A Killer's Choice

Pre-script

I've been sitting on this post for over a month. Sodden with grief, flanked by my overcommitments, moving through clay mud is what I can liken it to.

I am on the brink of much greater production re: Fractal Praxis. I couldn't even mount a dam to this generationally-powered flow if I tried. So I'd better give a damn instead.

It's almost too much at once to move through me, though. A million accumulated signals all vying to be made tangible. And I am in the habit—and the financial circumstance—of keeping them constrained to the sidelines. Even while influential entrepreneurs compete to access my attention, this niggling thought that My own ideas are even stronger than this, and need an audience... persists.

I'm writing essays, conceiving of master production plans, laying groundworks. I know none of this is visible to you, and for that I'm genuinely sorry. It is not my intention to neglect you, dear friend and reader. It is a statement of my capacity, but it is a circumstance that shall not stand for long.

I overthink when it comes time to publish. I ponder all the angles it could be replied to from. But that's a bit self-defeating, isn't it? 'Twould be better to get it out and let it have impacts and talk-balks and fall-outs. And perhaps, accumulate attention. All so scary for someone who's survived by hanging back, playing small.

My sweetheart, whom these matters matter the very most, has not yet formulated his own highly considered, compassionate, and heart/mind-shifting response to all this. Not that he ought to have it figured out whatsoever. The wound is still so raw. The self is still being unmade before it can be re-constituted. And I think a part of me has been hanging back, knowing the impact my words can have. But, he knows this is coming and will read it when he's ready.

Sometimes when big things happen, I see a lot in them. Like a kaleidescope of insight, warping my vision. The 9 essays that poured out of me for the Trumpocalypse essay series were like that... My (unpublished) fantasy?/post-collapse fiction epic called the Discriminators has at times been like that for me. Likewise, when I sat down to write this essay, it was actually four essays. So I've been laboring over it, then avoiding it for weeks, letting it stir in my unconscious. (I suspect a lot of artists are like this.)

But I'm biting the bullet and publishing. It's not perfect. I'm not done with it. But I have so much else to say. And IMHO it's time on the clock of the Earth for more aggressive action in this war of information. I'm here to fight the good fights.

And I need support. If you appreciate anything about this essay or the ensuing Ignorance series, or my 3 years of publishing here on Ghost, I'd appreciate you kicking me a ☕ $8/month subscription to support my continued efforts to bring forth my own odd thought-leadership.

Within hours after the killings, I encountered the headline or snippet that the killer claimed to the cops, "he had to do it." The singular thought that popped into my head was:

"He is wrong."

Truth speaks like a cymbal sometimes. Let it ring.

The killer said, "he had to do it."

He is dead wrong.

He had a great many choices.

He chose to stalk, prey upon, annihilate, and steal. This requires cunning and calculation.

The dragging of the bodies to a different location after shooting them indicates awareness that what he was doing should not be found out.

After his first cowardly kill—from behind—
an elderly lady watching television,
he felt emboldened to take more lives.

All women.
Innocent.
Helpless.
Existing.

Perhaps he felt resentment toward their existing.

Because they were whole and well beings, unto themselves.

Unlike him.

...The killer said, "he had to do it." And he is wrong.

Not only morally wrong. The objective fact is: He had many choices.

As a young white male, he can deflect responsibility, as he's done.
Puerily purport that society made him the way he is.
Made him do what he "had" to do.
He, the hero... actualizing the prophesy of malignance
kneaded deep into his soul
from enculturation.

Whereas, in reality and in truth: it's obvious that this young man has scarcely enough agency to think for himself.

Should he have had the agency, then, to harness weapons of mass destruction (guns) to annihilate others in their full personhood?

You see, it is an inherently infantalized position to claim:
I had no choice. Something else "made" me do it.

And he wants to be both helpless, infantalized—and heroic.
Rising to the moment of what he "had to do."

This.
He is the symptom of the syndrome.
This anecdote is not antidote but proof of the whole sick arrangement.
This is the toxic syndrome, the sick reality—of white supremacist patriarchy in its descent.
Afflicting most of all: disorganized, drifting young white males in America.
They've inherited entitlement—but no longer with many of the insulating, co-morbid factors of unearned privilege. And so they lash out—mad at a world that taught them to be entitled with nothing to possess.

The killer said, "he had to do it."

He is sick with his culture's disorder.

So let's remedy it, at least in our critical understanding.

This is an essay about how a killer is made. We must unmake the conditioning with our minds, so as to hopefully avert current and future similar catastrophes.

This man is clearly mentally ill, with extremely distorted thinking processes.

And yet he made himself a killer. He made himself a killer.

He made it so he is now known to the world as a killer.
So he is defined, referenced, by his choice.
Not a victim of circumstance.
Not a victim of a lack of options.
Not a victim of withdrawn entitlements.
But a product of his choices.
And a product of his reasoning.

Acknowledging who and what his twisted agency led him to be... This is the mere icing—the thinnest of surfaces—on what accountability should be.

But if we were to have true accountability here, we must account for all of the systems that led to this young man being so isolated, being able to obtain guns, being able to make so many bad judgments without intervention. Being able to avoid mental health treatment for what is clearly severe mental illness. And being viewed as harmless by society, when he is everything but. That same society which "made" him a predator... and yet affords him the benefit of the doubt, due to his appearance.

This twisted, circular justification—he is the hero and he is the victim, even as he is actually and obviously the villain, causing harm... this warped, fragile logic is like a perfect fractal reflecting the condition of society-wide illness and insanity embodied in the efforts to maintain white supremacy, patriarchy, and violent domination as an entire way of life.

The killer dominated these women. Not just because he could, but because he would. Because that is who he was taught to be. Somehow, he learned that.

To victimize others and then claim to lack agency... This exemplifies the decayed logic of white supremacist patriarchy that results in outcomes like this.

Three sovereign, hale, well women, all of whom would undoubtedly have simply provided their vehicles to this disturbed young man...

And his justification for the second set of murders? He "wanted a better car."

He wanted a better car. And he paid two lives as the self-imposed rental fee.

He took three lives in ambush without even a word, let alone a conversation, held.

His own great dehumanization rippling out into the dehumanization of these three women, who, again, were whole people.

Whole people, and braided with their communities in love.

Why do you think this killer didn't perceive asking these three women for help with his needs as a choice?

Perhaps because his gnashing sense of shame and separation were so great—to be seen by these women at all would have felt like an intolerable affront to his ego.

He didn't want to be seen by them in his time of need. So he destroyed them before they could ever even see him.

And he surveilled and preyed upon their bodies.
But never saw them. Not once.

He had choices. He may not have seen them as choices. But this is just a symptom of his ignorance. It is not a fact.

He had many choices. Like taking a bus back to Iowa. Asking to borrow a car. Renting a car. Accepting his brother's offer to pick him up. Even, for fuck's sake, stealing the cars through less violent means (like, mugging). Again, asking for help.

He made none of those choices.

Which is why he shall be known to us, for these rhetorical purposes, as "the killer." Defined by his most heinous acts. Importantly: vaguely. His humanity obscured. Frozen in time in the moment of making choices so wrong that they pointlessly thew away the full, dynamic lives of other human beings.

In this rhetorical treatment, we meet him with the same hollow disregard for his nuance and complexity as a human being—as he did to others. Rhetorically, not fatally, however: we mirror the dehumanization he perpetrated on others. He shall be known by the choice—three times—that he claims was essential... Whether it be to some heinous essence embedded within himself, or, to the misread circumstance.

Until he makes efforts toward repair and amends, which would bring him back in the direction of humanity and repair, then, consider this:

There is no need to know him, or see him, any more deeply than that.

He had choices and he ignored them. Those women had full personhood, and he ignored that. Ignoring the killer, rendering him "nothing," offers a kind of temporary relief. A mirroring of the loss imposed by his toxic will. A kind of equitable treatment, for the immediate term.

Remediating Toxic Systems Fractally: A Potential Pathway

Ultimately, ignorance cannot heal ignorance. We cannot forever only render this person a killer. That kind of reductionism is ignorance, and only furthers harm actually. But for this essay's purposes, we should highlight the ignorance to really internalize what is at stake.

To ignore the ignorance, dissociation, and trauma constantly replicating itself around us... To ignore the rampant despair and mental illness among young people in this fallow, failing country... To further dissociate from the many ways our worlds and our people need us...

To ignore these is not a viable means to protect or insulate ourselves from their results. The byproducts of this sick society are everywhere—sometimes, even stalking you on a casual outdoors hike in the middle of a peaceful nowhere.

The only true remedy to such a crisis—a moral, spiritual, psychological and behavioral crisis—is not further exile. No amount of separation and disclaiming this killer could protect us from the emergence of more killers just like him.

Instead, the remedy is to weave disturbed, devoid, confused young white men like this back into the fabrics of their communities. To claim them, indeed, as our own.

This might taste like bitter medicine, and sound like hard work. Yes. But we can do more. We can stop doing useless, draining things—the busy work of postmodern, screen-absorbed existence. And do more that make us feel, that make us ache, that make us feel vulnerable, that demonstrates our humanity.

For this outcome to have been prevented, the killer must have been wrapped in an all encompassing embrace of loving family, friends, and community. He must have been able to feel and sense his world. The toxic patterning must have been being remediated actively by his kin and church, if you will. That this was not the case is the responsibility of everyone, because surely its negative consequences belong to everyone.

In childhood, I was a cruel bully—vicious in how original and personal my attacks could be. No adult ever really intervened. Neither did they inquire as to the family or situational systems I lived in, that might be the source of these violent behaviors. Instead, when I expressed great distress ("cry for help"), I was sent to a therapist—as if there was something the matter with me.

I grew up in a context of great ignorance. It felt persistently to me like no grown-up knew what was going on. No one lived in their bodies; we were all condemned to our sick, sad, heavy heads. The alienation was almost universal. And I was never going to heal from any of that until the context changed. Until I navigated my way to loving community. Until I confronted my own shadows. And until I learned for myself the causes and mechanisms of my distortions.

We must commit harder to humanizing killers—before they ever make the choice that becomes the way they're known—as rectifying action.

To unravel their dehumanizing conditioning, that would permit them to selfishly dehumanize others.

To heal their shallow and distorted acts of dismissive othering. Othering is indeed a facet of white supremacist patriarchy—particularly the universal condemnation of women-bodied people.

To unravel this is to humanize. To enable that young man's mind to perceive others as full humans, and himself too, as a full human, would be regenerative and reparative. It would have made possible him perceiving a helping, caring, connected world around him, leading him to other conclusions about his stressful predicament: that there were options.

This society endorses violence perpetrated by disturbed and ignorant young white men. If it didn't, it wouldn't have been so easy for him to obtain multiple guns. It wouldn't have been so easy for him to head out solo on a road trip, and into situations his mind wasn't capable of handling. That he then felt entitled to propagate his presumption of dehumanization into the world, projected onto others and ending their lives—without even a word...

He may not have thought he could "get away with it," from a criminal justice perspective. But on some level, he thought he could "get away with it"—morally. That he was somehow justified. After all, he "had" to do it. He may have even been on his way back to Iowa with the intent to fulfill his obligation to show up for a previously scheduled court date—trying to fit into the system even as he antisocially annihilates innocent people... heading back to Iowa as if nothing of consequence had happened out west.

Seems insane, indeed. This young man was obviously quite disjointed about what it is he "had" to do.

He is not to be trusted as a judge of what his agency is, or ought to be.

He is not to be trusted with choices anymore, in general (hence, the penal, punitive system he's now enmeshed in, that will likely "put him away" forever).

Until he demonstrates any capacity to become someone else.

It will get uglier out there unless we learn to correct actively for ugliness, for ignorance. We must learn the discernment and skill to correct for wrong minds, for wrong, distorted minds. And we do this through cultivating whole people. To craft whole people, we must undermine white supremacist, patriarchy, and dominator society and its attendant systems of stupidly justified, rationalized violence-for-some.

We must dismantle the systems that enable such delusions of separation that can only devastate our communities—now or later, in one way, or in another. [LINK TO DISMANTLE ESSAY - COMING SOON]

This is the only way we could possibly prevent another insane tragedy like the one visited upon the kindly Dewey, Graves, and Oldroyd families.

How many innocent victims have we racked up to gun violence perpetrated by disturbed young white men in the United States of America—in just the last year alone, to say nothing of the last decades? Centuries???

And is the socially acceptable path to purely absorb such losses—and do nothing to disturb the systems causing them???

These are patterns. They are conditions, or symptoms, of a parasitic worldview. And these patterns must be uprooted and confronted, if we are to craft and attain a better society. We are deluded if we think we are separate from it. Delusions of separation will only dig us deeper into this grave. We must heal delusions of separation everywhere and anywhere we encounter them.

Further essays on Ignorance to come.

Thanks for reading.

In grief and solidarity,

C.