On January 7 in Minneapolis, a 37-year-old mother named Renee Nicole Good was executed in broad daylight by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent named Jonathan Ross. Her children, who had already lost their father, were orphaned when Ross fired three rounds into Good’s SUV and body. In the five days since her killing, I am not sure what has disturbed me more: the footage itself, which from every angle shows an unjust execution, or the hordes of sociopaths celebrating it online.
To get this out of the way early: sociopathy is not a diagnosis. It is not a psychological or mental health condition. It is a construct, a term or concept we use to identify people who exhibit traits like callousness, difficulty experiencing healthy emotions, and a lack of empathy. While these traits can result from anything from a traumatic brain injury to actual psychological conditions, it has become increasingly clear that some combination of political tribalism, noxious social media algorithms, and participation in certain online echo-chambers is also capable of creating sociopaths – and is currently doing so at a rapid clip.
As I watched the internet react to the footage of Renee Nicole Good’s murder at the hands of ICE, I was struck not only by conservatives’ ability to see whatever they wanted to see in the footage (which I suspect is another cognitive impact of MAGA conservatism), but also by the willingness of a great many of them to dance in her blood. To gleefully mock her orphaned children. To gloat about her widowed wife. While those on the left and in the center almost uniformly condemned the murder, most of those on the right declared that she deserved it, not even bothering to pretend that it was regrettable but necessary. And I was struck, not for the first time, by the unavoidable realization that the gap between these reactions is deeper than politics.
The reaction of those on the left and the center was not particularly political: it was the reaction one would expect from any human beings who have just witnessed a mother executed in cold blood. Shock. Horror. The reaction by most on the right, while inextricably linked to the political movement which has turned them into the kinds of warped and twisted creatures who would celebrate a woman’s murder, was also reflective of something deeper: a dark chasm where their souls used to be.
I have seen others in my social media feeds wrestle to arrive at this same conclusion. I have watched them desperately try to convince friends or parents or aunts, uncles, and cousins that Renee Good did not deserve three bullets to the face; that, regardless of how one feels about immigration enforcement or the Trump administration, murdering a woman in the middle of the street in broad daylight should be frowned upon. And I have watched them fail over and over – not through any fault of their own or any weakness in their argument, but because their gleeful, blood-drenched interlocutors have so thoroughly separated themselves from humanity that they have rendered themselves incapable of being convinced to care. Because they are sociopaths.
And what sociopaths need – what we need as a society to wrestle our institutions, our politics, and our personal lives back from the grips of sociopaths – is not convincing. What they need are consequences.
Society has changed before. We no longer hold witch trials, women have the rights to vote and own property, and most of us go our entire lives without engaging the racial bigotries our grandparents likely employed every day. How exactly society changes, though, has been a matter of much debate, and the subject of many separate theories, from Hegelian dialectic, to Marxist dialectical materialism, to the Kuhnian model first laid out in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Whatever model of social change you embrace, though, it involves conflict: between the way things are, and the way things are going to be. Which side wins? The side which can attain the critical mass necessary to define normalcy, and institute social consequences for those who deviate from it.
That’s how norms become norms.
Since Donald Trump was first elected, the political chattering class has been concerned about norms. They have wrung their hands about the Department of Justice’s prosecutorial independence, or about the norms of international law which were supposed to prevent things like the unilateral kidnapping of a sovereign nation’s leader. In all of their pearl-clutching, though, they have overlooked the erosion of the norms that matter most.
Society is not held together by the DOJ’s independence or the fragile bonds of international law. Society is held together by the norms dictating our relationships to one another. Norms like lying is bad, or racism is bad, or we should treat each other with kindness. While Donald Trump remains a present threat to the norms occupying the minds of commentators on the Sunday shows, his time in power has already demolished those more fundamental norms. That’s not to say it’s entirely his fault, though: since Barry Goldwater burst onto the national stage seven decades ago, a succession of demagogues have encouraged conservatives towards sociopathy. Trump was simply the final step: the open embrace of what had only been tacitly accepted until then.
Put more simply, American society is not broken because Donald Trump is president. Donald Trump is president because American society is broken. But the chicken and the egg don’t matter nearly as much as how we are going to cook them.
If Trump’s ten years in the center of the national spotlight have proven anything, it’s that no top-down solution to our norms crisis is coming. Lying is fine, the golden rule is dead, and our leaders are either incapable of or uninterested in reestablishing and reinforcing those fundamental norms of society. But that does not mean that we have to be. A bottom-up solution is available.
Does your dad keep commenting on your posts, saying Renee Good deserved to die? Does your aunt keep telling you that Renee Good should have just complied with orders and that, really, she brought it upon herself? These people are sociopaths, and you are not required to engage with them. In fact, you are not required to have any sort of relationship with them.
Does the older generation want to spend time with their grandkids? Great – but why would I expose a child to someone who gleefully celebrates an innocent mother’s murder? Why would I be friends with someone who demonstrably lacks the capacity for empathy? Why would I be in community with someone who laughed at children being orphaned?
I wouldn’t, and you don’t have to be either.
You do not have to cut off your family. You are welcome to engage in debates with sociopaths – but you are not required to. You have power in your relationship dynamics, and you are allowed to use it.
Our current societal norms – or the absence thereof – benefit the sociopaths. As the reaction to Renee Good’s murder showed, we live in an era in which millions of troglodytes feel no compunction about publicly declaring their glee over a woman’s murder; in which they feel that they have a right to castigate those who care about their fellow man; in which they feel like they are anything but aberrations. In a better society, one with better norms, that behavior would result in isolation, repulsion, and outcast. It would result in the conditions which would force many of today’s proud sociopaths to wonder if it was all worth it; if their allegiance to Donald Trump and a sadistic, antisocial movement was worth a lifetime of loneliness and resentment; if it was worth the consequences.
That better society will not create itself. We have to create it, and the road to that future does not start at the ballot box. It does not run through D.C. or our politicians. It starts with us. It starts at the dinner table, or in the groupchat, or in the replies section. It starts when we aggressively reassert the fundamental norms of human interaction, and enforce the consequences of violation – losing respect, or access, or conversation, or relationship. It starts not with “well, actually,” but with “fuck off.”
And it continues from there.
