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, 2011, in the video “Antinatalism at Light Speed”

Recently, someone discovered the ghost of Adam Lanza. His abandoned YouTube channel, named “CulturalPhilistine”, had been sitting on YouTube for 9 years, without anyone linking it to him. It had only about a dozen subscribers and 20 videos, which were audio and a black image. Recently, someone found it and linked it to Lanza. It was quickly deleted, of course, but some people managed to save all the content before it was taken down. So, now we 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, and then went to an elementary school, where he killed 20 children and 6 adults. The children were in Grade 1. Lanza was 20 at the time. He lived with his mother and spent most of his time alone in his room.

Like the Columbine shooting, it was both horrifying and incomprehensible. What could motivate someone to commit such a crime?

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

His YouTube videos paint a very different picture. They reveal an intelligent young man, who was thinking clearly when he posted his videos — the last of which he posted less than a year before the murders. He was reaching out to humanity to present his views of life and death.

Adam Lanza’s worldview could be broadly described as efilist (anti-life). He was aware of the efilist and antinatalist circles on YouTube. His videos mention Inmendham and other figures who were active in antinatalist/efilist discourse at the time, such as DerivedEnergy and Gratex. He was engaging with people in that circle to some degree. He was also aware of other heretical circles, such as the white nationalists (he mentioned HeyRuka a few times), and probably the ancaps and others.

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

I believe that Lanza developed his worldview mostly by thinking for himself, and then refined it later in life, after he encountered related ideas on the internet. Some of his rhetoric echoes Inmendham’s, but some is very different, and his views were not the same. In some of his videos, he explicitly contrasts his views with efilism. He used the term “antinatalism” to label his beliefs, but he also said that it was not the ideal term. He suggested the term “eulavism” instead.

The first stage in the development of Lanza’s worldview was the rejection of culture. He viewed culture as a delusion, a disease and an imposition on children. At this stage, his views could be loosely described as “anarcho-primitivist”. He idolized an imaginary primitive state of humanity before culture and civilization. He used the term “feral self” to refer to pre-cultural human nature. You could also call it the “biological” or “natural” self, as opposed to the “cultural” or “social” self.

He correctly recognized that culture is irrational, and that it is imposed on people by authority figures and by what 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 in the future. Lanza viewed enculturation as the imposition of cultural values on the feral self, creating a kind of false self with false values.

There is some truth to this, but Lanza’s idolization of the primitive was based on a common delusion, which (somewhat ironically) he got from culture. He assumed that the default or natural state of things is good.

In one video, he says that without culture he wouldn’t be making a YouTube response video to someone. In the feral state, maybe 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 might fight, or a male might attempt to coerce a female into sex, etc. They don’t just sit together and groom each other.

Lanza imagined a primitive paradise, which humanity lost due to the disease of culture. That was a naive fantasy.

The truth is that culture has a biological function, and we depend on it. Human beings cannot exist without culture. We are cultural animals. There never was a primitive human state without culture. There was a pre-modern state, a pre-civilized state and a pre-human state, which can be observed in chimps or gorillas. But there was never a pre-cultural human paradise.

Lanza believed that culture consisted of mindlessly-propagating memes. The memes infect people, who then propagate the memes to other people. Parents, teachers and other authority figures were the vectors of the memes. But so were ordinary people. 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 acquired irrationally, often based on conformity and obedience. Once acquired, it is mindlessly imposed on others.

I believe that Lanza’s rejection of culture was partly due to his aspiness. In some ways, he was hyper-rational. He wanted reasons for things. He couldn’t just accept memes being imposed on him without reasons. Most people never think about culture at all. They just accept it. Lanza became aware of culture as a foreign imposition on him, and he began to hate it.

Maybe he also hated culture because it alienated him from others. As someone with Asperger’s syndrome, he probably didn’t pick up cultural norms as easily as other people do, especially non-verbal aspects of social interaction. He wanted to interact with others naturally and rationally, not through the medium of culture. Social interaction is highly artificial and stereotypical. Instead of expressing our true feelings and thoughts, we play conventional roles in a social game.

Again, this critique of culture is not irrational or insane. It is largely correct, although there is no utopian feral alternative. Culture brings us together in some ways. We need it to communicate and cooperate. But it also creates barriers between us. It prevents honest self-expression. It alienates us from each other and even from ourselves to some extent.

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 must make up an excuse to talk to her, and make dishonest small-talk, rather than just expressing himself honestly. If he wanted to touch her body, he couldn’t just reach out and touch her. In a hypothetical pre-cultural state, he could just touch her, and she could respond by smiling or frowning. Instead, they must relate through a layer of arbitrary conventions: the cultural norms of flirting.

Most people don’t recognize this layer as artificial, arbitrary and dishonest, because they have internalized those norms. But it is artificial, arbitrary and dishonest, and it alienates us from each other, to some extent.

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

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 memes in his head, and he resented that. He tried to purge himself of the foreign memes, to liberate his true self. But there 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.

The second stage in the development of Lanza’s worldview was the rejection of value, and thus of 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 itself mindlessly from one generation to the next.

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

Although he may have been influenced by antinatalist and efilist discourse online, his views were his own. He criticized the efilists for their belief in objective value and objective rights and obligations. 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? Not really. Eulavism might lead to suicide, if a paradox can lead anywhere, but it doesn’t imply mass 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. However, he was going to be evicted from that 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.

Lanza was expected to grow up, leave home and become a “normal” person. He couldn’t face that. He couldn’t face the prospect of conforming to society and culture: getting a job, supporting himself, and so on. He already wanted to commit suicide, and this pushed him over the edge.

The first person he killed was his mother, perhaps out of anger that she created him, perhaps also out of anger that she was evicting him from his room, or perhaps because he wanted to deliver her from the horrors of life. Maybe it was all of those reasons.

Lanza had a very sheltered life. Despite his theoretical primitivism, I don’t think he ever went into the wilderness. A long canoeing or backpacking trip would have given him a less romantic perspective on nature and the primitive. Also, the absence of physical hardship and practical problems meant that psychological hardship and philosophical problems weighed more heavily on him. Alone in his room, he lived a life of abstract thought and macabre fantasies.

Apparently, he had been somewhat obsessed with mass murder even as a child. He probably spent a lot of time in his personal fantasy world. Fantasies internally generate values, which then create the desire to be fulfilled. Values are not just imposed on us from the outside. We also generate them internally.

Lanza was a lonely incel, and probably a virgin. Sexual frustration seems to play a role in motivating mass murder. The typical mass murderer is a lonely man. Lanza believed that culture created an artificial scarcity of sex, and so he blamed culture for his loneliness.

There has been 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 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 think his obsession with pedophilia had more to do with his views on culture. Pedophilia is one of the biggest taboos, and he would have enjoyed violating that taboo. In his “Pointless” series of videos, he mentioned that he wrote his essay defending pedophilia with the thought of submitting it as a college entrance essay, even though he knew that he would be rejected because of it. He said that he liked that kind of rejection. That was revealing. The violation of taboos is a rebellion against culture.

Regardless, I don’t think he killed children because he was sexually attracted to them.

Also, his actions were not motivated by hatred or resentment of children. He did not hate children. He idolized them as closer to the feral, precultural human state. He hated culture and life.

I think he targeted a school because it represented enculturation. Children also represent the propagation of life. He disliked authority figures. Teachers and parents are authority figures. He killed teachers. By killing children, he was hurting their parents. There are several reasons why a school shooting would appeal to Lanza.

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, and he must have known that killing a small number of people would have no effect on life or suffering in general.

Perhaps he also killed as 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. He abandoned his YouTube account in January 2012, a bit less than a year before his mass murder.

In the description of his final series of videos, titled “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.

I think his mass murder was also a failed attempt at expressing himself. He probably thought of his YouTube channel as his manifesto, and assumed that it would be discovered soon after his death. Instead, it sat 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.

Comments

  1. Perfectly written. From what I've seen of his writings (and videos) I agree with everything you wrote. I do wonder how differently things would have turned out had he not been so isolated.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks. Yeah, maybe if he had people to talk to, he might not have done what he did, but he chose to be isolated.

      Delete
    2. I wonder, if we were to go back in time and actually engage with him about his ideas, would the murder suicide have been prevented? His philosophy is just so completely self-defeating that I feel he needed to just be steered away from it entirely. His life could have improved and if he could have come to terms with the meaninglessness of human existence and arbitrariness of cultural mores like the rest of us, he could have carved out a little life for himself. My brother is a high functioning autistic and he never went down this dark path, although I'm sure he must have had similar sort of ideas along the way. I think Adam was failed by his family, much like the recent Texas shooter. He needed someone to be real hands on with him and truly address his issues with him starting at a very young age. My parents had to do this with my brother, and I'm sad to realize that not all parents are equipped to deal with the extra time, energy, smarts and expense that comes with raising a child with special needs. People fall through the cracks and nobody is there to prevent these sorts of attacks against humanity.

      Delete
    3. I learned only long after first struggling with depression is how much isolation contributes to depression. Depression leads you to isolate yourself, so it is difficult to escape that cycle, regardless of ideology or underlying values. But, superimposed on antipathy to value itself, self-destruction seems inevitable.

      Delete
  2. I don't understand why nihilism/Dexter-style autism is generally assumed to lead to murder. Why do people like them care if anyone else lives or dies? Being a mass murderer seems like a lot of pointless work if people don't matter.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Very interesting, Thanks for this. I agree: Hiking, canoeing, starting a garden, a simple walk in the woods, maybe reading the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson…it sounds silly as I write it out but maybe things like this would’ve helped this young man.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Although, Emerson said: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Didn't Lanza do just that?

    ReplyDelete
  5. I think his choice of a school was a way of liberating himself from "value", (or a way to prove to himself he had already liberated himself and wasn't a hypocrite). He saw taboos as cultural infection. If you don't value life, murder is the ultimate taboo; and murder of children is the most taboo form of murder.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Really insightful, thank you for sharing. I've been following the Sandy Hook case and learning about Adam Lanza from day one, and I was shocked to see how few people are talking about the discovery of his youtube channel

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, glad you found it insightful. Yeah, I am surprised that the mainstream media has just ignored it.

      Delete
    2. Surprised is greatly understating things...

      Delete
  7. do u have any more insight on how the channel was found? i've been working on some youtube archeology of my own and would love any tips on finding old and obscure videos/channels effectively!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Zero ContradictionsJuly 20, 2022 at 3:34 AM

      The following link was the very first public internet post and person (Reddit user u/u/Lightblaster87) who revealed Adam Lanza's secret Youtube channel. It is one of the most upvoted posts on the r/masskillers subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/masskillers/comments/pn7n0q/adam_lanzas_youtube_channel/

      Delete
  8. Well said! this lanza kid has made very interesting viewpoints thats why hes really by far the most unique one in my opinion compared to other school shooters.

    ReplyDelete
  9. He was Correctly Right about Life being Suffering and Suicide the Solution to alleviate that said Suffering.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Interesting capitalization style.

      Delete
    2. Well, a solution, but not THE solution.

      Delete
  10. First of all, he did not think that the primitive life is the ultimate paradise "But
    my feral self was also an impostor. Just as I realized that I could eliminate non-base values
    and have no need for the happiness which resulted from their fulfilment, I could eliminate
    base-values and have no need for the happiness which resulted from their fulfilment". Also if you were invested in his case, you'll find that in opposition to being completely shut indoors, he was very much into exploring the nature, hiking, etc., in fact it was one of the only activities he mentioned to the friend at the theatre and his father. It became almost the only activity he liked doing with Peter besides shooting, before he eventually stopped contacting him and everyone else. Peter also mentioned he could tie his own shoes during a hike and apparently Nancy was surprised to learn that. I think this shows that Nancy may not have known Adam as well as she thought she did, and she may have painted him as a much weaker, more vulnerable child than he actually is capable of doing. This affects how we as outsiders view AL since a lot of description of his everyday life was through the telling of Nancy, but she could have a very delusional view of her son in the beginning. I also want to point out that "the absence of physical hardship and practical problems" is likely not true in his case, people with Autism suffer from a different kind of physical hardship. i.e. a normal amount of noise may not cause significant problem for a neurotypical person but it could mean a great deal of pain for an autistic person like AL, and it could heavily delay and cause trouble for his daily routine. He was also failing classes in school, which is a practical problem, since he always wanted to do well academically. Although these problems may seem 'minor' compared to, for example a person who is struggling to find food and shelter every day, but you don't just compare hardship and suffering like that. Especially not for a severely troubled person like him, I don't think there is ever a separation between physical and psychological suffering. I don't even think those can be treated differently for anyone, they are always connected.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You should have read the post before commenting. That quote is in the post. I walked through his philosophical evolution from primitivist to eulavist.

      At the time of the murders, Lanza wasn't in school, so failing classes would have been an issue from the past, not a current problem. Also, given his views on culture, I don't think he wanted to do well academically. He talked about writing an essay that would get him rejected from university, for example. He rejected grades and "doing well" as false values, imposed by culture.

      In the years prior to the murders, he was living in isolation in his room, with garbage bags over the windows, so not exactly exploring nature. Maybe he enjoyed some hiking in earlier years, but I don't think he ever did any real wilderness travel or survival activities. He had no actual problems of survival. His mother supported him.

      You seem to be creating a fictional story about Lanza, the poor misunderstood autistic kid, who was really a victim of society, his mother, etc. You are not trying to understand the reality of his life and ideas.

      Delete

Post a Comment