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The Writing on the Screen: A General Semantics Reading of Cho Seung-Hui's Breakdown By Camilla Benolirao Griggers, Ph.D. On April 16th, 2007, the now infamous Seung-Hui Cho went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech University killing 27 students and 5 teachers and wounding 15 others before shooting himself (Kleinfield, 2007). Immediately the chatter began that Cho may have played video games. The self-made video he mailed to NBC that was subsequently broadcast to the nation certainly suggested a correlation. The video featured Cho dressed as his avatar Ax Ismail, brandishing multiple weapons and posturing to the camera like a violent 3D-game hero in a first-person shooter game. By the end of the week the suspicions were confirmed. The New York Times reported that his parents had hoped when he was accepted to Virginia Tech that he would no longer retreat to playing video games alone the way he did at home (Kleinfield). Now let's be clear about the meaning of the signs we are interpreting here. Many people play violent shooter video games and do not go on a shooting spree in real life, firing 175 rounds in 10-15 minutes, as Cho did. They may shoot digital avatars on a screen, but not real people in real life. The main issue that concerns us from a semantic perspective is that Cho reversed the order; he played out violent game-like imaginings in reality. Three days after Cho's murderous rampage, a struggling student of mine at California State University Channel Islands posted on her Facebook webpage a statement that said she was "going on a . school shooting spree! Watch out kiddies, better hide under that desk!" By afternoon, she was arrested on campus and taken to the county jail where she was charged with making a criminal threat (Abdollah, 2007). In the case of Cho's shooting spree in which he identifies with his violent avatar Ax Ismail, and in the case of my student's reckless speech act on her webpage in which she verbally identifies with Cho's shooting spree, we see a breakdown of semantics that, when expressed through the body in what we might call "real world" space-time, i.e., when somaticized, has devastating effects. In these two examples, we recognize what Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics, called "undesirable human semantic afflictions" (2005). One of these afflictions, or what we more commonly today call breakdowns, is characterized by abstract cognitions that are not grounded in coherent emotional and somatic semantics. The body, mind, and emotions cannot be separated. Another kind of breakdown is characterized by the inability to properly evaluate relations that are asymmetrical (the majority of relations in the natural world are asymmetrical). An asymmetrical semantic relation is demonstrated in the following example given by Korzybski: "If a leaf appears green to me, I certainly do not 'appear green' to the leaf!" Such a statement shows what is at stake in equating values of signs that cannot be logically equated. On a psychological level, this process is known as 'identification'. If we identify sign values as if they were symmetrical when they are not, we quickly find ourselves in a dimension of semantics that is false to facts, illogical, and potentially delusional. Consider, for example, this delusional logic: "If I kill digital avatars on a computer screen I 'win'; if I kill people in a classroom I 'win'." Certainly Cho did not appear 'a winner' to any of his victims on that fateful day, nor to the few survivors of the ordeal, nor to the families of the victims, nor to Cho's own shocked family. For the most part, people across the country who watched in horror as the story unfolded on the television, in newspapers, and on the internet also did not recognize Cho as a winner. However, some people, like my student who was arrested and numerous others involved in similar incidents across the nation in the week following the event, identified in some way, just as Cho himself identified with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who murdered their teachers and classmates at Columbine High School eight years prior (Kleinfield, 2007). It is frighteningly easy for an ungrounded mind to make a mis-cognition on a purely cognitive semantic plane. It's as easy as equating a shooter game and a shooting spree. The potential damage of illogical or delusional semantic evaluations to the evolution of our species is so great that we all need to be extremely conscious about what kind of logic we are teaching to children and young people. We also have to pay attention to sequencing in their semantic/somatic development. Emotional development comes first in the natural order. If you reverse the natural order, you create dysfunction, maladaption, and possible pathology. In addition, when analyzing what kind of logic we are teaching, we have to take into consideration the semantic aspects traditionally ignored by Science: the affective and somatic aspects. These include somatic patterning, emotional development, and limbic resonance. Limbic resonance refers to the emotional bond between individuals in a group that characterizes mammalian social evolution. On the biophysical plane of our all too human reality, what linguists call structure (order, sequence and relation) signifies as much as content. In fact, structure is content. While adults in our culture tend to forget that fact, with children before the age of fourteen, nothing could be more obvious. Structurally, gaming has meaning, beyond whatever content fills its surface screen. Because of our biophysiology, one meaning is that the player is sitting alone for long periods of time without human emotional contact and bonding, developing a high threshold for visual stimulation and perhaps, depending on the kinds of games played, a high threshold for violent images, along with a compulsive repetition attachment. Let's face it, repetition is how we learn. Sharon Begley, co-author with Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz of The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (2002), describes the biophysical imprint of somatic repetition on the bodymind this way: The brain is dynamic, and the life we lead leaves its mark in the complex circuitry of the brain: footprints of the experiences we have had, the thoughts we have thought, the actions we have taken. The brain allocates neural real estate depending on what we use most: the thumb of a video game addict, the index finger of a Braille reader, the analytic ability of a chess player, the language skills of a linguist This knowledge bears immense implications for age-appropriate use of computer technologies, because all software applications are, by definition, high order abstractions quite distinctly different from, for example, swimming with a sea otter off the California coast-something none of us may be able to do in the 'real world' if we continue to pollute the ocean to the point that this endangered species can no longer survive. By the same token, strategy games of war craft are quite distinctly different from actually occupying a foreign country. Clearly, Cho is not the only one among us who has had difficulty cognizing his relation to the real world. Our collective evolution depends on how each of us cognizes that relation. Parents should monitor children for appropriate use of games, and game designers should be aware of the somatic and emotional semantics their games could encourage, not only in players with undeveloped or dysfunctional emotions, but in all players. The situation in regard to electronic games can be summed up in this way: violent video games do not necessarily cause players to be violent; however, the industry may well be creating games for which some people would benefit from a psychiatric evaluation before being allowed to play. Likewise, universities do not necessarily cause students to be alienated; however, they may create social environments that fail to provide students adequate safety nets much less coherent programs to help them integrate abstract cognitive skills with emotional intelligence in the body. The hard truth is that emotional and somatic development must always precede more abstract cognitions. Why? Because "for better or worse, we happen to live in a four-dimensional world, where 'space' and 'time' cannot be divided" (Korzybski, 2005). And we live in that world as whole organisms, whole beings, with nervous systems that ambulate through space-time processing ordered chains of signs and meanings produced by the impulses of external stimuli. Order and relation and repetition are fundamental to our experience and function in the world. For this reason, old three-dimensional analogies and elementalist thinking that separate space and time and break the whole being into separate elements defy the facts of actual function in the natural world. Consider the old Cartesian logic embedded in this absurd question: Was it Cho's body or his mind that became a criminal sociopath on the day he longed to be a hero? The question is itself insane. Why do we even bother to ask then, if the university's responsibility is to the embodied emotions or minds of its students? Parents, educators and electronic game designers need to look at the whole picture, and the whole person, to evaluate what is appropriate use of computer technologies and what is an appropriate educational response to a student's speech, writing, and behavior. If game designers and parents should consider the bigger picture, so educators should finally see the writing on the screen and take action, before there's more blood on our playgrounds and in our classrooms. It's not enough to educate a mind, even digital technologies need a body, heart and soul to make them make sense. A mind without a heart is a danger to our own evolution. The new field of neurocardiology recognizes that 60-70% of the cells in our hearts are neurons, meaning our heart is a part of our consciousness (Pearce, 2002). The emotions are part of our intelligence. Educators should embrace the bodymind paradigm that launched the wellness industry, and make somatic education courses that balance sensory awareness, emotional expression in the body, and cognition a requirement for all entering freshman at every university campus in the U.S., as well as for children in every elementary school across the country. Seung-Hui Cho needed those courses. All of us do. © Camilla Benolirao Griggers 2007 Works Cited: |
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