The Horror Dimension of Today’s America

 

Revisiting Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man” in 2020 was not final, and there I sowed the seeds of this recent take, the full arc of 60 years since the publication date of the book in 1964. As I was concluding in 2020, homo digitalis is a split self.

"His divorce is more and more from the real world into a virtual world. He has a real identity and a virtual one or multiple virtual ones on social platforms and the internet. This split adds new dimensions to alienation of consumerism alone."

What I am following now is to what extent homo digitalis both product and victim of this new medium deteriorates even further into desensitization and dehumanization and results in a manufacturer of horror, real and/or virtual.

Let’s start by looking at the profile of the American youth, raised in a country with the Second Amendment to the Constitution, about the right to bear arms, a law of the land old a few hundreds years, a cult of the tough guy, the American cowboy first a reality for several hundreds years then glorified by Hollywood Western movies and turned into a myth. Also a culture of individualism elevated to the rank of art, the famous American individualism. Add to these ingredients, the culture of fame, namely the democratization of fame in America by the well-known mantra of “15 minutes of fame”,  and the more recent video games culture, all built silently into one pathology and we had the first school massacre of 1999, the Columbine tragedy, which became the template in the digital age for school shootings not only in America but in the world at large, Europe, Brazil.

This template found fertile ground in a culture that had, by the turn of the century, already begun celebrating a specific style of aggression under a new name. The neoliberal ethos that reshaped American business from the 1980s onward prized risk-taking as virtue, and canonized the "disruptor" — the individual bold enough to break existing structures, defy incumbents, and profit from the wreckage — as its highest social type. 

This is not merely an ambient cultural mood but an explicit, published doctrine. Andy Kessler's business bestseller Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs, 2012,  makes the ethos literal in its title, instructing entrepreneurs to eliminate 'inefficient' jobs in the name of wealth creation, and insisting — in terms that reach well past the boardroom — that 'today, we're all entrepreneurs,' that risk-taking is 'the name of the game.' What began as a rule for business strategy becomes, in this framing, a general modus operandi: aggression recast as virtue, ruthlessness as the price of progress, applicable to anyone, not merely the entrepreneur.

This vocabulary did not stay contained in venture capital and Silicon Valley mythology; it became ambient, aspirational, a general grammar for what counted as admirable boldness in American life. The school shooter, monstrously, enacts this metaphor literally: he, too, disrupts, breaks what was stable, defies the rules that bind everyone else, and is rewarded, as the disruptor is, with attention and a kind of terrible capital — fame.

What actually happened in America after Columbine is that social platforms, the internet, the digital media amplified the violent occurrence of these school shootings. It became epidemic.

Speaking of the psyche of American individuals one can notice that the virtual use and abuse of digital violence spills into real life, it creates numbness and blurs the fame/infamy distinction, the virtual world becomes a huge theater and the individual is by now an actor, an agent of horror who craves attention and fans.

American exceptionalism can be brought into discussion here. While at the civilization level exceptionalism still works today speaking of America, at the individual level the situation has changed. The same concept stands in a blurred territory lately.  That is from exceptionalism as a merit in 18th, 19th  century to exceptionalism as its Nemesis today.

School shootings, not a infrecuent phenomenon in America but a recurring one, reflect not only the proliferation of firearms available in homes of law-abiding citizens, but the answer of youngsters in search of identity, their failure of self-expression in non-violent ways, their confusion between the real and virtual,  sometimes the fascination with the spectacle of enacting killings. What actually happened in two decades is the erosion of the emotional life of the young individual, that numbness that leads to desensitization.

Netflix culture in the past decades exported the spectacle, the violence, the horror, which virtually acquire apocalyptic proportions. Children are fed video games from an early age. Schools struggle to keep arms away from students. From a culture of horror consumption America quickly moved to a culture of manufacturing horror.

This sets apart a new dimension of the 21 century American individual, as often being a dehumanized subject capable of spreading hate, death, catastrophe.

The horror dimension of today's America is part of a larger picture: the neoliberal ideology of risk-taking that has spun, over four decades, from economics and business into everyday life, canonizing the disruptor. In this climate, the American dream, opportunity, and a bright future have become casualties

What was Marcuse’s 20th century alienation through consumption of goods is today desensitization and finally, dehumanization through consumption and manufacturing of horror. The victim of horror becomes an agent, an actor of horrifying scenarios. The fans and followers witness his act, react on platforms, built a legacy, copycat the scenario, transplant it to other continents.

This new dimension of the 21 century American individual tells us it’s time to sound the alarm about America’s failure to nurture its young anymore. This is a structural fault in the emotional build of the individual,  the child, the adolescent, one of the most vulnerable members of a society.

The Nemesis I was mentioning earlier is here a replay of an America as Medea, the mother who murders her children, the fruit of her love. America's exceptionalism does claim to love and nurture its young (the American Dream, opportunity, the promise of the future) while its own structural logic consumes them.

Elena Malec, California, Aug. 2026