed & executed to maximize loss of 

life". … But he said that it was too soon to debate whether tighter gun laws could have stopped it.  "You 

should know the facts of that incident before you run out and prescribe some law that you claim could 

have prevented it," he told Fox News.

http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-43066528

Earlier, it was revealed that a comment on YouTube - apparently from Mr Cruz - saying "I'm going to be 

a professional school shooter" had been reported to the FBI tip hotline.

Lanny James, 77, has a place five miles away in Margate. He comes here for the sun; today, the 

temperature is 25C by 9.30am.  He was playing golf when he heard the news. "I just love South Florida,"

 he says. "This is supposed to be paradise." Lanny, a semi-retired broadcaster, has 10 guns and has hunted 

since the 1960s.  "I just don’t know what the answer is," he says. "And there may not be one."