When I learned of the Friday night events in Santa Barbara and was told the killer left a video and "manifesto" of sorts for all to see, I thought well that's enough data for me to apply one of my stronger talents, psychological analysis.
I watched the video and cringed. Then I read the "manifesto" and started to make notes of the things I thought may reveal where this young man was coming from. I wasn't far into the notes before I began to notice some patterns. For example he was an extremely strong willed child. Kudos to his parents for the fact that they ever managed to deny him his way at times.
I also began to catch myself. I realized that as the good person I perceive myself to be I couldn't just lay out my psychological analysis without any redaction. This after all is a real person with a real family, not a fictional character or just some logical argument to be critiqued. I also decided not to use any names in this for a number of good reasons.
What I decided to do was to concentrate on the external influences that I think pushed this young man to become a killer. And I will note here that I think he has to be the one we consider ultimately responsible. In concentrating on the influences on him that I call 'external' I am not giving him an excuse for his actions, but only addressing the question we always seem to ask when things like this happen; What could have been done differently to have possibly prevented this?
Again, I am redacting from my analysis anything a time traveler might want to have told his parents about how they could have raised him differently to have avoided this. In the absence of time travel it would just be 20 20 hindsight and thus little more than cruel. I will only say this much. It is clear that his parents demonstrated great care in raising him and that he loved them both. Any human being could not ask for much more than that from parents.
I'm also not going to make readers wade through all of the rest of my analysis either. Instead i'm going to summarize the parts that most interest me and I hope by extension also most interest my readers.
In my analysis informed and still humble opinion I believe there were two major external forces that played on his strong will in such a way as to culminate in Friday's tragedy.
The first major external force was one of collectivism's most ugly faces, the tendency of those insecure in their own belonging to pick on those they see as weird. After the Columbine murders, schools around the country decided they needed to be on the lookout for loners, and they were horribly misguided. The problem with loners is not that there are loners, but in how loners are perceived, as dysfunctional. School officials going out of their way to try and integrate loners just further cements the idea that the loners are "losers" who can only stop being "losers" by no longer being loners.
I mention the misguided school officials here because it shows how even adults who think they're helping are really just as lost in the mistaken perception. It's a huge problem on secondary education school grounds.
And in this young man's case, a group of girls teased him relentlessly for being weird. now combine this with him being a very strong willed boy just starting to be sexually aware and actually desiring the affections of a girl, and his hatred and resentment follows predictably.
That alone, as disturbing as it was, was not enough to make a killer or even a violent person out of him. There was something else that combined with this to make it possible.
And here is where I must warn my readers that I'm about to take what they may think is a ridiculous leap. But I assure you that as a writer of fiction who takes my art seriously, I am being very serious here.
Anakin Skywalker's transformation into Darth Vader in Star Wars III, which has been widely seen by critics as poorly done, I think had a huge impact on this young man. He says as much himself in his manifesto though he doesn't make quite the connection I do. If he had, we might not have this tragedy to talk about right now.
The poorly carried off and thus highly implausible transformation of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader in Star Wars III grabbed this young man's attention when he was a young teen. This is frightening and should be a very sobering reminder that story telling does have an impact on reality.
Perhaps if Star Wars III had done a better job of explaining how a character could so radically turn from a hero into a heartless killer of children, just perhaps this tragedy in Santa Barbara might not have happened. And I don't think that twice is too many times to try and make that point.
At the time that I saw Star Wars II and III, I was very taken myself by how Anakin's love for the princess was not just on an epic scale but so out of proportion to his responsibilities to his fellow beings as to be sociopathic. I guess for the writers of those movies this was their ticket to the evil transformation they needed to happen, but as I saw it they had missed that they made Anakin an evil sociopath from the moment he fell in love if not sooner. A seemingly minor mistake until three real people get stabbed to death, three others get shot to death, and several others injured by gun and car.
Fiction matters, it really does. Writers learn that a character's sexual love can be a convenient way to get them to do what their base character would normally not allow them to, but we writers must be careful. Our writing is potentially even more dangerous than blades or guns.
If we posit that the love of a woman can cause an otherwise good guy to become evil we are potentially saying that seeking or failing to obtain such can justify horrible acts. Especially if we have already established that the character who so turns is later redeemed as in Star Wars VI, thus confirming that the character did in fact start out as good.
The reality of this, as strange as it seems to use reality and Star Wars in the same sentence, is that the character of Anakin Skywalker was evil even before he fell in love, at least as the movie presents the evidence to us. If he were not already evil then his love for the princess would never have reached sociopathic disproportion without him noticing. And while it is understandable that real teenagers in real life may not be quick to notice such things in themselves, fiction should not be so indistinct.
I am not saying that fiction writers need to concern themselves with people who jump off buildings because Superman can fly or who shoot up schools because some fictional character is trigger happy. These are people who are already bent to do the sorts of things they do and the fiction just happens along. A bird or a real shoot out would have eventually inspired these sorts of people to the same ends if the fictional works hadn't come along sooner, and the fictional works are no more responsible than birds or press reports of crimes.
But this case in Santa Barbara is different than those. Here a piece of fiction tells us that a good person can become evil because he is threatened with the loss of access to a woman's love. It should be a ridiculous idea on its face but it was passed off as otherwise. Unlike Superman's powers which are clearly unreal, this idea that good people can become killers because they may not get the attentions of the opposite sex is too easily perceived as real, perhaps even too commonly. This isn't someone who was already challenged in his perception of what is and isn't real. This young man knew he couldn't fly and that killing people has real significant consequence. He saw his father mourn his grandfather and was moved by it. But what he didn't know, and I think we'd find that shockingly many don't, is that whether or not you can get any doesn't outweigh the importance of other people, their lives, and dignity. This young man acted out what far too many people think, largely due to poorly thought out fiction.
This was a young man who didn't need to be a sociopath but ultimately became one. But if he had lived through this and found himself in the company of other sociopaths, I really believe he would have fit in with them even less than he thought he did with everyone else. Because unlike them he knew right from wrong, at least the right and wrong he was taught. Star Wars III may not have singularly pushed him over the edge to becoming a sociopath but its irresponsible writing greatly reinforced a general contemporary wrong attitude towards sex in our society. And combine that with the collectivist tendencies in school cultures that pick on loners, and we have the external causes of this tragedy pretty well summed up.
I only hope we can look past all the tools he used to see what really enabled him to do this.
I watched the video and cringed. Then I read the "manifesto" and started to make notes of the things I thought may reveal where this young man was coming from. I wasn't far into the notes before I began to notice some patterns. For example he was an extremely strong willed child. Kudos to his parents for the fact that they ever managed to deny him his way at times.
I also began to catch myself. I realized that as the good person I perceive myself to be I couldn't just lay out my psychological analysis without any redaction. This after all is a real person with a real family, not a fictional character or just some logical argument to be critiqued. I also decided not to use any names in this for a number of good reasons.
What I decided to do was to concentrate on the external influences that I think pushed this young man to become a killer. And I will note here that I think he has to be the one we consider ultimately responsible. In concentrating on the influences on him that I call 'external' I am not giving him an excuse for his actions, but only addressing the question we always seem to ask when things like this happen; What could have been done differently to have possibly prevented this?
Again, I am redacting from my analysis anything a time traveler might want to have told his parents about how they could have raised him differently to have avoided this. In the absence of time travel it would just be 20 20 hindsight and thus little more than cruel. I will only say this much. It is clear that his parents demonstrated great care in raising him and that he loved them both. Any human being could not ask for much more than that from parents.
I'm also not going to make readers wade through all of the rest of my analysis either. Instead i'm going to summarize the parts that most interest me and I hope by extension also most interest my readers.
In my analysis informed and still humble opinion I believe there were two major external forces that played on his strong will in such a way as to culminate in Friday's tragedy.
The first major external force was one of collectivism's most ugly faces, the tendency of those insecure in their own belonging to pick on those they see as weird. After the Columbine murders, schools around the country decided they needed to be on the lookout for loners, and they were horribly misguided. The problem with loners is not that there are loners, but in how loners are perceived, as dysfunctional. School officials going out of their way to try and integrate loners just further cements the idea that the loners are "losers" who can only stop being "losers" by no longer being loners.
I mention the misguided school officials here because it shows how even adults who think they're helping are really just as lost in the mistaken perception. It's a huge problem on secondary education school grounds.
And in this young man's case, a group of girls teased him relentlessly for being weird. now combine this with him being a very strong willed boy just starting to be sexually aware and actually desiring the affections of a girl, and his hatred and resentment follows predictably.
That alone, as disturbing as it was, was not enough to make a killer or even a violent person out of him. There was something else that combined with this to make it possible.
And here is where I must warn my readers that I'm about to take what they may think is a ridiculous leap. But I assure you that as a writer of fiction who takes my art seriously, I am being very serious here.
Anakin Skywalker's transformation into Darth Vader in Star Wars III, which has been widely seen by critics as poorly done, I think had a huge impact on this young man. He says as much himself in his manifesto though he doesn't make quite the connection I do. If he had, we might not have this tragedy to talk about right now.
The poorly carried off and thus highly implausible transformation of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader in Star Wars III grabbed this young man's attention when he was a young teen. This is frightening and should be a very sobering reminder that story telling does have an impact on reality.
Perhaps if Star Wars III had done a better job of explaining how a character could so radically turn from a hero into a heartless killer of children, just perhaps this tragedy in Santa Barbara might not have happened. And I don't think that twice is too many times to try and make that point.
At the time that I saw Star Wars II and III, I was very taken myself by how Anakin's love for the princess was not just on an epic scale but so out of proportion to his responsibilities to his fellow beings as to be sociopathic. I guess for the writers of those movies this was their ticket to the evil transformation they needed to happen, but as I saw it they had missed that they made Anakin an evil sociopath from the moment he fell in love if not sooner. A seemingly minor mistake until three real people get stabbed to death, three others get shot to death, and several others injured by gun and car.
Fiction matters, it really does. Writers learn that a character's sexual love can be a convenient way to get them to do what their base character would normally not allow them to, but we writers must be careful. Our writing is potentially even more dangerous than blades or guns.
If we posit that the love of a woman can cause an otherwise good guy to become evil we are potentially saying that seeking or failing to obtain such can justify horrible acts. Especially if we have already established that the character who so turns is later redeemed as in Star Wars VI, thus confirming that the character did in fact start out as good.
The reality of this, as strange as it seems to use reality and Star Wars in the same sentence, is that the character of Anakin Skywalker was evil even before he fell in love, at least as the movie presents the evidence to us. If he were not already evil then his love for the princess would never have reached sociopathic disproportion without him noticing. And while it is understandable that real teenagers in real life may not be quick to notice such things in themselves, fiction should not be so indistinct.
I am not saying that fiction writers need to concern themselves with people who jump off buildings because Superman can fly or who shoot up schools because some fictional character is trigger happy. These are people who are already bent to do the sorts of things they do and the fiction just happens along. A bird or a real shoot out would have eventually inspired these sorts of people to the same ends if the fictional works hadn't come along sooner, and the fictional works are no more responsible than birds or press reports of crimes.
But this case in Santa Barbara is different than those. Here a piece of fiction tells us that a good person can become evil because he is threatened with the loss of access to a woman's love. It should be a ridiculous idea on its face but it was passed off as otherwise. Unlike Superman's powers which are clearly unreal, this idea that good people can become killers because they may not get the attentions of the opposite sex is too easily perceived as real, perhaps even too commonly. This isn't someone who was already challenged in his perception of what is and isn't real. This young man knew he couldn't fly and that killing people has real significant consequence. He saw his father mourn his grandfather and was moved by it. But what he didn't know, and I think we'd find that shockingly many don't, is that whether or not you can get any doesn't outweigh the importance of other people, their lives, and dignity. This young man acted out what far too many people think, largely due to poorly thought out fiction.
This was a young man who didn't need to be a sociopath but ultimately became one. But if he had lived through this and found himself in the company of other sociopaths, I really believe he would have fit in with them even less than he thought he did with everyone else. Because unlike them he knew right from wrong, at least the right and wrong he was taught. Star Wars III may not have singularly pushed him over the edge to becoming a sociopath but its irresponsible writing greatly reinforced a general contemporary wrong attitude towards sex in our society. And combine that with the collectivist tendencies in school cultures that pick on loners, and we have the external causes of this tragedy pretty well summed up.
I only hope we can look past all the tools he used to see what really enabled him to do this.
Here's another perspective I respect on this. Different but not contradictory insights. http://connecticut.cbslocal.com/2014/05/29/psychologist-elliot-rodger-would-still-have-gone-on-killing-spree-even-if-he-had-sex-with-women/
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