Via my favorite fundamentalist Christian, I have learned of the latest school shooting. It took place in Finland and the young man who carried it out described himself in this way: “I am a cynical existentialist, antihuman humanist, antisocial socialdarwinist, realistic idealist and godlike atheist”. Among the things he hates are “Equality, tolerance, human rights, political correctness, hypocrisy, ignorance, enslaving religions and ideologies, antidepressants, TV soap operas & drama shows, rap -music, mass media, censorship, political populists, religious fanatics, moral majority, totalitarianism, consumerism, democracy, pacifism, state mafia, alcholohics, TV commercials, human race”.
Some of you at this point might be wondering if I’m similarly going to snap, so I’ll go through how I differ from him. I do admit to being a cynic because as Robin Hanson explains (see also from him here and here), cynicism tends to be more accurate. I have never read any existentialists, and like Rand I’ve gotten a bad enough taste just from hearing about them that I never plan on doing so. I’m not anti-human, even the more likable animal species are too dumb to measure up to them. I’m not a humanist (and though I’m a non-believer I don’t consider myself a secularist either, so I fail at both counts when it comes to secular humanism) since that sounds like another ideal I don’t feel like serving. I don’t like anti-social is the right word to describe me, since I have little antipathy and lots of apathy. Perhaps non-social (at least in meatspace, though not if I have something interesting to discuss or a suitable level of intoxication) would be a better term. I don’t really have a preference when it comes to how humanity should evolve, because I won’t be around in the long term unless the Singularity arrives (in which case evolution can be ignored compared to the rapid pace of technological change). I don’t hate religion (in fact I wish everybody except for me was a Mormon), I simply don’t consider any of them to be true. I don’t have a problem with consumerism, corporations (perhaps an illegitimate creation of the state and relic of mercantilism but I really like Wal-Mart), mass-media (it doesn’t “indoctrinate” people, it sells them the nonsense they demand, which is fine by me) and I think TV commercials are easy to avoid and a small price to pay for otherwise free entertainment.
When I was his age (I’ll spare you the stories of walking ten miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways) I was a nerd but also a Christian. I never understood the antipathy many nerds or other outsiders seemed to have toward popular kids or “jocks”. If anything those types seemed nicer people than the losers. Perhaps I was just lucky or perhaps I was extremely unaware (scratch the perhaps on that second one, but I think its effect could be questionable) but it didn’t fit the stereotype both the losers and entertainment fed me. I was largely ignorant and unconcerned of the doings of the high school elites, as were they of me. So why were other losers (if that term is irritating you, remember that I include myself in that category) so obsessed and filled with anger? My conclusion is that many were uncomfortable with their being nerds and wished they were jocks, which was something beyond their grasp. I saw a similar emulation of the popular kids with “geek chic” or “geek culture”, which always just annoyed me (and don’t get me started on nerdcore). Being filled with hostility and concerned with themselves, they imagined persecution at the hands of elites who could care less (we saw this both with Seng Hui Cho and Barack Obama, whose self-pitying accounts seemed bizarre to their former classmates).
At Pharyngula there was much blathering about trying to prevent this from reflecting badly on atheists, a courtesy the “religion poisons everything” crowd would never extend to Christianity or Islam. It is true that the killer misunderstood natural selection: anyone who thinks it has “stopped” or “reversed” in the modern era clearly doesn’t understand the purpose-free nature of evolution. The fittest still survive, but fittest has always meant merely those most capable of replicating their genes. As any evolutionary psychologist or behavioral economist will tell you, this includes selecting for self-deception. Rather than rant about how the ignorant masses just shouldn’t be outbreeding the “brights” (how I hate that term for stuck-up atheists) because they’re inferior I accept it as being how evolution always was, which is not necessarily aesthetically pleasing. Like Sidney Parker on Ragnar Redbeard’s “Might Makes Right”, this egoist finds all this ubermensch and “ought” talk rather moralizing. At the same time any Christian can state that someone who does horrible things in Christ’s name (the anti-abortion bomber or shooter of doctors was once prominent in equivocating between them and jihadists, but there haven’t been many of them in a while) doesn’t understand the Holy Word of God and is not a True Scot^H^H^H^HChristian and any Muslim can claim that suicide bomber’s ignore the Koran’s prohibition on the tactic, and these objections are true but irrelevant given the nature of mass belief. Atheism does not need an argumentum ad consequentiam. My fellow non-believers (I would refer to myself as an agnotheist, but there’s little difference between that and atheism) should be willing to admit that believers are more charitable with both their money, time and blood, that atheist regimes (both communist and Jacobin) were as bloodthirsty if not more than religious ones. Can we attribute those killings to atheism? I would restrict it to only the anti-clericalist violence (which occurred not only in officially atheistic regimes but also secularist ones like in Mexico during the Cristero War). The other killings may have been done in the name of communism, but could just as easily been have committed by an adherent of liberation theology. Similarly I think we should distinguish between Arab nationalist terrorism and islamists and quit referring to Timothy McVeigh as a “Christian terrorist”, especially considering that despite being raised Catholic he later denied believing in God. Even killings that can clearly be laid at the foot of a belief do not themselves discredit that belief. Hitler was quite anti-communist and killed huge numbers of people out of an apparently real fear of the threat of “Judeo-Bolshevism”, but this does not discredit anti-communism. If the war had gone otherwise I would have started by saying that just because Stalin killed huge numbers of people as possible counter-revolutionaries and opposed Nazism/fascism it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with opposition to those ideologies.
Along with democracy, the murderer hated the totalitarian regimes of fascism and communism (though I also dislike all three, I have to say western liberal democracy is far and away preferable). Oddly enough, he denied that Hitler and Stalin were guilty of mass murder because they got others to do it for them. To me that is just silly. We don’t consider someone innocent of murder if rather than using their own hands they wield a weapon. Though I often find Stephan Kinsella annoying I recommend his Causality and Aggression. A person may use a wide variety of things to call, from inanimate objects to another person. The distinction is irrelevant except in that we may also hold their accomplices responsible. I was thinking of that when commenters at Pharyngula mocked his talk of natural selection when he was killing people. They said it was instead artificial selection. When walruses evolve to become extremely large so they can fight each other, we consider this natural selection. When we breed animals for a trait, this is considered artificial selection. At the same time human beings are not bred by another species but breed themselves. Is sexual selection natural or artificial selection? From the viewpoint of an alien anthropologist/zoologist it is clearly the former. So how would human beings killing other human beings be any different? Our skulls apparently evolved considerable thickness when we were hitting each other over the head, and now they have thinned again. I say there is really no distinction between artificial and natural selection and our interactions with others are part of our extended phenotype. I consider killers like this kid or Varg Vikernes and Volkert Van der Graaf to be one-offs who do not have a significant impact and it is hard to think that any traits are being selected for.
Now that we’re done with religion/non-cognitivism let’s move on to other things that may be blamed. Firearmophiles like myself often pointed to Finland (along with Switzerland and Israel) as examples of places with lots of guns but little crime. Finland still has low crime, but the “Look at Finland!” argument won’t go over as well for a while. Video games are a popular target and I’m sure we’ll be hearing from Jack Thompson in a bit. I’ve stopped playing them and I’m disappointed at their decline in quality from the days of the text-adventure while continually increasing technical requirements, so I wouldn’t mind seeing the industry get what it deserves good and hard, but that doesn’t seem to have been an especially big factor. The killer was apparently fond of electronica and industrial, which I am not (with all this machinery making modern music can it still be open hearted? no), but I do like a lot of metal and some quite vile punk. I usually look down on pathetic fans of nu-metal in an elitist fashion, but I was embarrassed to find I liked a number of the same bands as Kimveer Gill so I don’t feel like indulging in that prejudice here. In the 90s there was more of a hubub about that, but I think people have stopped caring as much about the malign influence of music and rap (which I share Mr. Social Darwinist’s distaste for) has pushed aside rock as the scary genre. After the Cho killings it almost seemed as if people were going to blame Oldboy, but that died down quickly. The days of Natural Born Killers and the Basketball Diaries (which along with Oldboy I have not seen) seem to be behind us. Perhaps youtube will be blamed?
Finally and a bit off-topic, I already read racist, stalinist and fundie Christian writings as I try to expose myself to alien viewpoints. Could anyone point out to me a good and readable islamist blog? It seems to me that islamism has displaced revolutionary communism as the anti-imperialist/american ideology of choice and it strikes me that its a gaping void in my understanding.
November 9, 2007 at 8:05 am
Sounds like a libertarian.
November 9, 2007 at 8:57 am
I say we blame the existentialists.
November 10, 2007 at 2:37 pm
When a sheepdog goes rogue and starts killing sheep, it gets a bullet.
When a sperm and an egg come together and the combination produces an individual like that Finnish teen male, we also have a rogue …
The selection in this case was natural, and life goes on.
November 12, 2007 at 12:48 am
[…] I’ve stated before that I feel no serious attachment to the west or white people and if it turns out that the Chinese/Indians take over and my (very extended) relations also disappear, I wouldn’t be too peeved as long as My New Asian Overlords are willing to give me a decent spot. I also wouldn’t care if after I died humanity was wiped out by an asteroid. Maybe if I was a father and pillar of some community rather than rootless cosmopolitan things would be different, but they aren’t. I am glad to have this rather dispassionate/apathetic outlook, because it allows more fruitful discussion and contemplation of ideas that I have seen others (figuratively) frothing at the mouth over. I would not say I am completely free of the mind-killers. Though I’m on the left tail of the empathy distribution, I must admit I found it difficult to read this by Idang Alibi from Nigeria (he has a follow-up here). Both the understanding that led to his despair for his country and the misunderstanding that gives him hope (yes, Virginia, religion is adaptive) bit into me. I’m glad I’m not in his position and, es tut mir leid, I wish he were not either. Clear-headed in the face of the bothersome is what I aspire to be though. I take inspiration from this review by Chip Smith of a compendium of writings by those the fearful imagine hbd-realists to be. Is there a smug sense of superiority in that detachment over someones’ fears of the worst thing he could possibly imagine? Sure. There are worse things than smugness though. I’d say self-righteous opponents of truth and free speech qualify, as do hate-filled disguised inferiority complexes. […]
November 12, 2007 at 6:25 pm
I was thinking of that when commenters at Pharyngula mocked his talk of natural selection when he was killing people. They said it was instead artificial selection. When walruses evolve to become extremely large so they can fight each other, we consider this natural selection. (…) So how would human beings killing other human beings be any different?
I think natural selection requires some sort of causal inference. The problem is not that a human is exerting selection pressure on other humans, the problem is connecting the murderer’s stated motives to some heritable differences.
But like you say, the Tuusula case was unlikely to be significant enough to constitute either natural or artificial selection. Can greater killers like Hitler be called agents of natural selection? I’m not sure. Allele frequencies must have changed drastically in some locations as a result of the Holocaust, but this was probably largely neutral markers. We’d have to identify alleles that were more common in Nazis than their victims and played a causal role in their behaviour.
November 12, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Now that we’re done with religion/non-cognitivism let’s move on to other things that may be blamed.
How about Nokia and cheap cell phone rates?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article2828084.ece
November 12, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Can greater killers like Hitler be called agents of natural selection?
It was a one-time event, which doesn’t always make much of a difference, unless of course it results in a serious bottle-neck. I think one long-lasting consequence rather than merely killing was dispersing many to America and Israel, though in today’s globalized world that may not matter as much.
April 12, 2009 at 4:41 pm
In the case of murder and causality, I’d say that the presence of force upon the human “tool” determines the culpability (or lack thereof) of the “inciter”.
Determining “incitement” in absence of the force factor seems too much of a slippery slope from my vantage point…
April 12, 2009 at 9:08 pm
If I don’t use any force but merely hire a hitman to kill someone, do I have any culpability?
April 13, 2009 at 10:34 am
This is a good comeback. Admittedly, that’s one area I hadn’t examined. Intuitively, I’d say some culpability on your part is involved; however, there is also the will of the hitman: positive incentives can be ignored…
April 13, 2009 at 7:16 pm
There is no reason to imagine a fixed-pie of culpability. We can give the same punishment to all individuals involved that we would if one person had done it by themselves. Kinsella makes these same points in the paper I linked to in this post.
July 3, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Returning to this post again….
One thing that annoys me about “Darwinists” (especially the “game” bloggers) is their embrace of the naturalistic fallacy; the way some of those *ahem* fuckers go on (“If you don’t propagate/fuck all that moves/spread the racial gospel, you FAIL existence 4eva!!!11”) makes me think they might as well be spending their Saturday nights ironing their Sunday Best.
It’s not (necessarily) the actions that grate; more the attitude.
Also, why self-label as a “loser”?
July 3, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Also, wouldn’t agno*a*theist be closer to the mark?
July 3, 2010 at 9:21 pm
I think at the time I wrote this I didn’t have a job, so I’m less of a loser now. But I still don’t have very high aspirations, which would seem to be a mark of loserdom.
I guess they view the motivation as common enough (and status as one-dimensional enough) that everyone implicitly shares the same goals, or a pathetic fool who has yet to shake off their false consciousness.
I don’t know about etymology, I’m just following convention.