Weekly Essay
There are a number of milestones in a person’s life that mark the shift into a new worldview, an initiation into some deeper layer of reality — a peek behind the curtains.
Once known, such insights can never be unknown, and they begin to explain phenomena which previously seemed arbitrary. Remote incidents turn out to be intimately related. What seemed a mere twist of fate acquires a meaning you had never suspected.
It is like discovering a new color: one that was always there but to which you were blind. And the new world which you discover is not always a pleasant or appealing one. You find the reality you took for granted has all sorts of dark threats lurking around hidden corners, or ambiguous byroads outside the light of your well-traveled paths.
The first time you discover that your parents are only human, not the infallible authorities you thought they were, is one such paradigm shift. The first time you discover that your trusted government or media has lied to you, deliberately, towards their own nefarious ends, is another such moment.
But the one critical unveiling that I will cover today has a special significance. It is special because I believe that most modern people, even people well into their old age, have never actually arrived at this insight. They have not yet pulled back this final curtain to the backstage.
And like the child who still believes his parents are infallible, or the hapless citizen who still trusts every word of his news channel of choice, those who have not yet made this realization are easy prey to threats they do not even suspect or understand.
That realization is the existence of absolute evil.
When I say ‘absolute,’ I mean the opposite of relative. No one doubts the existence of relative evil. Relative evil means that something perceived as good from one point of view can turn out to be bad from another point of view.
Relative evil often emerges out of a clash of interests: one person’s interests are one way, another person’s interests are the other way, and depending on how strongly each person holds to their own interests, they may perceive the other person as evil — an outsider, a trouble-maker, a bad actor.
No one denies that relative evil works in such a way. We often have to remind ourselves that the person we are maligned by is not actually evil but merely has his or her own understanding of the good, his or her own interests to pursue, and that fact can ease our antagonism somewhat.
This is not what I am talking about. When I say ‘absolute’ evil, I mean evil that from every conceivable perspective would be considered evil. I mean an evil that every conceivable interest would see as an adversary, because its antagonism is so fundamental, so deep, it undermines the possibility of any interest by any human being or any living thing.
I mean that evil, true evil, has a foundation beyond our relative human perspectives. It has a nature, even an independent existence. It is an active force, or an entity, or an energy, as real as any physical force or energy, though it manifests in the human world of actions, thoughts, behaviors, mindsets, personalities, sometimes entire cultures or societies.
It is that force which contradicts or conflicts with every conceivable interest or purpose. It is self-undermining, self-devouring, self-destroying, and wishes to destroy everything else with it. It is the veritable logic of undoing and unmaking, a rebellion against reality itself. If anything is an enemy to all things, absolute evil fits the bill.
The moral awakening I am describing happens when we realize that absolute evil is not a fairy tale. The discovery of absolute evil, it turns out, has explanatory power. The understanding that there exists a force, an energy, a wavelength, a perspective, a mindset, a mode of being — whatever you want to call it — whose sole interest is to actively undermine all other interests, all things good, all things living, all of reality itself, can explain phenomena that would otherwise make no sense.
We tell ourselves stories to explain the worst atrocities of human history. It is far easier to believe they were necessary somehow — that the people doing them either didn’t know any better, and were ignorant, or that they had good intentions that were simply miscarried. In any case, they had some good reason to occur.
But the true terror of these events begins to suggest itself, the true crawling of the skin and chilling of the blood, when we stop proceeding from these rationalizations, these easy cause-effect explanations, and ask ourselves this: what if they didn’t have to happen? What if there was no good reason at all?
What if there was no rational account for these horrible events, these inconceivable scales of human suffering inflicted in the name of political causes or religious extremism or scientific expertise? What if the evil — the pain, the suffering, the misery, the torture, the death, the assault on life and everything sacred — , what if that in itself was the true purpose and motive behind these events?
What if the whole model of rational actors pursuing their own interests, in a calculated and efficient way, ignores this underbelly of the human psyche … this entirely irrational intention, not to pursue one’s own interests or gain, not to benefit oneself, but merely to harm — to harm for the sake of harming?
Don’t we all relate to this desire to some degree, in our more honest moments, and if we consult our own hearts?
Is it always the pursuit of self-interest we are after when we deny someone else’s interests, or is there also some added spice in the act, some subtler pleasure in our thwarting of another person’s desires and dreams?
Is it always the restoration of justice we are after when we seek vengeance after being hurt or slighted, or is there also, in our complex mesh of motives, a happy excuse to punish, to hurt, for its own sake?
And could it not be conceivable that this desire to hurt, independent of other related interests, could be extracted, encouraged, enhanced, could extend further than its required proportion with our other interests, and, at its extremes, could become an entire motive unto itself?
And would this not be exactly the absolute evil I described — not an evil relative to other competing interests, but an evil all on its own, a malign intelligence, which, if contemplated in a moment of clarity, would make anyone stand back in horror if only they faced it in themselves, for the first time, in full?
How else to explain the most depraved acts, those sadistic excesses so exceeding any rational reason, which are the empirical facts of human history and human behavior? Naïve political theories which see human history as a struggle for material resources could never hope to go deep enough to account for the needless and sadistic infliction of pain and humiliation — no material gain could be had from such acts. In fact, they are often an extravagant expenditure by the people inflicting them.
So why do people do them, and so often, and in such specific conditions, such specific political or cultural climates? Could it be that, when this desire to hurt goes unchecked, unrecognized, when our culture ceases to acknowledge this unconscious evil in our hearts, it can possess us, swallow us whole without us knowing, all while pretending to be for the best of intentions, the most pristine political utopias, the most humanitarian care for our fellow men … if only we could get rid of these nasty vermin that stand in the way?
Perhaps it is not the great cause, after all, but the vermin and their extermination which actually preoccupy us. Perhaps the exterminations were not the means to an end, but an end in themselves, and the proposed reason for our actions was merely a cover for the true reason: the satisfaction of our latent appetite for harm, for destruction and depravity, for cursing and crushing and condemning.
I do not hope to convince you over the span of this short essay that absolute evil is real. Only real encounters with true evil could hope to do that. The rest is idle speculation. But digging into the actual evidence, drudging up the famished and tortured ghosts of the past, peering into the lives of people so sadistic, they can barely be called human, is not the kind of science most people are ready to take up.
So, due to these barriers, it remains the case that most people, especially people not brought up by religious and moral teachings, have no language and no concept for absolute evil. They naively believe we are all motivated by basically reasonable things.
Of course, when you show them the evidence, when you dig into the specific cases of the serial killers and sociopaths, and describe in true and gory detail the acts perpetrated by ‘reasonable beings,’ they begin to squirm. Their entire worldview begins to bend at the seams. No language, no concept, like a missing color, can account for these excesses in a rational world, a world of free agents pursuing material goods.
‘And why be so morbid, anyway?’ they might say. ‘Why focus on all this darkness? Let’s get on with life.’ It is as if they, in their discomfort, blame us for these crimes and atrocities, when all we are doing is describing what actually happened, and what the full range of the human psyche — their psyche — is capable of.
They cannot face it. And I do not blame them. Absolute evil is too much to contemplate. But face it we must, if we are to understand human nature and our condition as a whole.
Below are excerpts from the manifestoes and final statements of a number of school shooters. You will begin to see a pattern. That pattern is the pattern of evil, for lack of a better word. It is the malign intention, independent and wholly self-contained, to destroy life for the sake of it, possessing the person at the expense of their own self-interest.
Greater causes may be offered up at times — some small attempt at justification may be suggested. But the pattern is by and large the same, which shows that the justifications are irrelevant. The one common thread is a rebellion against reality itself: a generalized logic of destruction.
Such a logic is indiscriminate, taking on a life of its own. It comes over the person as a parasite takes over a host, leading them to commit acts that defy anything that could be described as a personal motive. More than personal, it is suprapersonal. And it is a logic which any of us might partake in, more than we’d like to admit.
“I will have my revenge against humanity,” 22-year-old Elliot Rodger promised in a video uploaded to YouTube in 2014, shortly before he walked into a UC Santa Barbara sorority house and slaughtered six people before killing himself.
“I’m 22 years old and still a virgin,” Rodger complained. “I’ve had to rot in loneliness. It’s not fair.” His massacre, he said, was something the world deserved “just for the crime of living a better life than me.”
For all his complaining, though, Rodger didn’t exactly have a low self-esteem. He called himself “the perfect guy” and “the supreme gentleman,” promising that after he’d killed, they would see that he was “the true alpha male.” He had a delusion that he was “a god” compared to the rest of humanity, and after the massacre, he believed, the world would see him the way he saw himself.
His agony didn’t just come from self-hatred. He had delusions of grandeur, and when the world didn’t reciprocate his narcissism, he saw it as their fault, not his.
…
“If I cannot have it,” Rodger warned, “I will do everything I can to destroy it.”
“Someone’s bound to say, ‘What were they thinking?’ ” Eric Harris wrote in his journal, days before he and his friend Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School and killed 13 people. “This is what I’m thinking. I have a goal to destroy as much as possible.”
Harris saw himself as an enlightened person because he saw the irrelevance of life. “People will say things like, ‘Oh, it was so tragic,’” he predicted. “You think that’s a bad thing? Just because your mommy and daddy told you blood and violence is bad, you think it’s a f — ing law of nature?”
He saw his massacre as an act of natural selection. “Everyone should be put to a test,” he wrote, “see who can survive in an environment using only smarts and military skills.” Those who didn’t question conventional values, he felt, were “unfit for anything at all. Especially life.”
His journals, the FBI believes, reveal a “messianic-grade superiority complex.” He saw himself as above humanity, like an angel of death sent to decide who deserved to live and die.
Harris deemed few worthy to live. “The majority of the audience won’t even understand my motives,” he wrote. “They’ll say, ‘Ah, he’s crazy, he’s insane, oh well, I wonder if the Bulls won.’”
“I don’t like Mondays.”
That was the only explanation 16-year-old Brenda Spencer gave. In 1979, she set up a rifle in her San Diego home and opened fire on the elementary school across the street, wounding eight children and an officer and killing two adults. When a reporter asked why, though, all she said was that she didn’t like Mondays and that she was bored. “This livens up the day.”
The callousness and total lack of remorse in her answer made the phrase a cultural phenomenon, and what little else she said during the attack didn’t help anyone understand. When she surrendered to police, she told them that shooting children was “like shooting ducks on a pond” and that she “liked to watch them squirm after they were hit.”
“I needed to do this,” Jaylen Fryberg wrote in 2014 in his final text message to his family. Moments later, he would walk into his Marysville, Washington, school, kill four of his classmates, and commit suicide.
In his final message, he told his parents that he loved them but that he “wasn’t happy.” To him, his massacre was nothing more than a trip to the other side of existence. He just wanted to make sure his friends were there with him. He murdered four people and injured one more purely because, in his words, “I didn’t want to go alone.”
“I always knew you were going to shoot up the school,” Sam Strahan, one of Caleb Sharpe’s classmates, said in 2017 when he saw 15-year-old Sharpe walk into Freeman High School in Rockford, Washington, with a semiautomatic rifle. It was the last thing Strahan would say before Sharpe murdered him and injured three other students.
…
Some of the things Sharpe wrote in his notebooks before the massacre reveal the depths of his madness. Like Dylan Klebold, he wrote some of his notes as if he were another entity living in a young boy’s body.
“I am the one who deserved to live, but I still need Caleb until I kill all those . . . kids,” Caleb wrote, apparently imagining he was possessed by something else. “Then Caleb will finally die while I live on.”
(Excerpts are taken from “School Shooters on Why They Did It,” listverse.com)
If these murderers wanted nothing more than an end to their suffering, they would not be murderers but suicides. If all they wanted was the restoration of justice, these would have been targeted murders, not the indiscriminate killing of innocents. In their acts, there is an excess that cannot be explained by typical moral reasoning.
Whatever their rhetoric, what they actually did reveals more about their motives than anything they said. And what they did was partake in a general logic of destruction: not self-destruction, but destruction at large. One might imagine that if they had the button to a nuclear bomb, they would press it. It was only their personal arsenal that limited them from achieving the true scale of destruction they were after.
By definition, such acts exceed self-interest. There is no self, after all, once you’re dead. Still, you might want to psychologize these killers’ motives, in one last bid to avoid the idea of a moral force beyond the human mind. You might say, for instance, that it was the romance of it all that attracted them to the act. They imagined the public outcry, the celebrity, the mythic status they would gain, even if they would not be alive to see any of it.
But then one must account for why such a thing would have any romance to begin with — otherwise it is no explanation at all. What could be the attraction to such a deluded fantasy? How could such a fantasy, bizarre and highly narrow as it is, become a motive so powerful it trumps the fulfillment of all other fantasies — takes priority over one’s whole life, in fact, and several other lives with it? What could be the real motive behind such a motive?
At its furthest reaches, the fantasy could not be explained by recourse to personal gain or the settling of a score. The fantasy could only be explained by the fantastical, that is, the supernatural and metaphysical: it is not the public outcry but the world’s outcry, an injury not to individuals but to the entirety of existence, which drove them to a general logic of destruction. An attack on the innocent is always an attack on reality in its most general sense, an attack explained only by a malevolence that is not of the mundane world of man.
In closing, I would like to add some caveats — not to the idea of absolute evil, but to its main players in our world. I do not believe that all of these killers were lone actors. Many high-profile school shooters have the hands of government agencies all over them. A brief history might do some good.
In the MKUltra project, developed by the CIA in the 50s and 60s, the government became interested in technologies, pharmaceutical and psychedelic, to control the human mind. Their method was to brainwash a subject, wiping their mind of all memories and sense of self, and implant there whatever one liked. The applications were obvious: the creation of a Manchurian Candidate, a sleeper agent who could slip into society and with the appropriate trigger assassinate or sabotage with no understanding of what they did or who they served. This lack of tracing was the essential point.
It was discovered that through the application of psychological torture, especially sexual abuse in early childhood, the subject’s brain becomes wide-open to programming. The compartmentalization of the mind necessary to create a mind-controlled killer was achieved by fracturing it into multiple disassociated identities through the deliberate application of traumatic experiences, during which the brain sections off the traumatic event as a survival mechanism, entering into a highly suggestible trance.
Through a totalizing program of clinical-grade trauma, the subject would be betrayed by trusted authority figures, placed in an utterly powerless position, and be subject to an unending regimen of drug-addled disorientation, physical and sexual abuse, and excruciating electrode shocks — to list only some of the horrors. Cathy O’Brien, Rosanne Barr, and survivors of these programs across the US and Canada have spoken and written extensively about these experiments — many of them have successfully sued the government for hush money.
Earlier I implied that torture might be its own motive. The clean and clinical laboratories of science, sponsored by mild-mannered statesmen in their smoothly ironed suits and ties, are no exception to the rule. The purpose of these programs was not a specific assassination, a specific political plot. It was the potential for all assassinations, all political plots, the breaking down of all limits on power made possible by the breaking down of the human soul.
What couldn’t be possible after that? What limits could there be to further political schemes, once that line is crossed? The point wasn’t any destination beyond that line but the mere crossing of it. It was the enabling factor of condoning an act that would make any normal person sick to their stomach — an act which overwhelms the conscience, destroys any last vestiges of shame, and opens all doors to unrestrained power and possibility.
For all the pretensions to utility and instrumentality, all the Machiavellian motives and Realpolitik rhetoric, it was not any practical goal which these government agencies pursued through their scientific torture and systematic sadism. It was something far simpler: fascination. A playing with this shiny new toy of theirs — the human mind, broken and subjected, exposed and helpless to their touch.
And so, what do these secret government programs have to do with school shootings? For starters, many of the most high-profile mass murderers, shooters, and serial killers were in and out of CIA-sponsored mental hospitals. Many were subject to a daily cocktail of prescribed psychoactive drugs. Many seemed to evade any jailtime or any roadblocks to the acquisition of firearms despite a storied criminal record and a litany of mental illnesses. And the motive — attacks on the 2nd Amendment and the right for citizens to bear arms — becomes abundantly clear in the news coverage following these events.
I cannot treat these subjects at length here. Suffice it to say, the people in power are not above inflicting mass casualties among their own citizens to push an agenda. Why would they be, after they had proven to themselves they could scientifically rape the human soul itself? As with any blind faith in authority, be it one’s parents, one’s government, or one’s favorite news outlet, much of life’s realities will pass us by if we take the gleamy surface of authority for the true reality underneath.
But by far the greatest veil cast over our eyes is our innocent faith in general human reasonableness and common sense. This faith that all persons are ultimately reasonable in their intentions entails the belief that evil, after all, is relative. Good, by extension, is relative, too.
Everything is motivated by more real and more practical causes, we are told — a rational calculation, a clear cause-effect line, a neutral pursuit of greater interest. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are mere primitive categories for the ignorant masses, they say: we know better. The destruction, murder, devastation, torture and humiliation are actually good for you, if only you had our special insight, good for you in the ‘long run’ — the long run straight to Hell.
As long as we deny the existence of absolute evil, we fall prey to these pretty arguments.
END.
