The Ghost of Adam Lanza

Goodness is the fulfillment of value. Value exists only in life. If there is no life, there is no value, and thus goodness becomes an entirely irrelevant concept.

— Adam Lanza in Antinatalism at Light Speed, 2011

Recently, someone discovered the ghost of Adam Lanza. His abandoned YouTube channel, CulturalPhilistine, had been sitting on YouTube for 9 years, without anyone linking it to him. It had 20 videos, and only about a dozen subscribers. The videos were just audio with a black image. Recently, someone found it and linked it to Lanza. It was quickly deleted, but people managed to save the content before it was taken down. So, we now have new insights into the mind of Adam Lanza.

Adam Lanza committed the Sandy Hook school shooting. On December 14, 2012, he killed his mother at their home, and then went to an elementary school, where he killed 20 children and 6 adults. The children were in Grade 1.

Like the Columbine massacre, it was both horrifying and incomprehensible. Why did he do it?

At the time of his death, Adam Lanza was 20 years old. He lived with his mother. He was not employed or going to school. He spent most of his time alone in his room.

The media portrayed him as an insane individual with irrational motives. They emphasized his Asperger’s syndrome, reclusive behavior and morbid fascination with guns and death.

His YouTube videos reveal a different side of Adam Lanza. He was not a raving lunatic. He was an intelligent young man, who had thought deeply about life and death. In his videos, he explained his belief system to anyone who would listen.

I have listened to most of his videos. In this essay, I will present a summary of his beliefs, as I understand them. They shed some light on his motives for mass murder, but they are also interesting in themselves.

Lanza was somewhat engaged in the antinatalist and efilist circles on YouTube. His videos mention Inmendham and other people who were active in that discourse space. Antinatalism is the belief that procreation is morally wrong. It applies specifically to human beings, and it can have different justifications. Some antinatalists believe that human beings are a blight on the planet. Others believe that human existence is essentially bad, and thus it is better not to be born. Those are very different moral views. Efilism is the philosophical rejection of life in general, not just human procreation. Efilists believe that life is essentially bad for all sentient beings. Efilism and antinatalism are part of a larger space of heretical discourse on the internet.

Although Lanza was somewhat engaged in heretical internet discourse, he did not get his ideas from the internet. He was not thinking in a vacuum (no one does), but he developed his own worldview. Even as a child, he was thinking deeply about philosophical issues. Later in life, he discovered heretical ideas on the internet. He was influenced by them, but he did not simply adopt an ideology “off the shelf”, as many people do.

Lanza’s philosophy of life was related to efilism, but not identical to it. He used the term “antinatalism” to label his views, but he said that it was not the ideal term. He suggested “eulavism” instead.

The rejection of culture was the first stage in the development of Lanza’s worldview. He viewed culture as a delusion, a disease and an imposition on children. At this stage, his worldview could be loosely described as “anarcho-primitivist”. He had an ideal notion of the human condition before culture and civilization, which he called “the feral self”. He believed that the feral self is the “true self”, which is stifled by culture. He believed that culture prevents the attainment of happiness, because it stigmatizes natural desires. In his worldview, culture had cast humanity out of a primitive paradise. (Note the parallel to the Garden of Eden story.)

Lanza saw that culture is often imposed on people by others, through a process that he called “bullying”. For example, suppose that a child is picking his nose, because that’s what he naturally feels like doing. A parent or teacher then bullies the child to conform to social/cultural expectations of correct behavior. After being forced to conform to this value, the child internalizes it, and feels bad about picking his nose. He starts to propagate the value to other children, by bullying them. As an adult, he becomes an authority figure, who transmits the value to another generation.

Lanza believed that culture consists of memes that propagate by coercion and deception, not rational persuasion. He saw a world of people infected by memes, acting as enforcers of a memetic tyranny.

This view is not irrational or insane. It is partly correct. Culture is often acquired by conformity and obedience. Once acquired, it is mindlessly imposed on others. Culture can be irrational, and it can be harmful. However, culture has important functions. Some memes are harmful, but many are beneficial, even if they propagate irrationally.

Lanza viewed enculturation as the imposition of cultural values on the feral self, thereby creating a false self with false values.

In one video, he said that without culture he wouldn’t be making a YouTube response video to someone. Instead, he would be stroking the other person’s hair and looking into his eyes, or “whatever feral humans do”. That is a very romantic notion of the primitive. If two strange chimps meet in the forest, they don’t just start grooming each other. They are more likely to be fearful or hostile.

Lanza’s notion of a primitive paradise was a naive fantasy.

Humans are cultural animals. We can’t survive without culture. There never was a pre-cultural human condition. There was a pre-modern human condition before modern technology. There was an ancestral human condition before civilization and agriculture. Further back in time, before Homo sapiens, there was a pre-human condition without fire or language. But there was never a pre-cultural human paradise.

I believe that Lanza’s rejection of culture was partly due to his autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It made him more socially detached, and thus gave him a more critical perspective on culture and society. He did not just accept the culture that he was immersed in. He questioned it. Most people never think about culture. They accept it and internalize it. They conform and obey.

Lanza became aware of culture as something foreign that was imposed on him, and he began to hate it.

Maybe he also hated culture because it alienated him from others. As someone with ASD, he would have been less aware of social cues, which are important for learning social/cultural norms. He probably resented the arbitrary norms of social interaction. He wanted to interact with others naturally and rationally, through emotions and thought, without the intervening layer of norms.

Culture brings us together. It enables communication and cooperation. However, it also creates barriers between us. It prevents honest self-expression. To some extent, it alienates us from each other, and even from ourselves.

Social interaction is highly artificial and stereotypical. Rather than expressing our true feelings and thoughts, we play conventional roles in a social game. For example, imagine a young man who sees an attractive girl. Can he just say “Hi, I find you attractive”. No, of course not. He can’t just express his desire honestly. He must engage in small-talk, and slowly reveal his interest through a pretense. If he wants to touch her body, he can’t just reach out and touch her. In a hypothetical pre-cultural state, he could express his desire openly, and she could respond by smiling or frowning. Instead, he must relate to her through a layer of arbitrary conventions: the norms of flirting.

Most people don’t recognize this layer as artificial, arbitrary and dishonest, because they have internalized it. They don’t even recognize it as foreign. But it is artificial, arbitrary and dishonest. It supersedes honest self-expression. We interact through artificial personas, and we must play by the implicit rules of a social game.

Here is an excerpt from My Antinatalism, the first video that Lanza posted:

I didn’t understand this when I was younger, but I’ve always had an immense hatred for culture. I considered culture to be delusional values, which humans mindlessly coerce onto each other, spreading it no differently than any other disease.

I previously sought to eliminate my cultural values to the greatest extent that I could. Through this, I expected to gradually discover values within myself, so that I could engage in activities and pursue goals which would lead to happiness. Eventually, I got to a point where I had sufficiently freed myself from what I called “cultural values”.

When I analyzed all of the things which brought me happiness, and all of the goals which I wanted to pursue, I realized that absolutely everything about those things that appealed to me was entirely a consequence of my cultural infection. Formerly, I had rejected some aspects of culture while accepting other ones and merely not calling them “cultural”, as if those values were somehow transcendent and mine. It was at that point that I realized that there is no such thing as an inner self. Any sense of self is a delusional cultural construct. I realized that cultural infections are the sole source of any possible value beyond base values.

For a while, I believed that happiness could be attained if culture could theoretically be eradicated and if anarcho-primitivism were to take hold. Replace all instances of “technology” with “culture” in the analytic sections of Industrial Society and its Future [the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski], and you basically have my mentality at the time regarding the pernicious effects of culture.

Lanza discovered that he had been coerced and deceived into having certain values. He resented that. He tried to purge himself of foreign values, to liberate his true self. However, beneath culture, he found only another layer of coercion and deception, another mindlessly propagating disease.

The problem was I had not been addressing what happiness is. Happiness is merely the fulfillment of value.

I recognized that if cultural values were eliminated, the happiness which results from their fulfillment would not be needed, because happiness becomes unnecessary and an incoherent concept when it is removed from its context.

A common theme in my quasi-anarcho-primitivist thought at the time was that non-base values exist only as a consequence of cultural infections, and impede on the happiness which results from the fulfillment of feral values. I thought of my feral self as if it were metaphysically the real me, whose soul had been devoured by the culturally constructed imposter of the self. But my feral self was also an imposter.

Just as I realized that I could eliminate non-base values and have no need for the happiness which resulted from their fulfillment, I could eliminate base values and have no need for the happiness which resulted from their fulfillment.

It was not only the disease of culture that had been plaguing me all along. It was the disease of life itself.

Lanza went from rejecting culture to rejecting life.

He understood that all happiness comes from the fulfillment of value, or in other words, from the fulfillment of desire. It follows that one must suffer to be happy. To feel happiness, one must have a want that can be fulfilled. Value is the root of suffering. Value is the cause of all problems.

He recognized an analogy between culture and biology. He viewed culture as imposing false values, which must then be fulfilled. He came to view life in the same way. Life creates beings that have desires. Those beings then struggle to fulfill those desires. Life also propagates mindlessly from one generation to the next.

He came to hate life for the same reasons that he hated culture.

Although he was influenced by antinatalist and efilist discourse online, his views were his own. He criticized the efilists for their belief in objective good and bad. He saw morality as a cultural delusion. He didn’t believe in objective values. He believed that his own values were subjective.

My Antinatalism continued:

I was not and I am not in some existential crisis. I have never had the slightest problem with the obvious non-existence of free will, objective purposes, and all that. I have always been entirely psychologically capable of accepting my own subjective values and goals, even though I know that they are consummately inconsequential. And it doesn’t bother me at all.

The problem is not that I seek meaning and cannot find it. The problem is that I do feel immense meaning, and so does everyone else who is alive.

Meaning is an abstract interpretation of value, which exists only because of life. Just as I sought to eradicate the delusional values which culture infected me with, the final solution is the termination of my life, to rid myself of all value. A solution cannot be to embrace some aspect of life, as if the erosion of delusions is the cause of this. Life is what originally caused me to have value, and changing my life will never do anything but create different delusions than the ones I already have.

Unfortunately, as of right now, I lack the discipline to commit suicide, and to rid myself of the values which delude me, even though I recognize the solution to life is death. But I do commend others who commit suicide. They have freed themselves from culture, life and all value. They have freed themselves from themselves.

Lanza even recognized that there was a paradox in his position. His rejection of value was itself a value. “Value is bad” is a value judgment. Eulavism is a self-negating paradox. But he still had that value, paradoxical though it is. Eventually, he negated himself.

Does his philosophy explain why he committed mass murder?

No, not really. Eulavism might lead to suicide, if a paradox can lead anywhere, but it doesn’t imply murder. I believe that eulavism influenced his decision to commit mass murder, but he had other motives, some of which were subconscious.

Lanza had painted himself into a corner by becoming reclusive. He couldn’t face the world outside his bedroom. Just before the murders, he was due to be evicted from his sanctuary. His mother was trying to sell the house. She wanted to move him into a trailer, so that she could clean his room and show the house to prospective buyers.

Lanza’s time as a child was over, but he refused to grow up. He didn’t want to leave home and become a functioning adult. He couldn’t face the prospect of conforming to society and culture. He was living in a fantasy world, and his little bubble was about to burst. He already wanted to commit suicide, and his impending eviction pushed him over the edge.

Lanza’s mother was his first victim. Did he kill her out of hate or love? We don’t know. Maybe both.

Lanza had a very sheltered life. He did not put his theoretical primitivism into practice. A long canoeing or backpacking trip would have given him a less romantic perspective on nature and the primitive. If he had gotten a job, he would have developed practical knowledge and strengthened his frail body. Instead, he retreated from reality into fantasy.

In the years leading up to his crimes, Lanza had a growing obsession with mass murder. He posted occasionally on a forum called “Shocked Beyond Belief”, and many of his posts were about mass murder. He had a special fascination with school shootings, including the Columbine massacre. (See Adam Lanza’s “Shocked Beyond Belief” Posts.)

He probably spent a lot of time fantasizing about mass murder. Fantasies generate values, which then create the desire to be fulfilled. Values are not just imposed on us from the outside. We generate them internally.

Lanza was a lonely incel, and probably a virgin. The typical mass killer is lonely and sexually frustrated. Lanza believed that culture created an artificial scarcity of sex, with various norms limiting sexual expression. He blamed culture for his loneliness.

There is some speculation about his sexuality: that he might have been gay or a pedophile. He wrote a long essay about the dishonesty and hypocrisy of society’s treatment of pedophilia. He said that he was not a pedophile, and that he had not been sexually molested as a child.

This is from the description of the video series On pedophiles and children:

I have to emphasize for the fifth time, I AM NOT A PEDOPHILE. My position is that children would not be harmed by consensual sexual interaction with adults any more than other adults are, unless their culture forced them into being ignorant of it and manipulated into being horrified by it.

I recognize that my anti-pedophobia was only a futile retaliation against culture, so I will never have the motivation to improve any of this.

However, in his Pointless series of videos, he said:

How can someone be attracted to breasts? [laughter, inaudible] I’m just attracted to young teenage girls who have the bodies of 12-year-old anorexic boys.

So, it seems that Lanza was attracted to pubescent girls, not full-figured women. However, I believe that his obsession with pedophilia had more to do with his views on culture. He enjoyed violating taboos. In his Pointless series of videos, he said that he wrote the essay defending pedophilia with the intent of submitting it as part of a college application. He knew that it would cause him to be rejected, but he liked that kind of rejection. That was revealing. The violation of taboos is a rebellion against culture.

Whether he was a pedophile or not, I don’t believe that he killed children because he was sexually attracted to them.

Also, I don’t believe that he was motivated by hatred or resentment of children. He did not hate children. He viewed them as closer to the feral, pre-cultural human condition. He hated culture and life.

I believe that Lanza targeted a school for multiple reasons. One is that it represented enculturation. School is where children go to have culture injected into them. Children also represent the propagation of life. He disliked authority figures, such as teachers and parents. He killed teachers, and he hurt parents by killing their children. He was also influenced by the Columbine massacre. He had fantasized about a school shooting for a long time. Perhaps he was also symbolically returning to childhood, rewinding his life before his death.

The idea that he was mercy-killing children is too simplistic. But he would not have viewed his actions as harmful to them. In his worldview, death was salvation and enlightenment. However, he did not believe in morality or objective value, or that he had any obligation to act for the good of others. Also, he must have known that killing a small number of people would have no effect on life or suffering in general. He did not kill children to save them from life. He killed them to express his hatred of life.

Maybe it was also a way to force himself to commit suicide. He was burning his bridge back to life, so that there was no going back.

I think he fell into a deep despair after sharing his views on YouTube, and getting mostly mindless bullying as a response. His last video was posted less than a year before the murders, in January 2012.

In the description of his final series of videos, To the Proculturalists, he wrote:

If you wanted to upset me, you’ve succeeded more than you could have expected. I could have explained everything in this more extensively if this wasn’t extemporaneously spoken while feeling despondent, but if no one understands what I’m saying after seven hours of videos (which barely any of you even listened to), no one ever will. I can’t handle this cultural bullying. My account is now officially abandoned.

About 10 months later, Adam Lanza put a gun to his head and blew his brains out, after killing 27 other people.

The murders were his final attempt at self-expression. He wanted to spread his beliefs to others. He probably thought of his YouTube channel as his manifesto, and assumed that it would be discovered soon after his death. Instead, it was ignored for years.

There was a strange irony to his final act. By committing mass murder, he was trying to impose his values onto others. He was horrified by life, and he wanted others to feel the same way. He hated life and value, and he wanted to propagate that value to others. He was trying to bully the world into accepting his values.

Single video compilation of his channel.