Columbine- a dissertation

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1: Introduction

 

4/20/99: Shots ring out in a crowded cafeteria. Security cameras, installed to prevent littering, capture an indelible image of a tall young man in a trench coat leaping and swaggering among the tables brandishing a shotgun. Later, when the talk is buzzing back and forth the media pundits will question the boy’s peers, who will say:  “he was a loner, a loser, I never really knew him, but nobody thought he’d do this,” and the incident will be used as a platform from which to preach everything from gun control to censorship. The pundits will be wrong on all counts (Cullen, 2009). The shootings on April 20th of 1999 at Columbine Highschool, that this young man is about to commit, are not about gun control, violent video games, or popular culture. They are instead a cry of pain and rage that will be repeated until society learns to hear it. For now, however, all we know is that the gunman is young, male, and in such tremendous pain that by the end of the day he plans to be dead, along with his shooting partner, and his victims.

Those of us who wish to study the situation find ourselves lost in a welter of distorted and biased imagery and punditry (Brown, 1999; Cullen, 2004; Dedman, 2000; Sterngold, 1999) These distortions of reality arise as a result of locating these occurrences within the realm of the bipartisan political debate in this country.  This political debate highlights the divide in our society between the culture of fear and the adherents of the Constitution. The followers of the culture of fear insist that to insure public safety is worth any sacrifice, even giving up fundamental civil liberties. The Constitution, on the other hand, is based on the idea that the basic civil liberties insure the safety of the public, and that to violate them poses a far greater threat than any “terrorist,” or an armed student at a school. This conflict has a polarizing effect on people’s ideas about Columbine. 

The conversation rapidly takes on a two dimensional quality, giving the question of school shooting the appearance of a simple binary, amenable to a solution comprised of simply altering a single element. If only, we say, if only we had taken that one crucial step, installed metal detectors, forced the gunman into therapy, or encouraged this or that person to take the proper medication, then the whole thing could have been prevented. 

However, this simple approach fails to address the deeper roots of school shootings. So, it is hardly surprising that, even though a number of these simple interventions have been in use since Columbine, the number of school shootings and other spree/rampage type murders has only continued to grow.

Mens rea.  Society’s primary responses to acts of violence such as the Columbine shootings, and murder in general, are framed by our legal system and the concept of mens rea (Melton et al, 1997), or “evil mind.”  In this world-view, a person is found guilty, innocent, or not guilty by reason of insanity, depending on their intent to commit the criminal act. This way of looking at criminal activity is prevalent in society at large as well as the in the legal system. However, mens rea is primarily a system for determining whom to punish. When examined psychologically mens rea collapses into tautology. After all, one would have to be insane to some extent to risk incarceration and other social sanctions simply in order to express one’s feelings of anger and frustration by acting out violently, or killing another human being. Furthermore, when examined closely, the rationale of the criminal act, and the logic of the punishment invoked turn out to be exactly the same (Gilligan, 1996). Both are intended to redress wrongs by inflicting pain after the fact.  Both are based on the assumption that if, somehow, the bad people can be made to suffer the good people will be better off.  Increasing the total amount of suffering in the world can never reduce suffering or create healing for anyone. As such, our legal system is a seriously flawed tool for understanding and preventing violence and the suffering that both drives and derives from it. 

 Easy answers.  The media has a familiar, well-established, and very official sounding narrative it uses to handle incidents like the shootings at Columbine High School.  We find easy answers in this story. We refer to how aberrant and unusual such events are, how they are not, in any way, related to the rest of our culture (Newman et al, 2004). We reassure ourselves that the gunmen themselves had some deep and innate flaw that prevented them from acting normal like everyone else. We tell ourselves how, if only someone had spotted that flaw, it could have been accommodated or corrected for somehow and we could have prevented the incident from happening.  This approach brings a certain superficial comfort, but fails to address cultural and social forces, methods and memes that drive the school shooters.  Failure to address these forces leads to a picture of school shooters that completely obscures the ways in which school gunmen are, in fact, very much products of our culture and its expectations of young men. 

 Labeling the shooters as deviant, evil and insane, gives us permission to deny them empathy. This in turn allows us to ignore the actual personhood of the shooters, making it nearly impossible to recognize what school shooters are actually trying to accomplish. Acts of violence are acts of communication. Focusing on their newly created identities as mass murderers de-emphasizes, and ignores, their other identities as suicides.

 As Eric and Dylan might wish, we see only the great and powerful murderers, and ignore the frightened, powerless adolescents, hiding in the shadows, behind cultural curtains.  We fail to notice Eric and Dylan in their desperate, and lonely, struggle to create identities in the context of a culture whose hallmarks of masculinity are violence (Neroni, 2000), vengeance (Castillo, 1994), and a indifference to feelings and emotional needs, whether those needs be one’s own or someone else’s (Kupers, 1993).

 Our culture is a long way from shunning all killing and violence. For example during the year of the Columbine shootings, 1999, the US military and its NATO allies killed between 6,200 and 10,000 people in Kosovo (Kosovo Death Toll, 2009), depending on the source reporting, making the number of dead at Columbine seem like a drop in the ocean. Littleton Colorado is economically sustained largely through the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, and Eric Harris came from a military family (Cullen, 2009).  We cannot ignore the possibility that some aspect of the violence at Columbine was driven or encouraged by the intensive level of violence that our society considers legitimate and appropriate.

Making meaning of Columbine.  In order to make the deaths in Littleton have a lasting effect beyond heightening tension in schools and making the already outcast and socially compromised “Goth” and “Heavy Metal” segments of the adolescent population (Goldberg, 1999) even more feared and stigmatized, we need to make real meaning out of these events.  We need to move beyond the media, political machinations, and the politicians and see Columbine in terms of the personal tragedies they represent for the young people involved in them (Gilligan, 1996). 

If we are ever to understand the forces that drive these killers, we must take the dark and difficult path of venturing into their minds on their own terms. We need to examine the biological, social, and structural elements involved in the creation of the meme of school shooting, and why societies response to the events in question has failed utterly to prevent incidents like Columbine, from happening again, or from getting deadlier.

Seeking a single cause, however, leads us into a bewildering welter of possible hypotheses (Newman et al, 2004), but moving beyond the simple dynamics of mad, bad, or blameless, however, leaves us in a puzzling situation.  Something very powerful is happening in these individuals as well as in our culture to make such intense behaviors possible.  Biology almost certainly plays a part, as does individual mental illness. Societal norms and structures, like the social stratification of schools, gun control laws, and the glorification of violence in the media have a part as well. Possibly all of these phenomena are aspects of a deeper resonance or cultural structure and the gunmen are simply more vulnerable individuals, or even just individuals with wrong kind of cultural capital to find a socially acceptable outlet for expressing these feelings.

Situations like Columbine are complex and multiply determined. They take on the quality of being floating signifiers (Floating Signifier, 2009) having a different meaning for each observer. As some observers themselves become school shooters, exploring these many levels of subjectivity takes on an urgency that transcends the simplistic binaries suggested by the media.

Into the darkness.  One simple approach to understanding the subjectivity of the school gunmen is to examine it in the context of their own written words.  When we examine these writings in detail, noting their similarity, and the almost identical responses of the press and the survivors of the shootings, it is difficult not to conclude that school shootings have actually become a self-replicating meme (Dawkins, 1989) in our culture, something far more complex and difficult to understand and prevent than a simple one time act of deviance.  In fact, as of this writing, there have been at least 50 school shootings (A Timeline, 2009) since Columbine.

Finding the causes of these shootings requires a very special kind of thinking. We must look into the minds of these individuals without preconception, while simultaneously referring back to a known set of understandable principles that has sufficient depth to account for the fundamental tragedy (Gilligan, 1996) of these young men’s lives. At the same time we must find a way to connect the individual traumas and trials of the gunmen to universal principals, which can then form the basis of future interventions.  The actions taken by the gunmen are simultaneously grossly disturbing violations on an outward level, and deeply significant symbolic actions from the gunmen’s subjective perspective. We are in much the same position as a therapist attempting to understand a violently acting out patient. Psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytic thinking provide us with a very useful tool for understanding these events.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2: Review of the Literature

 

How does violence arise?  What makes some individuals more prone to violence than others? Is violence instinctive, or culturally driven? Questions like these underlie any exploration of school shootings. Answers to these questions, and arguments about the answers, have been bandied about for at least as long as there have been alphabets to record them.  A brief exploration of some of the answers arrived at through biology, psychology, and anthropology can help us find our way through the dark and secret world wherein live the roots of violence in our culture and in the inner worlds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. 

Nature versus nurture.  One of the primary, and often most controversial, questions surrounding the origins of violence is whether or not the impulse to murder is biologically based or based in the individual’s personality their and response to the social environment.  Fromm (Fromm, 1973) describes this dichotomy as the difference between an instinct and a passion. There is evidence that all mammals have some level of aggressive activity, and that these activities arise predictably in relation to certain stressors, especially overcrowding and competition for resources and mates, on the one hand.  On the other hand, mass murder, large scale, organized war, and the killing of others for the sake of ideology are specifically human behaviors. Humans are known to engage in types and levels of violence that are not found elsewhere in the animal kingdom, even among our closest relatives, the great apes.  (Johnson, 2009) 

We share a tremendous amount of our DNA and neurophysiological substrates with the rest of the animal kingdom. Our understanding of human violence can only benefit from understanding the underlying biological structures involved in violence, whether or not these structures somehow generate and drive a “death instinct” per se.

Early hunting behaviors, necessary for the survival of the species throughout most of our evolutionary history, are often mythologized as the origin of the urge towards violence. A close examination of the actual behavior of real hunting societies (Fromm, 1973), however, reveals that this idea is largely based on speculation by scholars with no direct experience of the lives of Neolithic peoples.

 In fact modern Neolithic societies gather much more of their food than they hunt. They tend to live in a state of primitive communism, where resources are distributed throughout the group according to need, and rarely if ever bother to organize themselves into serious, lethal, warfare. This pattern of living is forced upon people in hunting and gathering societies by the simple biophysical necessities of living in an unaltered ecosystem (Driscoll, 2009).  Only when “civilized” people come along and introduce more efficient means of production do homicide, lethal warfare, and mass murder/suicides become possible.

Biological Substrates of Violence

Testosterone.  Biology presents us with a number of plausible physiological substrates for the violent actions of our gunmen. School shooters are typically male and young. Young men are responsible for most of the violence occurring in our world. Some of this violence may be due to the influence of testosterone. Testosterone receptors are densely concentrated in the amygdala and the periaquaductal gray matter (Panksepp, 1998), the areas of the brain that produce aggressive responses when electronically stimulated in animals. Small wonder that males of most animal species are typically more aggressive than females. One rare exception to this tendency is the hyena whose females are far more aggressive than males. Female hyenas are so laden with testosterone that wildlife biologists are usually unable to determine their gender unless they can be immobilized, and surgically examined, or they happen to get caught in the act of nursing.  (Panksepp, 1998).  Clearly Testosterone has a role to play in the origins of aggression, if not violence.

Separation distress.  The consequences of isolation, and their effects on the brain, form the basis of another biological perspective on school shootings. One characteristic that all school shooters seem to share is that they are socially isolated (Fast, 2008). Social isolation has two primary effects on brain chemistry. When a social animal becomes separated from its peers it undergoes separation distress (Panksepp, 1998), a traumatic stressor that increases cortisol levels dramatically. Increased cortisol production, in turn, down-regulates serotonin production and transmission.  Low serotonin levels are frequently found in severely violent individuals.

Opioid neurotransmitters constitute the other major brain system involved in social isolation. Opioids are involved in the pleasure/reward systems associated with returning to the herd or family, and social bonding. Opioid addicts and users, when under the influence of the drugs, seek solitude. This behavior suggests that perhaps the artificial substance is taking the place of the natural rewards of interaction (Van der Kolk, 1989). Someone not taking narcotics could experience opioid withdrawal when deprived of comforting social contact.  An addict-like desperation (Mate´, 2004) a determination to pursue any means necessary to get a fix, in this case of intimacy, could arise.  Violence, sadly enough can provide that fix. It is, in a twisted way, a form of intimacy. 

Developmental factors. Developmental factors may also play a part. The prefrontal cortex, involved in making moral decisions and having empathy, does not develop fully until well into adulthood (Adolescent brain, 2009).  Many adolescents have little or no understanding of death. They will commit suicide (Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry Committee on Adolescence, 1996) almost accidentally. These adolescents start out by using self-harm as a means of getting attention. Things go seriously wrong when the teen in question begins to believe that they are actually immortal, and/or that they will be around to gloat over the grief their death will cause. To someone in this state of mind, our school shooters are actually quite successful. If what they want is to be noticed, talked about, and never forgotten, they have surely attained their goals. Unfortunately, like so many teen suicides, they are not around to enjoy the fruits of their efforts.

Psychoanalytic Roots of the “Death Instinct”

Freud.  Sigmund Freud first explored the question of human destructiveness while trying to explain why certain patients seemed to feel a compulsion to repeat painful feelings and emotional situations from the past.  These repetitions occurred both in their therapy sessions, and daily interactions (Freud, 1961).  Freud’s original formulation was that all human behavior was guided by instinctive drives toward pleasure and self-preservation. These re-enactments, which served neither end, were directly contradictory to Freud’s original theory. 

In Freud’s new theory, painful affects resulting from primal intrusions into the psyche of the individual arise. The repetitions are an attempt to bind them. These painful, primal, affects are also the source of the death drive, a phrase that was later translated to “death instinct”. For Freud, something has to die in order for the individual to be able to have functional relationships. In healthy development this “death” occurs during the Oedipal phase (Freud, 1905) of development.  It is simply a matter of accepting the primacy of the father, learning to use repression to bind up unacceptable psychic material, and ceasing to rely on projection, splitting, and other primitive tools, as a pre-Oedipal child does.  When the process goes awry, a neurotic compulsion to repeat the primal injury until the death drive can be bound arises in some cases.  In yet other situations the death drives become attached to a punishing and sadistic superego, which can then be projected outward in the form of authoritarianism and cruelty.

Object relations and violence. Melanie Klein (Klein and Mitchell, 1987) adds another dimension to the psychoanalytic exploration of human destructiveness. In her formulation the destructive drives arise out of the phenomenological world of the infant, which, in turn, is the result of human brain development. To Klein this is a world represented in a brain as yet incapable of logical thought, consisting entirely of sensations and affects. It is personified and animistic. Volition, personality and intent are attributed to all perceived phenomena. Hunger, instead of being seen in terms of an empty stomach, is seen as the hunger (object), who is causing this stomach discomfort, deliberately.  Klein’s world of the infant is dominated by the concept of talion, whereby the desired action is projected inward as an image of having that action done to oneself. The hunger (object) is not only out to get me, it wants to eat me. 

The hunger (object) in question is invariably the mother’s breast. It is split, in the infant’s primitive perception, into the good breast and the bad breast. The good breast is the breast in the act feeding. The bad breast is the evil hunger (object), a representation spun together out of projection, talion, and misunderstood somatic discomfort. The feeling of envy arises in the infant when he feels has no ability to predict which object he will encounter. “Envy is the angry feeling that the other person possesses and enjoys something desirable: the envious impulse being to take it away or spoil it” (Klein, 1957).

 Envy, in relation to the good breast, gives rise to guilt, fear, and the phantasy that the infant’s envious and destructive feelings have transformed the good breast into the bad breast.  Klein’s infantile world is chaotic, animated, and confusing. It has no clear delineation between what is internal and what is external. Negative feelings, guilt, fear, and the original envious rage are introjected and experienced as a poisonous object inside the body. This object must be excreted through violence, projection, or projective identification.

Projection, introjection, phantasy, splitting and primal animism are the characteristics of what Klein calls the paranoid/schizoid position. If the individual, with the help of appropriate parenting, successfully negotiates the vicissitudes of the first six months to a year of life their cognitive abilities engage. They are now able to reach Klein’s depressive position. Here partial and split internal objects are replaced by whole-but-ambiguous others. “Normal” human relationships can unfold. Some individuals, however, never manage to negotiate this treacherous territory. They remain in the paranoid/schizoid position indefinitely. Some individuals occupy a “borderline” state where they alternate between schizoid and depressive positions. Any individual under the impact of major stressors or trauma can regress to the paranoid/schizoid position.

Human violence, then, is a result of this regression. The victims are the recipients of the aggressors’ violent projections. Cruelty is the projection of a punitive superego. Murder is an attempt to kill off damaged and spoiled internal objects by projecting them outward and destroying them. 

Superego Development and Criminal Behavior

Parenting style and the reality principle. Psychoanalytic formulations of criminal behavior involve the development and function of the superego in a number different ways.  Criminal behavior, from this perspective, is a result of interactions between ego and environment that are not the direct expression of a death instinct, but instead are organized around controlling, or making tolerable, feelings of rage, greed and destructiveness.

August Aichhorn (1935) explored the role of identification with the parent as a potential source of delinquency, with emphasis on the resolution to the Oedipal situation in the formation of the superego.  He elucidated two commonly found forms of delinquent personality, delinquency through excessive severity and delinquency through excessive love. In the case of the delinquent whose parents are excessively severe, the voice of the superego is too harsh for the ego to handle, and becomes repressed completely, leaving the person free to commit crimes. In the case of the delinquent whose parents are excessively indulgent, the superego is weak, and the instinctual drives for possession and destruction simply overpower it. 

Aichhorn suggests that a thorough interpersonal history must be taken in order to distinguish which kind of person one is dealing with. Stern treatment of a person with a harsh superego will only result in further repression and thus further acting out. Stern treatment of a person with a weak superego can provide exactly the kind of internalized external structure that the person needs in order to grow.

 Freud’s idea that the ego operates by a pair of principles, called the reality principle and the pleasure principle (Freud, 1961), is crucial to our understanding of the growth of the superego.  The pleasure principle, simply put, is that the ego seeks pleasure through gratification of the instinctive drives. The reality principle is the grown-up version of the pleasure principle. The ego still seeks pleasure through gratification of the instinctive drives, but now its actions are moderated by the demands of reality, especially in a social context. The reality principle is the driving force behind ideas like putting off immediate gratification in favor of larger, later rewards, and avoiding pleasurable but forbidden activities out of fear of punishment.

 The reality principle is the domain of the superego. In Aichhorn’s formulation, the criminal is a person in whom the superego, through a failure, or crisis in the primal relationships, is unable to enforce the reality principle. This leaves the person in a regressed state, acting only on the pleasure principle.

Spectrum of delinquency.  Franz Alexander (Alexander and Staub, 1931) also explored the ego’s interaction with the superego and the world as a source of criminal behavior.  In Alexander’s (1931) formulation criminal behavior is closely related to neurotic symptoms, and is similarly derived from a person’s response to an instinctive urge whose fulfillment is forbidden by society. Alexander postulates a continuum of different possible responses, based on the nature and intensity of ego and superego involvement in the subject’s behavior. On one end of the continuum is the normal person, whose superego is strong and in accord with society. This person may simply daydream or fantasize about the criminal act. If the urge in question is a little too fraught and dangerous, the person might use dreams to express it instead of a conscious daydream. The strength of the subject’s ego makes it impossible to act out the fantasy, so it is safe. 

Further along the continuum the superego is weaker, but still in accord with societal demands. The subject can become an accidental criminal, experiencing a slip in behavior much like a slip of the tongue. The ego here is completely disconnected from the criminal behavior, over which it has no control, because it has no awareness. 

As we move further down the continuum, the superego loses potency. Behaviors gradually shift, moving from the world of conscious effort into the realm of neurotic compulsion. Here we find neurotic criminals, shoplifting movie stars, and philandering politicians. The ego is no longer controlling the criminal behavior, but it is aware, and experiences the crime as an uncontrollable response to a mysterious urge. Denial and rationalization support the ego’s inability to perceive the criminal intentions. Neurotic criminals experience an internal and generalized sense of guilt, presumably stemming from early Oedipal, or other, conflicts. They may commit crimes in order to assuage this guilt by receiving punishment from the outside world.

As the superego continues to lose potency, the defenses and rationalizations that keep the neurotic from perceiving their own criminal intent are endorsed by the ego.  We come to the realm of the chronic criminal. This person feels justified in their criminal activity. Society takes the place of the stern parent, or the punitive superego, and the ego is in full rebellion. Criminal behavior produces little or no guilt. It feels justified. The ego is completely aware and involved in the criminal behavior. The superego is repressed and ignored. Crimes of necessity may fall into this category, given dire enough circumstances.

Finally, these chronic criminals have children, and raise them with a criminal value system. This gives rise to Alexander’s final category the healthy criminal. Here the superego is introjected from criminal parents. It finds no problem in breaking the laws of society. The ego is involved in, and aware or the criminal behavior.  The accord between personal values, superego, and ego creates no conflict in the individual.  This lack of conflict is what Alexander means by saying a criminal is “healthy.”

Justification through suffering.  Self-defense, or response to injustice, is central to Alexander’s formulation.  The two things that most motivate and empower the reality principle in the superego are the fear of punishment and the hope of love. In a social setting the possibility exists for these basic drives to become subverted and overthrown. When, for example, an individual encounters a group of other individuals intent on destroying him, he will generally act to protect himself, never mind the protests of the superego or the provisions of the criminal code.  Similarly, the individual who lives in an unjust society can become reasonably convinced that unfair punishment will be meted out to him regardless of his actions. This reduces his hope of finding love, and, eventually, he will come to feel that he has nothing to lose. So, suffering, survival stress, and a sense of injustice reduce the potency of the superego. This principle becomes very important in understanding the actual manifestations of the continuum of ego involvement mentioned above. 

Experiences of suffering and injustice can affect anybody’s superego, but for a criminal, suffering that weakens the superego may lead to violent acting out.  In contrast, neurotic individuals may unconsciously induce punishment and cruelty from those around them as a means of weakening and subverting their own superego.  This allows them to act out their instinctive fantasies and to justify criminal behavior.  Finally, individuals can also experience persecution, injustice and threats to their own survival in response to purely internal stimuli, like a persecutory superego, or a psychotic delusion of persecution. A week spent working in an average drug rehabilitation facility will amply demonstrate all of these possibilities.

Primitive Ego Structures: the Role of Environmental Provision in Creating Violence

 Winnicott and environmental provision. Violence can be seen as a manifestation of a poorly developed ego structure. These manifestations take a variety of forms, which can also include the behaviors we associate with personality disorders. This viewpoint derives from analysts like D.W. Winnicott’s (1984) thoughts on the consequences of early failures in environmental provision.

Like Klein, Winnicott sees the experiential world of the infant as the origin of strong feelings of both love and hate. When the early environment is able to withstand the intensity of these feelings, it provides a container for them.  The developing infant is able to utilize this container to gradually define its own boundaries.  Eventually, the infant becomes aware of itself as a separate entity (Winnicott, 1989).  This awareness, in turn, helps the infant to begin experiencing the world as an objective phenomenon, and other people as complex ambivalent wholes rather than split off partial objects.  This new way of experiencing others leads to the discovery that the mother-object who is the recipient of the biting, devouring, frustrated rage of infancy is, in fact, the same person as the good mother-object who provides sustenance and comfort. This gives rise to empathic concern for the mother’s welfare. By internalizing the tolerance and containment of a healthy early environment, this concern is eventually generalized into the ability to interact in a healthy caring way with others.

If something goes wrong, however, a less wholesome ego structure evolves. The developing infant comes up with a compromise that works on the surface, but will always mourn for the loss of the early good environment and objects. Winnicott draws a connection between antisocial behavior and hope. In a moment of hope, he says, antisocial behavior is engaged in an attempt to force a return, or revival of the earlier structuring and containing energies from the parents, or, as the case may be, from society. 

Winnicott highlights adolescence as a time when this kind of behavior is most likely to emerge. This is due to the unique nature of adolescence as a developmental stage, much like early infancy. In both there are tremendous changes in the body, giving rise to new possibilities for deliberate action in pursuit of instinctual fulfillment, and in both the process of becoming an individual is a crucial aspect of healthy navigation of the developmental phase. The primary difference is that whereas the infant is powerless and can only indulge in primitive fantasies of fusion and destruction, the adolescent has the power and physical ability to actually seduce or destroy others. 

Once again, as in early childhood, the adolescent is faced with the task of encountering a real and unpredictable world, a world in which the establishment of boundaries, gaining knowledge of one’s limitations, and the creation of an independent identity are essential for the continued health and safety of the individual.  Any previous failures in the environment will now arise as pressing emotional needs, crying out for reworking in the form of antisocial behavior. Unfortunately, in this case, it is society that acts in the role of the parental environment.  The adolescent’s struggle against that environment, and their need to and be contained by it all too often results in lifelong negative consequences.

Winnicott identified dissociation as a regular feature of the clinical presentation of antisocial behavior or tendencies. Clients who engage in antisocial acts frequently deny having any memory of their actions. While this might be interpreted as simple lying, Winnicott observed that his patients seemed completely sincere, and often genuinely surprised, when presented with evidence of their wrongdoing, even though later they could acknowledge, in a disconnected, intellectual way, having committed those acts. He surmised that what was happening was due to an internal, structural issue rather than a conscious attempt to mislead.

 This structural issue consists of the ego’s excessive use of primitive splitting mechanisms to cope with unpleasant affective content.  In a normal developmental situation the ego is thoroughly integrated, able to see others as complex, ambiguous wholes, and to use repression to contain negative feelings.  For a person engaging in this kind of dissociation, actions will remain in memory, but the affective content and the motivation may be repressed.  The person can remember performing the actions, but will deny vigorously the true intentions or feelings connected with those actions until they are revealed in analysis, or integrated into the ego with the help of environmental provision. 

In dissociation, the ego has split off the negative affects and the motivations arising from them.  They exist as negative objects in the psyche, floating just outside the realm of consciousness. When sufficient drive tension has built up within these people, the free floating conglomerations of negative feeling hijack control of the body and faculties in order to seek expression.  The ego remains split off, disconnected so that the memory of the event is vague and unreal at best, if not completely irretrievable.

Kernberg and the construction of identity. Kernberg (1976) recognized a similar phenomenon in dealing with “borderline” patients. His patients would exhibit drastic swings in their affective orientation towards him during the course of therapy. During one phase they would idealize him, singing his praises in an almost worshipful tone. In the other, he would become the epitome of evil, and they would revile him with scorn. What was interesting about this was that while at one or the other extreme, the patients would have no memory whatsoever of having ever felt the other way.

 Kernberg recognized this pattern of behavior as one relating to a pattern of internal object relations, based on primitive splitting mechanisms. When the environment does not provide an adequate container for primal affects, the individual is unable to develop sophisticated defenses against negative affect that are primarily based on repression. Splitting involves never letting the good aspects of the object come into contact with the bad aspects. This prevents integration of the good and bad internal representations of self and object. These representations are essential in the process of creating an identity, an internal representation of a whole self, interacting with a world of whole objects. In Kernberg’s formulation, the ego slowly develops through increasing levels of complexity and integration, using introjections of the surrounding affective environment, and, ultimately, as a sense of separate self develops, it makes and integrates identifications with the family, and society.  These eventually lead to the creation of an identity.  In the case of an individual who relies excessively on defenses based on splitting there are few, if any integrated internal representations of whole objects, so forming an identity becomes problematic at best.  Early failure of environmental provision, then, completely derails the developmental process, leading to an entirely different and less robust ego structure. This weaker, less well-integrated ego, structure is more susceptible to distortions and failures of the superego, which, as we have seen, can lead to antisocial behavior.

Kernberg’s (1976) schema consists of a series of ever increasing levels of disturbance in the normal functioning of the ego, based on the utilization of primitive splitting defenses, as opposed to the more mature use of repression.  The person, in Kernberg’s case the patient, uses these defenses based on the inner structure of their ego and how poorly integrated it is.  To Kernberg the ego is constructed during the first few years of life, out of units of “internalized object relations represented by a certain affect, object representation, and self representation.”(Kernberg, 1976, pg 29) 

These units begin as simple introjections of feelings and interactions. At first these are split, according their affective content, into positives and negatives. The positive representations of self and object fuse together into the beginnings of the ego. The negative representations and affects are rejected and projected outward. 

As the infant matures, it develops the ability to perceive the difference between self and others, and these primitive introjections begin to differentiate. Gradually the infant begins to understand that the negative object against whom their anger is directed is, in fact the same person as the positive object whose love they seek, and the ability to feel concern arises. Winnicott would say that the object mother and the environment mother have become recognized as the same individual (Winnicott, 1984). 

In normal development the caregiver is able to contain the infant’s negative affects, and these experiences, too, become available for introjection. Under the influence of the caregiver’s compassionate containment, these positive and negative introjections begin to integrate, leading to the integration of the good and bad self-representation. As the individual’s cognitive abilities mature enough to allow for the perception of role taking, these introjections eventually develop into identifications, a more integrated version of introjections. Identifications eventually integrate into an ego identity, a “consolidation of ego structures” with a “consistent overall perception of the world, and a sense of consistency in one’s own interpersonal interactions”(Kernberg, 1976, pg 30). 

While positive self-representations tend to agglomerate into some form of identifications regardless, without adequate support from the environment, the negatively affectively associated self and object representations follow a different path. They remain undifferentiated, subject to projection and eventually reintrojection as the nuclei of a punitive and sadistic superego. 

Splitting continues to be used as the main form of defense, preventing higher levels of integration from occurring.  The individual is usually able to cobble together an ego identity of sorts, but this identity lacks a robust inner structure.  It is brittle and prone to collapse into regressive states wherein primitive splitting, envy, idealization and aggression predominate. 

Superego development.  The superego develops in a similar manner to the ego. It is composed of the same structural units, internalized representations of object relations with a given affect attached to a particular representation of self and others. These affective/cognitive units do not integrate into the structure that forms the superego until after the ego has consolidated it’s structure to some extent and has begun the work of role taking and identity, usually sometime during the time between the second and fifth year of life. 

During this period, in a healthy affective environment, the early affectively negative introjections, or sadistic superego nuclei, fuse and integrate with the ideal self and ideal object representation. This fusion gradually becomes depersonalized and evolves into a generalized set of rules for behavior, recognizable as an adult superego.

Continuum of neurotic behavior.  If there is excessive splitting, a lack of environmental provision, of if the early superego nuclei are simply too harsh to integrate, the superego will fail to integrate properly.  This gives rise to a continuum of possible clinical presentations. One end consists of a total failure of integration in both the ego and the super ego.  This situation presents as a kind of psychosis.  The person’s ego and superego are completely submerged, possibly non-existent, and incapable of moderating behavior and perception.  Here affective and cognitive functions are completely dominated by projection, talion, projective identification and other primitive manifestations.

The other end of the continuum consists of a fairly normal ego development, but with the superego still containing powerful, sadistic primitive nuclei.  These render the individual so afraid of their own interior contents that they shut down, and constrict their affective engagement with the world as much as possible. Coping with this fear leads to a classic rigidly controlled neurotic presentation. In the middle are the group of people often called borderline, who present with aspects of both ends of the continuum, and may even alternate between them in their approach to affective stressors.

 In all of these conditions, rational thought can easily break down under affective pressure, resulting from the various attempts to cope with the negative affects, generated by the sadistic superego nuclei. As we move towards the borderline and psychotic end of the continuum, rational thought occasionally becomes impossible as subjective phenomenon such as projection, splitting, and talion take over reality testing under affective pressure. 

Finally, for those who are at the fully psychotic end of the continuum, formal operations, or rational thought, may never develop at all.  Rational thought requires the ability to balance two sides of a question.  For individuals at the psychotic end of Kernberg’s continuum all phenomena are binaries, split into Good and Evil, according to their affective charge at the moment.  The Evil side of the binary must be shunned, avoided, and ignored. This makes it impossible to achieve formal rational thought, role taking, empathy, or any other cognitive feat that involves seeing both sides of a question.

The Psychodrama of Murder

Dead selves and organs of humiliation.  James Gilligan (1996) has a lot to say about the dynamics of murder and violence based on his many years working in the prison system. In his formulation, the murderer’s sense of self is destroyed by shame or humiliation.  Powerful cultural forces of misogyny and homophobia shape and amplify these feelings, causing the potential murderer to feel emasculated. Emasculation is experienced as a death, the death of the murderer’s identity, his sense of self.  “Death of the self brings with it a sense of the intolerability of existence, ones own and everyone else’s” (Gilligan, 1996,p41). The murderer attempts to restore his sense of self, self worth, and masculinity by violently destroying the sources of his sense of self-loss.

This may be a person who has humiliated him, a witness to his humiliation, or the very organs, eyes, mouth, and sometimes genitals, which perform the actions, witnessing, speaking, and having sex, that symbolically represent his shame. Taking life doesn’t bring the dead self back to life, as the murderer soon discovers. 

Instead of being rejuvenated and restored, the murderer now faces the ethical, moral, and legal consequences of killing human beings. These include further humiliation and shame, at the hands of a vengeful society bent on restoring its own sense of self, or in this case community, by destroying the murderer. Having failed to bring the dead interior back to life, and unable to cope with society’s vengeful response, the only thing left for the murderer to do is to make the exterior match the dead interior, and commit suicide.

Environmental and historical factors

Beyond psychoanalysis.  Individual development does not take place in a vacuum. The individual lives within the context of a family, the family functions within the context of a community, and the community exists within the context of a culture and a society. The life of the child is structured by the mores and expectations of society, as well as by the individual personalities of the parents.  The individual is invariably a product of the culture at large as well as the family (Erikson, 1950).

 In the beginning of the 20th century, the shocking violence of World Wars I and II and the rise of Fascism, as epitomized by the Nazi party in Germany, inspired a number of psychoanalytic thinkers to turn their attention to the question of exactly how ordinary people, from ordinary families, could come to follow and obey leaders who asked them to commit extraordinary atrocities.  The now infamous Milgram Experiment (Milgram, 1963) and the “F-scale” developed by Adorno (Adorno, 1950) are examples of the attempts made by a group of Scholars known as the Frankfurt School to operationalize these explorations into empirical, and replicable findings. 

Erich Fromm (1941), another member of this group focused his attention on the individual’s responses to the pressures of society as they might show up in a client seeking therapy. He has a number of things to say that seem to shed light on the situation at Columbine.

Escape from Freedom

One approach to understanding the violence that seems to be an unspoken substrate in western culture was formulated by Fromm (1941) in his attempts to explain the violence that dominated the early years of the 20th century. 

Primary ties. According to Fromm, violence is a response to the painful existential choices we face as individuals in the modern world, having escaped from the bondage of medieval, theocratic society, with its monolithic structures of hierarchy in both the secular and religious realms.  This structure, while often repressive, provided the individual with a sense of place in the larger whole. This served to prevent the kind of existential stress we face today. The individual was a cog in a vast machine, and it made little difference to that individual’s sense of knowing where they belonged whether they were a good cog or a bad one. 

In the modern world, each individual stands alone, on his/her own merits. There is no omnipotent and omniscient God in whose eyes all men have valuable souls, presiding over an overwhelmingly powerful church. Instead, the modern individual faces a random, chaotic marketplace where value is largely determined by net financial worth, a world where they must create their own meaning, while competing in a struggle for primacy.  The idea that each individual has an inherently valuable soul is largely considered a fairy tale.  The media, which has come to replace more traditional methods of cultural transmission, reinforces this idea, ignoring and erasing the individual and his emotional needs as person. Individuality vanishes into “ratings.”  The individual is transformed from a person with a soul into a data point in a statistical calculation. This data point’s primary purpose in existing is economic; its function is to buy more goods and services.  The data point’s subjective experience of meaning is irrelevant.  

The modern individual may indeed be free from the oppressive restrictions that the medieval church imposed on thought, expression, sexuality and spirituality.  Without a ready-made context in which to experience themselves as inherently meaningful, however, only a few, very rare, modern individuals can use this freedom from oppression to act as truly empowered, self-sustaining individuals. 

Instead, most people are frightened by this existential uncertainty. They seek to comfort themselves, by returning emotionally to the kind of relationships that characterized former ways of interacting. These tend to be symbiotic. In the context of a hierarchical society, the most readily available form of symbiotic relationship is sadomasochism.  In the sadomasochistic equation, the top and the bottom are deeply connected through mutual dependency. This sadomasochistic tendency in society crystallizes in the, so-called, “authoritarian” personality type.  These people become bullies, the type of people who seek absolute dominance over those beneath them in the social hierarchy, and treat those above them with slavish dependency.

Five needs.  Fromm (1955) identified five basic human emotional needs: the need to relate socially to others; the need to express oneself creatively; the need for fixed roots; the need for one’s own identity; and the need to locate oneself intellectually. In order to be healthy, a society must meet these needs for the individuals within it.

 However, with the exponential growth in technology and the coming of the industrial revolution, many individuals found themselves removed from the economic and social context that had previously met these needs. Instead of growing up with a clear set of expectations and obligations, as is embodied in institutions like family owned farms and small businesses, they were uprooted from these familiar landscapes and contexts and forced to work in vast, impersonal, and rigidly hierarchical systems of industrial production. These social structures, whose emphasis is only on profit, fail to provide the means to fulfill the five basic human needs.

An individual living in a society lacking these means experiences a sense of unreality, alienation and irretrievable loss. This alienation creates an overwhelming need for closeness to others and a sense of position in the world. Violence and crime are a response to these needs. In Fromm’s conception, a person who is subjected to the alienation of modern society is likely to be irresistibly drawn to sadomasochistic interactions and relationships. These relationships, while unpleasant and uncomfortable, are also so deeply enmeshed as to be somewhat symbiotic in character and flavor. They also leave no doubt as to one’s position in them. However, these seeming gains are based not on true affiliation, but on fear. The sadomasochistic relationship fails to satisfy, creating a bottomless need.

Alienation and hierarchy.  An alienated society rapidly becomes a hierarchical society.  Those on top sadistically impose on those below, and those below pick on those beneath them in an ever-increasing spiral of cruelty and frustration. A given individual’s ability to control their behavior is all that determines whether or not they keep their sadomasochistic search for connection within the boundaries defined by law.

Fromm’s formulation does away with the distinction between the “neurotic” and the “healthy” criminal. Both act in response to unconscious motivations to fulfill instinct driven needs. However, it is society’s repressed content that they are expressing. It makes little sense to differentiate them. Instead Fromm focuses on the factors that provoke the instinctive reaction, or exacerbate the dysfunctionality of the response to it. Fromm is interested in factors like socioeconomic status, and the opportunities that they provide, or fail to provide, for sadomasochistic satisfaction without violating the law.  For example, a wealthy person can satisfy their sadomasochistic urges by dominating their domestic servants or underlings at work.  A poor person, on the other hand, has only their family and community to act their fantasies out on, and is more likely to end up breaking the law in the process.

Conformity, Patriarchy, Sadomasochism, and Lebensraum

Tricky territory.  Sadomasochism, profit motive, and authoritarian personality can be seen at work in virtually every modern institution and in organizations of all sizes. These, underlying, unspoken structures are powerful factors in the modern social environment.  Developing an approach to handling them is essential to assuming the “adult” roles adolescents like Eric and Dylan aspire to eventually fulfill. Their struggles to navigate through this tricky cultural territory are, of necessity, very strong elements in the thinking and feeling processes that lead to the shooting.

Social stratification and self-doubt/loathing.  Fromm (1955) observed that the demands of the authoritarian/sadomasochistic approach to society are particularly potent in the lower middle class, to which the shooters belonged.  Here there is not enough financial cushioning to allow for much in the way of compassion or individualism. Instead, caught between the rich, who are trying to get richer on the blood sweat and tears of the lower and lower middle classes, on the on hand, and the poor, who would potentially like to rise up and replace the entire class structure, on the other, the lower middle class feels tremendous self-doubt and anxiety about the future. These negative feelings are projected outwards as a potent hostility towards change, and towards outsiders, who represent difference. 

Adolph Hitler, for example, cashed in on this projected hostility, basing his political platform on the simple proposition of figuring out who the outsiders, and/or potential agents of political change, were, and then killing them all. Eric and Dylan thought that the Nazi’s “screwed up a few times but their beliefs sure looked good”(Harris and Klebold, 2009). They wanted to figure out who the people responsible for their sense of self-doubt were and to rise, like Hitler, to a new position of power and transcendence by murdering their enemies.

Transcendence and “robot” conformity.  In the wake of the collapse of centralized religious authority, this urge to transcend becomes excruciating, as the interactive context of society is gradually corrupted by sadomasochistic responses to the terrifying freedoms the modern world faces. 

There is a deep need for a return to what Fromm (Fromm, 1941) calls primary ties, the identity subsuming connections to an allegedly divine authority, manifest in the institutions of divinely ordained secular rulership (as in the divine right of kings) and the centralized power of the Catholic Church.  This need gives rise to a desire to find a similarly overpowering authority to surrender to, giving meaning to the daily struggle for economic and emotional survival. That desire, ultimately, becomes a mindless surrender to external demands in the form of social norms, and “common sense.”  “Robot” (Fromm, 1941) conformity of this sort is comforting for most people.  However, some of the more vulnerable individuals in society experience the pressure to conform as constricting and painful. 

The dysphoria is particularly strident for young people in rural and suburban environments, like Littleton Colorado.  Here there are few opportunities to explore alternatives to the mainstream, conformist culture, and the military industrial complex, with it’s many demands for conformity in the form of loyalty oaths and security clearances, provides the bulk of the employment opportunities. 

Transcendence and conformity at Columbine.  Conformity to norms is an intensely salient feature if high school social life.  The punishments for nonconformity in high school are severe, combining the agency and ability of adulthood with the ingenious cruelty of a child.  At Columbine High School these punishments were particularly sadistic and severe (Fast, 2004), including punching, pelting with objects and food, shoving people into lockers and forcing them to perform humiliating acts that would easily qualify as violations of the Geneva Convention were they performed by a nation state.

Moral Aloneness: High School as a Microcosm

Social stratification.  High school, where adolescents are gathered together for the specific purpose of indoctrination into the ways of the mainstream culture to prepare them for the adult roles they are expected to play, is a microcosmic recreation of the dynamics of society in general.  Wealthier kids’ parents supply them with such perquisites of their status as extra coaching, athletic equipment, cars and formal outfits to wear to proms etc.  They rise to prominence as jocks, cheerleaders, and popular kids. Lower class, and lower middle class kids are outcast and ridiculed.  In Littleton, where the average home sells for $200,000 (Fast, 2008), the one available public high school serves the children of the few blue-collar workers as well as the wealthy, and these contrasts are highlighted.

Any adolescent who is in this situation will be subjected to an enormous amount of emotional pressure. Even an adolescent with good social skills and a strong, resilient, ego structure would find the delicate dance of conformity and politicking required to keep afloat in the turbulent, hormone driven, emotional and social waters of a hierarchal, sadomasochistic, milieu like Columbine Highschool, stressful.  An adolescent with poor social skills and compromised ego structure, especially if they were lower middle class and lacked the social, and monetary capital to buy their way into popularity, could easily end up as an outcast.

Moral aloneness.  This adolescent would quickly fall prey to what Fromm (Fromm, 1941) called “moral aloneness.”  Moral aloneness is simply the need to belong to a group, and to know that others feel or think the same way as oneself.  All adolescents experience some level of moral aloneness as they strive to find role models and groups to identify with. In psychoanalytic terms we would call this a process of seeking positive objects to introject and assimilate into an identity. This feeling is intensified for adolescents whose ego structures are weak. 

For these adolescents moral aloneness becomes an unsolvable problem that creates enormous internal pressure. They are “damaged goods.” They respond poorly to emotional tension, and are often rejected and shunned by their peers. This happens right at a time when what they need most is healthy social interactions with peers and adults, to enable then to find and introject models of appropriate emotional containment. What they get instead is rejection from seemingly indifferent adults and peers, who may actually only be stressed and distracted by their own struggle to maintain a place in the hierarchy, with the possibility of punitive bullying from either always hovering in the background. 

This social situation mirrors the broken inner landscape, confirming the vicious ranting of the punitive superego. Meanwhile society continues to expect ever-increasing levels of responsible behavior and emotional discipline. This creates tremendous tension between the two opposite drives. Tension becomes pressure. This pressure cannot be relieved. Even when the adolescent in question manages to have occasional positive social interactions, these experiences are impossible to introject, and end up getting split and integrated into the existing internal model; a world of all positive and all negative partial objects that cannot be experienced at the same time.

Cultural scripts.  Without the self-confidence and resilience that come from solid internal structure, adolescents become particularly vulnerable to cultural messages, messages that their more sturdily put together peers are able to understand as entertaining and fantastical.  To the damaged adolescent these messages become templates for behavior, directions for the construction of a ready made false self (Winnicott, 1989), complete with mannerisms, ideals, and quirks, but created entirely by emulation, having the appearance of a strong ego, but lacking the inner resources that come from a healthy ego structure.  When they watch the movie or play the video game, they are looking for something more than entertainment, something akin to religious faith, a pre-ordained script to guide them through the tricky process of becoming a person.

 It is easy to see how these destructive scripts could be enacted in response to overwhelming social and emotional pressure (Newman et al, 2004). When compromised adolescents experience rejection and bullying by peers, they experience a feeling of helplessness, and self-doubt, which gradually becomes self-loathing.  In a person with poor internal structure, the tension generated by this self-loathing, creates a split.  On one side of the split, the desire for transcendence creates fantasy of superiority and supreme power.  On the other the self-loathing is projected outward onto the oppressive social order. 

The fantasy of supreme power is reified and reinforced by the many powerful images of masculine power-as-violence seen in the media and society at large, especially the part of society that is connected with the military.  The outcast adolescents, through fantasy and projection, are able to see themselves not as lonely losers in the game of life, but as potential culture heroes just waiting for their opportunity to claim, by acts of gratuitous violence, their place as the rightful leaders of the social milieu.  This, they believe, will win them the popularity they secretly envy and crave. Acts like the shootings at Columbine are simply enactments of this fantasy, attempts to navigate the tricky cultural and interpersonal landscape of adolescence by making a tangible reality out of distorted emotional contents.  

Greater historical context.  Conformity, reactions to conformity, and inner self-doubt and loathing projected onto an enemy who is then murdered, are central themes in the history of Western civilization (Fanon, 1963).  Nazi Germany is one often-cited example. Hitler preached that it was the destiny of the German people to expand. Rather than independent sovereign nations, places like Poland were seen simply as “lebensraum” (Smith, 1986), empty space where good Germans could be living.  Of course these good Germans would live in lockstep conformity to Hitler’s norms.  At the same time, the rise of the Nazi party was based on propaganda which revolved around the concept of Germany as an oppressed nation forced to conform to harsh treaty agreements by foreign powers.  Any self-doubt, or self-hatred experienced by the Nazis was quickly projected on to their Jews, Gypsies, and social and political nonconformists, who were accordingly taken out and slaughtered.

While the Nazi party in Germany is often portrayed as atypical, it is important to remember that the founding of many nations were not much different. For example, there were people living in the Americas at the time of its “discovery” by Columbus, including a number of quite sophisticated nation states. These were considered irrelevant and displaced or destroyed in the name of “manifest destiny,” (Zinn, 2005) a concept essentially no different from lebensraum.  Like the Jews in Nazi Germany, Native Americans were rounded up and placed in camps. However, there were a lot more than 6,000,000 of them. Colonists even used chemical and biological warfare in the form of free alcohol and smallpox soaked blankets to accomplish their ends. 

Like the Nazis, many of the American colonists used the rhetoric of “religious persecution” and the pursuit of “religious freedom” to justify their colonial ambitions. What most history books tend to leave unsaid, that any Quaker or Unitarian (Quakers versus Puritans, 2009) well versed in history could tell you, is that the freedom these “pilgrims” sought was the freedom to publicly torture and kill members of competing sects, and to live lives characterized by absolute obedience to the colonial governors and the harsh laws of Puritan society.  

Other colonists, who ostensibly arrived in pursuit of commercial gain, also lived under harsh dictatorial rules (Coontz, 2000). Pioneer life, while often presented in terms of isolated family units nobly struggling to survive in the wilderness, in fact revolved mainly around large communal projects, such as land clearing, crop harvesting, building homes and barns and preserving the harvest. These “independent pioneers” reserved the harshest of sanctions for those who failed to conform. Exile, or ostracism, tantamount to a slow death sentence, was their fate.

To be fair, we can find similar examples in the history of every major modern nation. In all cases it is the middle and lower middle classes who create the need for colonies and who form the bulk of the colonists. Apparently, the confluence of the forces of conformity, rebellion in the form of escape, and mass murder in service of emotional relief via scapegoating, is not merely an aberration in the behavior of the students of one American high school one Tuesday afternoon in 1999.  Rather, it is rooted deep in the very fabric of Western civilization. 

Patriarchy. In Fromm’s (1955) conception the root of this behavior runs up from the ground of patriarchy.  He derives this formulation from the difference between what he calls mother love and father love.  In mother love the child is loved simply for existing. Love is unconditional, and requires nothing in the way of conformity. In father love on the other hand, love is conditional upon not disappointing the father.

The concept of conditional love, when applied on a cultural level, translates into a hierarchical social structure. Those whom the father loves the most are on top, and those on the bottom have disappointed the father, or in the case of a society the leader, and can safely be treated with contempt. This kind of social structure, with various modifications, is the form taken by every known modern civilization. We call it patriarchy, after the central father figure. 

Patriarchy sets the emotional tone for scapegoating almost automatically. Those who violate father’s, or society’s, or God’s laws are displeasing to father (society, God).  To kill them would be pleasing to father (society, God), and if someone makes a fat profit out of the deal, that must be their just reward.

This logic also applies to the thinking behind colonial conquest (Fanon, 1963). Those people over there, who happen to live on land that I want, those people don’t live by father’s laws. They are lesser than I and mine, who do follow the father’s rules. They lack souls, as it were. Therefore killing them all and taking their land is simply another manifestation of father’s will and a glorification of my race’s martial spirit.

Similarly the same logic is used in society to justify racism. Those dark skinned people over there, who, incidentally, are descended from people who had formerly lived on land that I wanted, and who now have been colonized, don’t follow father’s will. Obviously God does not favor them because they are poor. Clearly they need to be segregated, relegated to only the lowest and meanest labors and the worst places to live, so that they don’t pollute the pure good people. Locking them up in jail, where they can’t cause any further trouble would be for their own good. In the case of Nazi Germany the distinction had more to do with religion than skin color, but the motivation works out to be much the same.  As in all such systems a small minority at the top of the hierarchical structure stood to make a substantial profit, and these few saw themselves as the chosen ones, favored by destiny.

The outward expression of these ideas has changed as technology has progressed, and an increasingly large percentage of the world’s surface has come to be conquered, colonized and eventually autonomous.  The idea of the “divine patriarch” gradually lost influence as people in general turned more and more to technology for answers, although it is still quite popular in some small segments of the community.  Instead “progress” and “economic necessity,” in the form of quarterly profits, usurp the divine demanding father as the ultimate authority. 

However, the idea of justifying one’s own success and other’s failure, in terms of relative goodness and badness in the eyes of an external authority, is still quite prevalent.  The figure of “God the father” is still routinely invoked when invading another country, or removing someone’s civil rights.  Given how deeply these sadomasochistic principles are rooted in the very structures of our culture, is it not much of a stretch to imagine that they were at play in Littleton Colorado and Columbine High School. 

Social Constructions 

The murder-suicides at Columbine High School are the end result of a complicated interpersonal and emotional process.  Understanding them requires examining some of the darker aspects of ourselves, and our culture. Our first temptation, instead, is to seek a proximate cause (Newman, 2004) or triggering event. This is a defense against the anxiety produced by the very randomness of the events. Similarly it is comforting to blame the shootings on individual flaws and pathologies in the characters of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, which protects us from seeing our own reflection in them. However, aside from an increased vulnerability, Eric and Dylan were just as human as you or I. The phenomenon of school shooting is more complex, as we see in the way others have repeated the actions of the Columbine shooters, and the increasing frequency with which such incidents occur (Timeline, 2009). 

Current thinking on Columbine.  This need for a comforting, simple explanation is rife throughout the recent writings on Columbine and other school shootings. These troubling events are first given the name “School Rampage (SR) shootings,” which helps us to distance ourselves from the shooters. K. Newman et al. (2004) coined this term in her exploration of several school shootings that took place before Columbine. After carefully exploring a large number of explanations and conducting a huge number of interviews with survivors, Newman concludes that SR shootings are the result of bullying, small town social structures that allow the shooters to “fly under the radar,” combined with readily available cultural scripts that lead the shooters to believe that they can restore their masculine identity and attain popularity and power through violence (Neroni, 2000).  This scenario does describe the process of becoming a school shooter, however, it falls short of explanation.  It fails to explain why all of the bullied, small town children who are exposed to macho cultural scripts that do not end up committing SR shootings, to say nothing of the small number of female school shooters.

D. Cullen (2009), while going into great detail about the town of Littleton/Columbine, devotes roughly half of his text to the reactions of the victims, but offers even less by way of explanation.  Although we can learn about the intimate details of Eric and Dylan’s lives leading up to the shootings by reading Cullen’s book, the only explanation he offers for the shootings is the standard story that Eric was a psychopath (Brooks, 2004), and Dylan a follower with little or no will of his own.

Both of these analyses suffer from an inability to understand or empathize with the shooters. J. Fast (2008) does a substantially better job of getting at this understanding by using Grounded Theory to explore all known information, including the Columbine journals and interviews with shooters from other incidents that did not commit suicide. Fast finds that SR shootings arise out of a combination of the natural drive of all adolescents to attain and create an identity in a larger context, emotional damage of some sort in the shooter’s past, a poor fit between the shooter and their social environment, and a histrionic, “drama queen” type personality in the shooter.

Why Grounded Theory 

The complexity of the problem.  Delving into the subjective world of a school shooter requires the use of a complex sort of research tool that reliably satisfies several criteria. One requirement is that, if our findings are to be useful, it must be a method with some basis in empirical reality. Another is that, in order address the complex and densely laden meanings associated with mass murder, our method must be responsive to the phenomenological reality of the shooters. For example we might statistically analyze the journals and come up with the result that the word “kill” comes up twice as often as the word “love.” However without insight into the subjective meaning of these terms, and their significance to the shooters, we would never know for sure if this meant that killing was twice as important as loving, or that loving was much more important, but seemed so impossible to attain, so that it became easier to talk about killing. Finally our method must actually tell us something about the shooters that we didn’t already know. 

Issues of measurement.  Lawrence Kohlberg (Colby and Kohlberg, 1984) has spent the better part of three decades creating a scale that measures an individual’s ability to make moral judgments based on that individual’s increasingly complex sociomoral perspective taking, which in turn depends on both increasingly powerful cognitive ability and increasingly complex integration of internal object relations.  Kohlberg notes that, if one is operating at a level where primitive splitting and projective mechanism dominate one’s interpersonal world, it becomes basically impossible to put oneself in another’s place.

 For a person at this level of development, the other is perceived only as a collection of rejected and projected pieces of the self. If it were emotionally possible to put oneself in the place of those partial objects, they would not be split off and projected.  It would be fairly straightforward to use Kohlberg’s criteria to analyze the many moral judgments and value statements that are present in the journals.  However, all that this would tell us is that the shooters made very crude moral judgments without any real empathy or concern for others’ welfare.  This explanation, while true, tells us little that is new.  We could deduce this information from the body count at Columbine High School. 

Grounded theory. There is, however, a method available in the social sciences that answers our needs quite nicely. It is called grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Its purpose is to discern the core variables involved in dealing with a given social situation by a deep analysis of what the subject has to say about it. This analysis is obtained by repeatedly breaking down the text, and grouping the resultant ideas by category and theme. Eventually, this process, in effect, distills the data down to one or two key concepts that are thought to be the essential elements in the subjects’ thinking about their situation.

 

 

 

Chapter 3: Method

Problem of scope.  One important methodological consideration is to define the scope of the current project. It would be tempting to generalize, to say that the writings and thoughts of Eric and Dylan are representative of all school shooters, all mass murderers, or possibly even all of humanity, and to seek a universal explanation, leading to a “silver bullet,” a preventative intervention for any and all mass murderers. The scope of this project, however, must be smaller than that. 

This project is an attempt to peer into the minds of two individuals who made a particular kind of decision, the decision to commit mass murder/suicide. The causes for making that decision need to be understood, as well as the means for accomplishing the shootings, or the statistical probability that a given population will contain a school shooter. If we want to be effective in reducing that probability we need to know the “why,” as well as the “how,” and the “how likely.”  

A more generalized approach leads to greater statistical reliability, however it also tends to lose some of the detail.  Furthermore, the very act of drawing a correlation between X and Y factors involved in a process, of creating a statistical result, means, by definition, that one cannot make any statements about causality.  The goal of this study is to use an approach that is closer to the phenomenological reality of these two individuals, hoping that we can find some pattern in the causes of their actions that can be used to generate new hypotheses and approaches to the problem.

If we can find a place in our existing thought about psychology that explains why or how these individuals made the decision to kill, or helps us to understand the pressures that the shooters experienced as pushing them into making that fateful decision, we can improve our understanding of this troubling phenomenon. Improved understanding opens the door to further research into more generalized explanations, possibly even interventions. 

What makes this kind of in depth theoretical exploration possible and desirable is that Eric and Dylan were fairly unique in leaving behind the amount and type of material they did. They are only two individuals, however, not even a big enough sample to use statistics on, much less to use to generalize about mass murderers as a whole, most of them do not allow researchers entrée into their thinking in the form of organized journals.

The data.  The raw data consists of two journals that were kept as evidence by the Jefferson County Sheriffs Department. These can be downloaded from the official Columbine website in both a facsimile of the original handwritten document and as a transcription. After checking against the originals for accuracy, the transcripts were used. Both copies were redacted by the Jefferson County Sheriffs, in order to eliminate the names of living individuals who are mentioned in the journals, and, of course, the many marginal drawings and unreadable scribbles were not included in the transcripts.  All told the journals consist of 13,117 words. They were written during a period of roughly the year leading up to the shootings, with the earliest dated entry being 4/10/1998. They were kept sporadically, with breaks of up to a couple of months. 

The entries in Dylan Klebold’s journal are undated, making establishing a timeline difficult. Stylistically, the journals are highly variable, alternating between philosophical musings, messianic declarations, and vulgar adolescent humor, often within the same paragraph. In addition a number of entries appear to be written under the influence of alcohol and other drugs.

Academic papers are included in the material collected by the Jefferson County Sheriffs, but these were excluded from the grounded theory analysis on the basis that journal entries, having no other purpose than to express the inner contents of a persons mind, would yield a more accurate sample of the thoughts and subjective experiences of the shooters.

The process. Each piece of writing was read through once for a general overview, and again in order to make annotations about developing themes within the material. A third pass through the material was made, this time going line by line and breaking each section down into units of meaning. Units of meaning (Lamp and Simon, 2007), in this case, are defined as a set of words related to a single idea.  Owing to the somewhat random and disorganized nature of the writing in question, units of meaning were not always confined to a single sentence or paragraph. 

 Each unit of meaning was then made into an index card, containing the basic tenets written across the top of the card, with the actual verbatim material supporting that idea written below. These index cards were then grouped by category into overarching themes, with each theme given a card of its own.  Plain white divider cards were used for themes, and colored index card for units of meaning, in order to avoid confusion.

 The determination of what constituted a theme, and therefore of how many themes were derived, was done on a semantic, or phenomenological basis, rather than a statistical one.  This was done because, as clinicians often observe, some of the deepest emotional content and meaning is also some of the most difficult content and meaning to put into words. An idea like suicide may come up only once or twice in the texts, but it must not be treated with any less seriousness than the idea of envy, even if envy comes up in every other journal entry. This approach was also necessitated by the difference in verbal production between Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Dylan produced roughly twice as much material.

The separation of units of meaning into themes was accomplished using emotional intensity, resonance with a central emotional tone, and similarity of thought pattern as criteria for grouping.  If Eric expressed his rage in childish, poorly thought out polemics against Gay people and ethnic minorities, whereas Dylan expressed his rage in childish poorly thought out polemics against jocks and cheerleaders, cards containing words from these polemics would be gathered under the themes of childish rage, and poor thinking.  As in this example, many quotes could be placed under more than one category.  They were then distributed into categories, depending on which category was the most germane to the quote.

 Themes were gathered from Eric’s journal, and then from Dylan’s.  A rough count was made to determine if the two journals had a similar number of themes and a roughly proportionate number of individual answers per theme. This was done to determine if the groupings of themes related to something that could be measured in roughly the same way across the two subject’s journals, with the difference being due to Dylan’s verbosity. 

The process was then repeated, this time using the themes from the divider cards from both journals, grouping them into overarching meta-themes representing emotional and cognitive content common to both shooters.  For each of these meta-themes a memo was written, containing a statement of the basic message of the theme with verbatim examples supporting it written below.  Finally these verbatim examples were grouped together to form the outline of a narrative paragraph representing the axiomatic thought process involved in the theme. 

These paragraphs, consisting of rearranged verbatim quotes edited for clarity and flow, form the bulk of the results found in Chapter 4.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 4: Results

 

This section contains the actual contents of Eric and Dylan’s journals. Selections in quotations are verbatim from the original, and still contain spelling and grammar errors as left by the original authors. Eric’s journal had 18 themes with an average of number of 4.9 statements per theme with a median of 4 statements per theme. Dylan’s journal has 20 themes and averages 7.65 statements per theme with a median of 7.65 statements per theme. Eric and Dylan produced roughly the same number of themes. Their statements/theme seem to be proportional, and appear to measure a consistent way of thinking, with the main difference being that Dylan overproduces verbiage, and Eric underproduces, verbiage leading to a wide difference in their total responses

The  Journals  

Eric. The first piece of writing is the journal kept by Eric Harris during the year preceding the shootings. The journal is a complicated and confusing document, containing musings, ranting about society, shopping lists of ordinance and a number of quasi-philosophical statements about life and relationships in general. Eric seems unclear about whether he is writing for an audience or simply working out ideas in his own mind. In this study the journal is used solely to illustrate the processes going on in Eric’s mind.

Dylan. The next piece of writing is Dylan’s journal. Like Eric’s journal, Dylan’s rambles and it lacks internal consistency. Dylan is far more comfortable and adept at using language. He tends to elaborate his ideas further, and will often lapse into non-narrative modes of discourse such as poetry and quasi-metaphysical speculation. However, Dylan’s elaborations on his thinking are often illogical and distorted. For example, Dylan often uses neologisms, makes errors in grammar, and shifts tenses from first to third person when talking about himself. He engages, in other words, in the kind of minor distortions in ideation, mediation and processing that would cause him to score poorly on cognitive measures in a psychological assessment (Exner, 1997). 

Finally there are sections in Dylan’s journal that were deemed unusable in this study. Firstly, there are any number of drawings doodles and symbols that Dylan used throughout his manuscript which are not susceptible to textual analysis.  Next there is a section that appears to be a collaborative story writing game between Dylan, Eric, and at least two others. This section was excluded from the grounded theory analysis because it represents Dylan at play with others and so may, or may not reflect his internal process. 

In addition a number of potentially confounding factors exist that make interpretation of the text difficult. For example the section in question could be either a spontaneous writing game or an in class writing assignment. In addition the order in which the participants respond may be due to a natural dominance hierarchy, or it could be due to random factors like seating arrangements. If it was an assignment, then it is possible that the topic itself was predetermined, as well as the order of response. 

It is included here because it does contain some suggestive thematic material:

“[Dylan’s writing] 

In a boring, gay, retarded classroom, there were a bunch of koolios doing some childish writing exercise for kindergardners.  It was dark outside.  there was a grenade lancher on the desk next-closest to the back wall, & a couple of boxes of rockets.  The spacey teacher made a groaning noise, & started to throw globs of flesh at the kids.  The kids turned into zombies, & started throwing too.

 

[Someone else’s writing]

The coolios waited for the right moment.  At last she turned her back, and the coolios sprang into action.  Reb grabbed the grenade launcher and began firing at the hideous beast.

 

[Eric’s writing]

Suddenly, The zombie wouldn’t go down.  Marine training kicked in and I dodged to the left avoiding the flesh globs as they smacked against the wall behind me.  tossing a spare rocket to Vodka, he shoved it into the zombie-master’s back as I, Reb, distracted her by throwing Tombstones at her.  Meanwhile, the other koolios were battleing the zombified students with their newly founded right guns.

 

[Fourth person’s writing]

All of the sudden a bright light shot out of the sky.  There was a huge explosion and tons of black smoke everywhere.  One of the koolios stood up to see if anyone had survived.  There was nothing to see everything had disappeared & all that was left was a lonely koolio and one riot gun.  Since he was so sad he shot himself.”  (Harris and Klebold, 1999)

 

Of particular interest is the idea of the contrast between the “coolios” and the “zombies,” the image of the teacher spewing gobs of decaying material that turn other students into mindless zombies, and the unreasoning, seemingly over-determined hatred the boys writing appear to have for their peers. Themes, like these, of alienation, and raw primal feelings of hatred, repeat themselves throughout the journals.

Finally, both journals contain shopping lists of weapons and materials to be gathered for the final killing spree. While on some level reflexive of Eric and Dylan’s thought processes, these were not thought to add to our understanding of their emotional or decision-making processes leading up to the shootings.  The analysis that follows combines themes from both shooters.

Theme I: Alienation and Society, Lies and Appearances

Lies and appearances/ existential despair.  The first theme in the journals arises out of Dylan and Eric’s inability to function well in their social milieu.  Eric and Dylan’s feelings of frustration and loss around botched social interactions give rise to intense feelings of alienation.  Alienation from society reverberates throughout the journals, taking many forms.  These forms range from adoption of megalomaniacal, grandiose, and antisocial identities, to expressions of despair, failure, hopelessness, and inability to cope with quotidian existential existence with all of it’s many paradoxes, contradictions, and challenges. 

Alienation. Dylan feels that his lot is to be stuck forever “clinging to the smallest rocks,” his “small stupid pleasures and so called doings” in a world that becomes  “weird and different from the past” when his friends begin “depleting and collapsing each other.”  To Dylan  “the pain of humanity is our love,” “advantages taken are causes for martyrism,” “martyrism is hope for others,” “existence is pure heaven and pure hell at the same time,” and “it gets better, BUT IT DOESN’T!”

This feeling is particularly keen for Dylan in relation to his difficulty maintaining relationships in general, especially his lack of ability to find a romantic partner.  Dylan experiences this as the universe punishing him. He believes that there exists, a priori, a “love” for him, and if he can only figure out who that is, everything will get better. He feels that with “no happiness, no ambitions, no friends, NO LOVE,” “life is a punishment.”  In fact “the cruelest of all punishments” is that “to some I am crazy.” Part of this punishment, for Dylan is his own ignorance: “it’s all so clear and yet so foggy” he says, while “to be kept in the dark is a punishment.”

While Dylan feels the universe is punishing him by keeping him ignorant, Eric is more inclined to blame society for his ignorance.  His major concern involves lies, lying, and hypocrisy. He believes that “we all live in lies.”  Eric sees lying as a crucial survival tool, one that he uses with great regularity: “I lie a lot, just to keep my ass out of hot water.”  He sees lying as something that almost everyone does.  Eric is bothered by others lying, but thinks that “it’s ok if I’m a hypocrite because I am higher than you people.” 

Eric believes that society believes itself is hypocritical, superficial, and senseless, composed largely of “degrading worthless shits brainwashed by 90’s society;” that most social wisdom is simply “rearranged phrases like don’t fight your enemies, make your enemies fight, dumbfuck shit.”  Eric also derides “social words, ‘normal’, ‘civilized,” and believes that these words constitute “one big quote” having no bearing on reality which is that “different is good, (I) don’t want to be like you or anyone else”, and he feels that most people are nothing but “original copycats” trying to act different, but only in ways that are socially acceptable and therefore not truly genuine or original.

Another idea running parallel to these notions is that society itself is contrary to human nature, forcing people to give up on their natural, instinctive desires and conform to rules, expectations and social pressures that turn them into “robots” who “don’t take advantage of their full human capabilities, just hop on the boat and head downstream.” Eric sees “thought and the ability to change” as the ultimate value, and considers ideas like “the real world, justice, pity, sorry, religion, etc” to be “robot words.” School, in particular, is a “robot factory” where “ ‘supposed to’ drains and filters out human nature’ while “ those who stick to their natural instincts are casted out as psychos, lunatics, strangers.” In general, “the human race strives for excellence in community,” but “standards, laws and ‘Great Expectations” make people into robots” and “anyone who thinks different than the majority” is branded as “weird, crazy, unusual.”  In the midst of this, Eric feels oppressed by the opinions of others: “peoples own little opinions and agendas=corrupt= HOE (hell on earth).”

Eric feels the pain of being rejected socially, and he clearly sees his actions connected to this pain.  “All of this” says Eric “might still be avoidable,”  “if people would give me more compliments.” He feels that “ my hate grows from the fact that I have practically no self esteem” and “I hate all you people for leaving me out of so many fun things.” Eric yearns for acceptance: “I would have made a great Marine,” he says, as if to contain his love of killing in a socially acceptable package. Eric mourns the loss of opportunities to do “some major bonding” with his father if only his father shared his love of firearms, and wonders if “maybe I just need to get laid.” Ultimately, however Eric feels that “everyone makes fun of me because of how weak I am,” and decides that “I will get you all back, ultimate revenge” because “ you should have showed more respect, treated me better, asked for my knowledge and guidance.”

The distance Dylan experiences between himself and the rest of humanity is expressed in his vision of himself as a detached observer of this “weird time, weird life, weird existence.” Dylan “by experiencing the petty others actions, reactions, emotions, doings” gets “a mental picture, a cycle” wherein “existence is a great hall, life is one of the rooms, death is passing through the doors” and the “ever existing compulsion of everything is the curiosity of everything to keep moving down the hall, through the doors, exploring rooms.” At the same time Dylan “knowing no existence, knows nothing relevant to himself,” and even though he knows “the petty destinations of others and everything on this world, in this world,” “they have no purpose to him.”

Superiority. Dylan sees himself as a distinctly superior perceiver of reality, which makes him a superior being. Dylan sees himself as “the ponderer, the outcast, the believer” who “helps out the human” to be more like him, “more mentally open to everything”, and to see “my three dimensions, my realm of thought, time and space.” As result “foolish, stupid gay nigger humans think I’m crazy” and Dylan fears that all of his ideas will be “lost in the depressions and concerns of the human books forever” because he “cant stay thinking in a 2nd dimension” but must always “go to the fifth.” Despite the fact that “some zombies are smarter than others”, Dylan and his cadre “know and love being superior.” However “the real people (gods) are slaves to the majority of zombies” and “most morons never change, they never decide to live in the Everything state of mind,” so Dylan decides to “let humans suffer without my knowledge of the everything.”  This idea, that Dylan and his cadre are superior knowers of truth connects to Eric’s notion that his “superiority” entitles him to use lies or hypocrisy at will, as both place the shooters in a position of superiority that entitles them to be arbiters of truth.

Eric, too, believes that he is a superior perceiver of reality, “higher than almost anyone in universal intelligence,” and that this makes him superior to other people, even to the extent of thinking of himself as God or at least a Godlike figure: “no-one is worthy of shit unless I say they are, I feel like God.”

Eric believes that, because his actions represent his idea of original human nature, he is a force of nature, an aspect of the ongoing natural selection in the evolution of humanity.  He asserts that “natural selection= kill all retards,” “rich snotty toadies should be shot (natural selection)” and “people’s human nature will get them killed.”  Eric believes that “if humans lived how we would naturally, it would be chaos and anarchy-that’s how it should be”, whereas “government and society only created to have order and calmness- the opposite of pure human nature” and that “the human race is not worth fighting for, only killing-give Earth back to the animals, they deserve it more.”  Eric feels that “we are all a waste of natural resources and should be killed off,’ that “since dealing with it seems impossible for mankind to deal with YOU DIE, mercy doesn’t exist.”  Eric’s choice is to “kill and damage as much as nature allows” and to the world he says “fuck you, only nature can stop me now.”

Dylan, also, sees himself, and small number of others, as transcendent beings not bound by human rules or mores: “we are the nature of existence, an Einstein stuck in the body of an ant.” Furthermore, “society is tightening it’s grip on me, and soon me and (edited) will snap” and “have revenge on society and be free too exist in a timeless sourceless place of pure happiness” because “I am God (edited) is God, and zombies will pay for their arrogance, hate, fear, abandonment and distrust,” and “I’ll go on a killing spree against anyone I want”. This identification with primal nature, the raw, uninhibited quality of the feelings expressed, are reminiscent of the descriptions of early infantile thought and behavior by psychoanalytic theorists such Freud and Klein.

As a superior being Eric gets to decide who lives and who dies: “there are people I don’t want to die, THE REST MUST FUCKING DIE.”  At the same time, Eric is aware that he is not likely to succeed in killing everybody he doesn’t like: “you are lucky you escaped my rampage, I wanted to kill you,” and that there is a tragic, or unfair, dimension to his actions; “pity that a lot of the dead will be a waste, like dead hot chicks who could have been good fucks, but life aint fair, not by a long shot with Eric at the wheel.”

Experiencing no remorse or hesitation, Eric feels he is beyond human constructions of good and evil. To him “Moral is just another word’ while “humans try to have a universal law” but this “shouldn’t be allowed” because humans are “not gods” and “anything that happens in the world is just a happening.”  Meanwhile Eric “must not be sidetracked by sympathy, mercy etc.” because “it’s either me or them, I have to turn off my feelings.”

Dylan has similar feelings, he say’s “I understand the everything, am the god of the Everything” and “fate is my only master.” At the same time Dylan is aware of “this humanity.” He feels that his “human side is putting up a wall” between himself and “the happiness” because “that will destroy it if I conceive/relish it when I am human.”  Dylan thinks of himself as a divine being whose divine nature prevents him from attaining true human relationships: “most people find happiness, I never will, does that make me a non-human?  YES…the god of sadness.” Unfortunately while “Godliness isn’t nothing, humanity is the something I long for, something I can never have.”  Dylan “wants to be normal, not this transceiver of the everything’ and “petty things mean much to him.” He takes the position that while he is “God compared to some of these unexistable brainless zombies,” “the petty actions of them interest me, like a kid with a new toy.”  However this same distance from others leaves Dylan feeling empty: “some God I am, all the people I ever might have loved have abandoned me.”  It is likely that the difference in how Dylan refers to himself when talking about himself as an observer as opposed to as a god is significant. Dylan the observer is a vague third person “ponderer” whereas Dylan the lonely god is decidedly “I”.

Alienation and dichotomy are echoed in Dylan’s view of the social world. He “could never be a zombie, even if I wanted to” because “the nature of my entity” prevents that. Instead Dylan experiences humanity as “non-thinking stasis” which is “blocking me again” and “so primitive to me.”  He wonders if “maybe going NBK (gawd) with Eric is the way to break free,” and comes to believe that “the humanity was a test” to “see if our love was genuine” and that “the zombies will never cause us pain anymore” after the school shooting.

Grandiosity.  Bolstering this sense of remorseless purpose is the shooters’ perception that their actions are part of a grander scheme and destiny.  “I will die soon, and so will you and everybody else” says Eric, who wants to “torch and level everything” because “that would be beautiful” and wonders “do I want all humans dead, or just the ‘civilized’ developed and known of world.”  Eric’s life “feels like a goddamn movie,” he feels a sense of “irony and foreshadowing while “everything I see and hear I incorporate into NBK.”  (NBK= natural born killers= code name for murder plan).

Dylan, meanwhile, feels that his life is “the most miserable existence in the history of time,” that he is “in infinite suffering in infinite directions in infinite realities” that he is “a god, a god of sadness,” that he gets “screwed and destroyed by EVERYTHING” and “CANT EVER STOP IT.” “Such a sad desolate, lonely, unsalvageable I feel I am” says Dylan. Because of “being made human without the possibility of being human,” “my existence is shit.”

As one might expect Eric is preoccupied with self-revelation and how much of his true self is perceivable from the outside. He feels a “need to put on one helluva mask,” that he is “showing too much, people might start to wonder” and wonders “if anyone will write a book about me, lots of symbolism, double meanings, themes, and appearance vs. reality stuff going on here.”

Eric and Dylan present, in many ways, as normal adolescents with some pretty serious social adjustment issues. Eric celebrates the end of school saying, “woo hoo, never have to take a final again,” and livens up his weekends with “a fuck-load of booze and cigars.”  At the same time, he “never really did like alcohol, but it felt good just to have around.”  Dylan relates his misery to having “no money, no happiness, no friends” and feels that he wants “something I can never have,” which seems to consist of the acceptance of the very peers he despises as inferiors. 

The stark contrast between these fairly mundane situations and problems, and the global pronouncements and philosophies that color the rest of the shooter’s writings, suggests to a clinician that these grandiose ideas may represent disowned feelings that are driving the violent, projective fantasies of global destruction and messianic transformation.  Similarly, Eric and Dylan utilize a rigidly binary type of thought in their ideas about “koolios” and “zombies.”  This type of thought is often associated with a poorly organized internal structure that does not allow for the integration of opposites into whole, ambiguous objects.  Taken together, these aspects of Eric and Dylan’s thought processes incline a careful observer to suspect that the shooter’s grandiosity and desperate need for attention may have their roots in failed early childhood relationships.

Self-perception as a criminal.  Eric and Dylan’s alienation from society is expressed in their identification with criminals and Fascist dictators. “The framework of society stands above and below me, the hardest thing to destroy, yet the weakest thing that exists” says Dylan while “to most people I appear, well, almost scary” despite having “denied who I am for a long time.” Dylan is convinced that he has “been caught for my crimes and want to go to a new existence” because “I wont be able to survive in this world after this legal conviction.” The crimes in question, prior to the shootings, largely consist of “drinking, smoking, house vandalism, and the pipe bombs.”

Eric expresses his alienation, and hatred of society, through his idealization of a hate-based government, the Nazi regime. “This Nazi report is boosting my love of killing even more, my brain is like a sponge soaking everything up” reports Eric, who feels that “Hitler and his boys fucked up a few times, and it cost them the war, but I love their beliefs.” 

The paradoxical nature of Eric’s hatred surfaces here too: “Nazism would be great if not for Individualism and our natural instinct to ask questions” and “that form of government couldn’t last long once the human equation was brought in, but it sure looked good” are odd thoughts for someone who believes that it is heroic to endure being called crazy, weird or different for following one’s natural instincts and expressing one’s own individual humanity.

One of the more poignant expressions of this theme is in the notes Dylan intended to put in the locker on his love object, referred to in the redacted journals as “(edited)”: “you would hate me if you knew who I was, I am a criminal.” He is certain that he somehow “made you sad and fucked us up somehow,” and even though “you don’t consciously know me and doubtedly unconsciously too,” Dylan “had to write to the one I truly loved,” to urge her not to “feel any guilt” in the aftermath of his suicide. Dylan feels that “this world would be better place if you loved me,” but “fate put me in need of you but Earth blocked that with uncertainty” because “if you don’t know who I am still I apparently haven’t been noticeable enough.”

Theme II: Fractured phenomenology

Overthinking. The next major theme has to do with Dylan’s preoccupation with his own mental processes, the distortions in these processes imposed by his emotional needs and his awareness that he creates his own internal reality via these processes.

Dylan believes that his intellect is “the most powerful tool known to him,” which he uses to acquire “knowledge of the unthinkable, of the indefinable, of the unknown” so that “the Everything is his realm.” However “the more he thinks, hoping to find answers, the more questions come up,” and even though “thought is the most powerful thing that exists,” Dylan ends up living “in the past, thinking of good and bad movies” with a mind that “never stops, music runs 24/7, just songs I know, not necessarily good or bad” leaving him feeling that “think think, that’s all my life is.”

Dylan feels that there exists a false and a true reality such that “a shell of happiness shines around, true despair overwhelms it.” This is particularly true of the world of human relations where “the meak are trampled on, assholes prevail, the gods are deceiving.” Even when things are going well socially for Dylan he feels this is “the zombie bliss side” that “I hate just as much, if not more, than the awareness part,” that he is “giving myself fake realities that she, others, might have liked me just a bit,” “all the crushes I have ever had” are “just shells, images, not truths,” and “the meanest trick was played on me, a false love” who “in reality doesn’t give a good fuck about me, doesn’t even know me” and is only “a shell of what I want the most.”

Paradox and dissociation. All of this thinking occasionally leaves Dylan with only a very distant connection with consensus reality, moving ”farther and farther from what the zombies call life” into what psychologists refer to as derealization and depersonalization, a state of “no emotions, not caring” where people and events seem to be “just images, not life,” and Dylan remembers “details, nothing worth remembering I remember.” Dylan feels the “my emotions are gone, so much past pain” that he is “done, my senses are numbed” and he enjoys “the beauty if being numb” from his position as “only the interpreter of all this.”

This sense of dissociation is replicated in Dylan’s perception of himself. In addition to the many changes from first to third person in Dylan’s journal he also wonders “when Dylan Klebold got covered by this entity containing Dylan’s body” and personifies the many difficulties he has as “at least one power” being “against me.” This externalized identity becomes simply “he” as Dylan wonders “why the fuck is he being such an asshole (God I guess, who ever is the being that controls shit)” or thinks that “he had thoughts that I might not be enough, I think about human things” and concludes that “he is fucking me over bigtime.”  Dylan also has experiences with more positive personifications; “I have the feeling I know him, even though I consciously don’t, and we talk like we are the same person, like he’s my soul.”  No wonder “my mind gets stuck on its own things.”

This theme shows up in Eric’s writings, as apparent hypocrisy or paradox. Eric despises the rules, and the hypocrisy of society yet idolizes authoritarian Nazi philosophies, and is willing to lie and cheat to attain his own goals. He brags of having alcohol and yet says he doesn’t really like it. While claiming to experience himself as a “Godlike” creature set apart from the bulk of humanity by his superior intellect and firepower, Eric regrets missed opportunities for bonding and wishes he had been included more often, and even rails against his peers for not acknowledging his efforts to be a part of the group. There is no reason to lie to a journal or diary, so these paradoxical presentations do not appear to represent outright lies, but rather changes in state from one mode to the other of the paradox without any apparent notice on the Eric’s part. In a clinical situation this kind of flip-flopping would be a sign of a dissociative process of some sort.

The contrast between Dylan’s overly elaborate intellectualizations and Eric’s blind behavioral expressions highlights one of the main differences between the two. It would seem that Dylan is far more sophisticated, and that he is at a much of a higher level of development emotionally as well as is intellectually.  However it is important to remember that whatever intellectual processes are going on in Dylan’s mind, they are going on in service of splitting the perceived world into good and bad, and projecting internal contents that he finds unacceptable outwards onto the parts labeled bad.

Envy. Dylan observes the happiness of others, hates them, and wants to destroy them.  He feels he will never know that happiness himself, and pictures life in terms of a “vertical cliff” where “everyone moves up, I always stayed” at the bottom, where “nobody will help me.”  In fact Dylan feels that his friends “walked up me” to attain whatever degree of happiness they have. These feelings are crystallized around “the friend who I shared, experimented, laughed, took chances with and appreciated me more than any friend ever” gets a girlfriend and becomes “lost in bettering himself, having, enjoying, taking for granted his love.” To Dylan this friend “has passed on in my book ever since (edited) (who I wouldn’t mind killing) has loved him,” and has “ditched me forever.” While “the lucky bastard gets a perfect soulmate who he can admit fucking suicide to, I get rejected for being honest about hate for jocks” while “they look at me like I am a stranger.”

Dylan feels envy towards society in general. Although he believes himself to be superior to others he is amazed that “the zombies have something that me (overdeveloped me) wants.” Dylan sees himself as “pensive, quiet, not wanting what is offered, school, life etc.”, a person who “didn’t want to be a jock,” and, in fact, “hated the happiness that they have.”  However he “wanted to love, to be happy and ambitious and free and nice and ignorant” but “everyone abandoned me.” To Dylan “awareness signs the warrant for suffering.” He feels that “other peoples achievements are tormentations” because “people are alike, I am different.”  He believes that “everyone is conspiring against me,” that “they all set out to hate and ignore me.”  Dylan sees himself and the other people around him as “each lacking something the other possesses.” While “I lack the human nature Dylan owned, they lack the over developed mind/imagination/knowledge tool,” and they live “rather shallow existences compared to mine” but are able to have “fun, friends, women, LIVEZ,” leaving Dylan to wonder “they can love, why cant I?”

Hate. Eric’s envy takes the form of hate. He “is full of hate.” Hate seems to be a comfort to Eric. He say’s “(I) hate the world”[…] “and I love (hating) it.”  Eric hates “people” [and] “they better fear me, and I guess I want people to know it.”  This hate is expressed as the classic American forms of hatred, sexism, racism, and homophobia.

Eric believes that victims of racism bring hate on themselves, that “they deserve hatred, other wise I wouldn’t hate them.”  In Eric’s world “America= White” and “Black people are different- they started on the bottom.  So keep ‘em there,” while “niggers, spics, and chinks” are sometimes “so retarded they deserve to be ripped on.”  Meanwhile “all Gays should be killed” because “it’s a disease” and “women will always be under men.”

 Eric’s hatred takes the form of his preoccupation with guns and bombs, the tools with which he ultimately expresses his hate.  “WE HAVE GUNS- ha ha, neener, booga booga, point of no return” he writes triumphantly, and “yesterday we fired our first firearms, taught that ground a thing or two, even had 2 clips in my pocket talking to V’s dad.”  The theme of lying connects to the guns and bombs because of the many lies Eric must tell in order to acquire and conceal them.  

The guns and bombs also relate to the theme of feeling superior to others.  Eric sees the world in terms of armed conflict.  He feels empowered by having superior firepower and so places a high priority on these tools of destruction.  He writes that “[car] Stereo is nice but having no insurance so I could concentrate on BOMBS would have been better.” 

Eric despises society, and claims to be in support of social outcasts, and those who follow their own nature over society’s dictates.  So, it is interesting that he chooses relatively powerless groups to hate rather than, for example the government, Republicans, or rich people, all of whom represent much more powerful symbols of the forces of conformity Eric claims to despise. This apparent paradox may be due to a deeper psychodynamic mechanism at work in Eric’s hate.  Eric envies those who are successful at conforming to society’s demands because they are accepted and loved where he feels isolated, so he hates them with all the infantile rage we see expressed eventually as a hail of bullets, the ultimate expression of his hatred.  Eric, however, also wants to be one of ‘them.’  He cannot consciously endorse his hate, so he takes it out on the powerless, those lower on the social ladder, expressing his feelings as rebellion; “I’m Reb don’t tell me what to do;” antisocial behavior: “if I am free why can’t I deprive some dumbshit of his possessions?” and sadism: “ I want to tear a throat out with my teeth, find some weak little freshman and tear them apart like a wolf, show them who is God.”;

 Magical thinking/ paranoia.  The final theme derives only from Dylan’s journal and emerges as Dylan’s deep emotional needs distort and warp his perception of the world around him into entirely unrealistic, magical, and mythic shapes. The extent to which these needs warp his cognition highlights the depth of Dylan’s emotional immaturity, despite his clearly superior cognitive and language abilities.

Dylan sees the world as a mythic conflict, an “everlasting contrast” between “dark, light, God, Lucifer, Heaven, Hell, GOOD, BAD” where “since existence has known the fight between good and evil has continued- can never end” because “good things turn bad, bad things become good” but “people on earth see it as a battle that can be won.” 

He sees himself in all of this as a being on the verge of a mystic transcendence into a higher, happier existence, which he has been promised in a series of quasi-mystic revelations. Even “the weather is a replication of our thoughts” with “the end of the beginning of the halcyons” approaching “the happiness is close, visible, ending” and “soon we will live in the halcyons of our minds,” “conceived of ourselves and each other,” a goal attained during “every night of the awareness journey” when “everything we knew we were able to understand it, to perceive it into what we should” such that “things are so simple now that they are infinitely complicated.”

This “halcyon” that Dylan believes he is headed for takes two forms. At first Dylan sees the halcyon as being reunification with a primal soulmate: “to love is to enter a completion of one’s self,” and “love is greater than life even,” whereas “the true great person achieves happiness only when he has met his soulmate,” and “true love is… the most completing achievement any man can have.” However Dylan sees this achievement as “something we cannot even conceive in the toilet earth” because it so “beautiful, innocent, and pure.” He believes that “I will find it (my love)” and that with this person he will be “free to explore the vast wonders of the stars, to cascade down everlong waterfalls and thru the warmest seas of pure happiness, no limits,” in a state of “no awareness, jut pure bliss, unexplainable bliss,” where “the only challenges are no challenges” and there is “a happy feeling in the presence, absolutely nothing wrong, nothing ever is” because, even though “my existence is flawed, you get me closer to God,” and “the meaning of each life” is “to be loved by yer love and to be happy with one’s self.” 

When the quotidian reality of human relationships imposes itself on this fantasy of fulfillment Dylan’s thoughts turn in a darker direction and he begins to see suicide as the means to attaining “the halcyons.” “Thinking of suicide gives me hope” that “in 26.4 hours I’ll be dead and in happiness,” the “little zombie human fags will know their errors and be forever suffering and mournful,” and “I’ll finally not be at war with myself, the world, the universe,” “I’ll be in my place.” Dylan refers to the actual shooting as “fun and judgment” which will be “difficult but not impossible, necessary, nerve-wracking and fun,” and describes how “knowing I’m going to die, everything has a touch of triviality to it.” After all “what fun is life without a little death?”  

The glaring contrast between “toilet Earth” and the “halcyons”, and the absolute perfection of the “halcyon” state are features in Dylan’s narrative that illustrate the intense splitting and projection that are regular features of Dylan’s emotional style. Despite his ability with language these characteristic distortions of thought are profound enough to seriously compromise Dylan’s reality testing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 5: Discussion

 

In this section I will discuss the various themes elicited from the journals and attempt to elucidate them using the psychological and psychoanalytic theories explored in the literature review.  Each theme will be examined in terms of what it could mean about the inner workings of Eric and Dylan’s minds.  To begin with an examining Eric and Dylan’s functioning, or lack of functioning within their social milieu is useful, along with a look at that milieu.

Symbiosis and Sadomasochism at Columbine.

Stresses and pressures.  Eric and Dylan are members of a society that puts them under stresses and pressures that are greater than their internal resources can handle. In accord with Fromm’s (1941) theories, the strongest of these forces are those related to alienation, the need an individual has to have strong, well-defined emotional connections, the need for a place to fit in the world, and the need for transcendence.  Eric uses the exact same terminology as Fromm when talking about the “robot” conformity of his peers.  He and Dylan are both extremely disturbed by this conformity, and tormented by their increasing sense futility, a sense that this social milieu represents a world that they are forbidden to join, no matter how much they secretly yearn to.  Although the references are subtle, both Eric and Dylan complain that lack of money is a strong feature of this alienation, supporting the idea that their lower middle class economic status heightens their overall sense of helplessness. 

Social stratification at Columbine.  At Columbine High School an intense level of social stratification served to intensify and focus this sense of not belonging.  The parents of the wealthier students supply them with such perquisites of their status as extra coaching, athletic equipment, cars and formal outfits to wear to proms, etc. Accordingly, these students rise to prominence as jocks, cheerleaders, and popular kids. Lower and middle class kids are often outcast and ridiculed. In Littleton, where the average home sells for $200,000 (Fast, 2008) and the one available public high school serves the children of the few blue-collar workers as well as the wealthy, these differences are quite striking.

The adolescent subculture at Columbine High School clearly fits Fromm’s description of a sadomasochistic society. Intense and brutal bullying maintains the social order, featuring such activities as name calling, stuffing people into gym lockers, punching, pelting with food and other items, and “bowling for freshmen,’ consisting of covering the gym floor with oil and shoving/hurling younger students into crowds of their peers across the room (Cullen, 2009; Fast, 2008).  The bullying occurs under the watchful eye of the teachers without provoking intervention or consequences for the bullies, unless, like Eric and Dylan they are low on the social ladder. When Eric and Dylan get caught committing property crimes, such as vandalism and petty theft, they are treated seriously and required to do a year of anger management and counseling. This feels severely unjust. As well as being bullied, Eric and Dylan are also both bullies placing them squarely in the lower middle of the power hierarchy, an arrangement that mirrors their socioeconomic situation.

Eric and Dylan in context.  Eric and Dylan are two very different people, with very different approaches to handling the daily struggles of survival and identity development in the hierarchal, sadomasochistic milieu of Columbine High School. Eric externalizes his inner conflicts into outer hate, scapegoating those who are weaker, and exulting in destruction, which he seems to see as the ultimate force in the universe.  Dylan, on the other hand, appears to be more of a romantic, eternally seeking his true love, and revering love over life itself. 

Leadership.  The media often portrays the two shooters as very different, operating in a hierarchical manner with Eric, a psychopath, acting as the leader while, Dylan, a passive follower, seems to have a less damaged personality.  These differences, however, are largely based on the differences in Eric and Dylan’s verbal expressive abilities. Dylan not only wrote more, but also expressed himself more readily in writing. We end up with a much deeper and more detailed picture of how Dylan thought and what his relationships were like. From a literary perspective it is Dylan who is the leader. Dylan’s ideas are laid out clearly, and he seems to be the “brains” of the operation. Eric’s more overtly hostile and action oriented writings make him appear to be the leader from an action oriented perspective. The easiest way to resolve this seeming contradiction is to think of the shooters as being mutually supportive in their specialized roles, having no need for a “leader,” or ultimately anybody other than each other.

Together, Eric and Dylan create, share, and ultimately inhabit an odd, alienated, and self-contradictory world of their own creation.  In this world, they are messianic, sadistic conquerors.  At the same time they are aware of their role in the real world, and society in general, as outcasts and losers.

Symbiosis, Eric and Dylan against the world.   The boys contain the anxiety arising from maintaining this paradox by splitting it, seeing themselves as Godlike creatures, beyond human conceptions of good and evil, and the rest of the world as mere robots, trudging unthinkingly onward.  For some unfathomable reason of their own, the Godlike Eric and Dylan are obscurely fascinated with the “comings and goings and doings” of mere mortals.  In Dylan’s words “the petty actions of them interest me, like a kid with a new toy.”  Dylan’s fertile imagination, along with his ability to contain the emotional dissonance deriving from the split by describing it in the language of cosmic, philosophical principles, is crucial to the development of the boys’ alternate reality.

Ultimately Eric and Dylan create and share a mutually destructive worldview, a malignant psychic process that leaves them outside of consensus reality, but desperate to connect to someone somehow.  By connecting with each other, the shooters feed each other’s delusions, creating an ideal supportive environment for the development of the idea that these two are chosen, divine, and predestined to wreak havoc on those around them.

Theme I existential despair and alienation

Existential despair.  When either shooter feels threatened in his messianic perspective, he retreats into disconnected and dissociative processes, much like those observed by Kernberg in his borderline patients (Kernberg, 1976).  Dylan expresses these modes of thought more openly, personifying his universe while simultaneously displaying a disconnection from his own sense of self; he is “only the interpreter of all this.”  Eric engages the same kind of distancing in the form of self-affirmation of his outcast status; “I hate all you people for leaving me out of so many fun things,” while “different is good, [I] don’t want to be like you or anyone else,” and “it’s ok if I’m a hypocrite because I am higher than you people.” 

Eric and Dylan’s social world is warped by their internal processes into a minefield of split off negative objects and projected fears that neither feels competent to cope with.  As Dylan says: “awareness signs the warrant for suffering” while  “the real people (gods) are slaves to the majority of zombies.”  Eric, meanwhile, is convinced that “the human race is not worth fighting for, only killing-give Earth back to the animals, they deserve it more.” 

Underlying dysfunctional thought processes and relational approaches cause Eric and Dylan to act in ways that isolate them from their peers.  This isolation in turn creates feelings of futility and rage. Both shooters feel overwhelmed by their world and incapable of coping with life on its own terms.

Alienation.  Eric and Dylan’s psychic process, a structure initially based in alienation, eventually evolves into two parallel processes each held apart from the other by a veil, or barrier, as it were, of dissociation.  This is not severe, clinical dissociation as is seen in dissociative disorders, but rather the more common form that patients with disordered and borderline ego structures are prone to that often is mistaken for lying (Winnicott, 1984). 

When an integration of good and bad internal objects is not needed, a semblance of normal functioning is possible.  When, however, more complex or ambiguous situations evoke both good and bad feelings, the personality begins to melt down.  Good internal objects and bad internal objects must be kept so stringently separated that linear thinking breaks down.  Integrating good and bad feelings is impossible, and a horizontal splitting process takes its place.  

Remembering involves integrating the feelings associated with the thing being remembered, so actions that are driven by, or associated with, negative emotions get split off from normal memory, and the person appears to be lying because in their normal state of mind they do not remember doing the bad thing or having the bad feeling.  The world becomes, in Dylan’s words: an “everlasting contrast” between “dark, light, God, Lucifer, Heaven, Hell, GOOD, BAD” where “since existence has known the fight between good and evil has continued- can never end”. 

A split reality.   On one side of the dissociative barrier, alienation gradually transforms into a sense of superiority through a mechanism that Freud would call a reaction formation. As the alienation deepens, this sense of superiority becomes amorality driven by an inflated self-image. This ultimately leads the subject into a sense of impending apotheosis. Dylan feels like “God compared to some of these unexistable brainless zombies,” and Eric says “no-one is worthy of shit unless I say they are, I feel like God.” 

On the other side of the barrier lives the emotional content associated with the alienation from society, misery, rage at abandonment, and loneliness. These interact with feelings of loss to create a sense of hopelessness, leading to a mindless urge to “torch and level everything” as Eric puts it.  Feelings of rage projected onto the outside world, give rise to a dark and paranoid worldview.  Dylan wonders, “why the fuck is he being such an asshole (God I guess, who ever is the being that controls shit)”, believing that “he had thoughts that I might not be enough, I think about human things”, and concludes that “he is fucking me over bigtime,” while Eric feels that: “peoples own little opinions and agendas=corrupt= HOE (hell on earth)”.  Once these parallel internal processes run their full course, we end up with individuals who are full of rage, completely amoral, entirely convinced of their own Godhood, and ready to become school shooters.

 Moral Aloneness, Identification with Criminals, Grandiosity 

Moral aloneness.   Isolated from their peers by their distorted and hostile worldview, Eric and Dylan are subject to “moral aloneness” (Fromm, 1955).  One of the primary drives of humans everywhere, according to Fromm, is to create an identity that exists in the context of a group. This group doesn’t have to be one that meets face to face or even exists as a whole in real time, but we all need to feel ourselves as a part of something larger. In the case of Eric and Dylan this something larger is unattainable in the context of their real peer interactions. They turn instead to fantasy interactions guided by the popular media, especially the Internet.  Here they find a culture that clearly states that the royal road to personal and reproductive success lies in violence.  The number of different versions of this basic idea that are represented in movies and video games is staggering. Eric and Dylan are particularly drawn to ultraviolent movies like “Natural Born Killers”(NBK), a film by Oliver Stone, wherein two highly damaged individuals meet, find love, and ultimately find a way to live happily ever after by going on a cross country killing spree.

Eric and Dylan feel a connection to something larger that they find in these movies, as well as in the historical figures of Adolph Hitler and Charles Manson. The violent imagery acts as a “cultural script” (Newman et al, 2004) providing a ready-made template for projecting inner ugliness onto the world.  This cultural script provides a new identity, based entirely on superficial appearances, that easily assumes the place of a fragmented and problematic self-image.

 The identity Eric and Dylan choose to adopt is extremely violent, uses this violence to deprive others of their rights and property, and receives the consequences society dishes out for these acts with ill grace and resentment, properly encased in sarcasm and self-righteous, quasi-philosophical and political ranting.  “I am God (edited) is God, and zombies will pay for their arrogance, hate, fear, abandonment and distrust,” says Dylan; “fate is my only master” and  “I’ll go on a killing spree against anyone I want”, to which Eric adds, “fuck you, only nature can stop me now.”

Introspection and a whole host of other healthy human traits like empathy, responsibility, and adult role taking aren’t part of this persona.  These social and emotional functions require the ability to see things from another’s point of view, to see both sides of an issue.  Eric and Dylan are incapable of performing these operations.  Constantly facing the consequences of this lack creates an emotional tension that pushes Eric and Dylan ever further into their fantasy world, making them ever more inclined to ‘cut and paste’ an identity that from the media, one that seems to have solved the problem of empathy and adult role taking, if only by ignoring it.

False selves, identification as a criminal.   Embracing the criminal/dictator identity, enables Eric and Dylan to vastly simplify their otherwise baffling and painful social world. The simple black and white rhetorical framework, provided by the ranting of people like Adolph Hitler and Charles Manson, provides a framework for Eric and Dylan to build false selves on (Winnicott, 1989).  These new selves mask and conceal the painful ambiguous emotions that Eric and Dylan feel about their peers.  They are quickly adopted and endorsed as original truth.  This false identity makes it easy for the shooters to drift further and further from reality. 

Grandiosity.  A sense of messianic grandiosity, focused entirely on the shooters themselves and their imagined relationships, comes to take the place of normal, mutual interactions with peers.  Day to day reality fades, warps, and transforms into a mythological fantasy where everything, everyone, and every interaction takes on an archetypal significance confirming the shooters’ delusions of grandeur and superiority.  As Eric puts it, life  “feels like a goddamn movie,” full of “irony and foreshadowing” where “everything I see and hear I incorporate into NBK,” while to Dylan even “the weather is a replication of our thoughts.” 

In the deepest depths of their delusion Eric and Dylan believe themselves like Hitler and Manson.  Like their heroes, they want to inspire a popular uprising, to overthrow the social order by removing the jocks and cheerleaders, making themselves the chosen ones in the eyes of a world that has become, for them, the mirror of a punitive superego. 

To this end they come up with a criminal master plan.  Almost inevitably they choose the age old “final solution”: figure out who the people who are “responsible” for keeping them from the success and popularity they want/deserve, the “bad people”, are; project the disowned self-doubt and self-loathing onto those “bad people;” and then mercilessly slaughter them. 

 These schemes, based as they are in fragmentary logic and delusional superiority, rarely go according to plan.  The Allies conquer Berlin, Charles Manson is serving a life sentence, along with his followers, and Eric and Dylan never manage to build an effective detonator, so their carefully constructed bombs fail to go off. These bombs are supposed to destroy the center of the school including the cafeteria where lunch is being served. The death toll could be in the high hundreds. Instead, Eric and Dylan are forced to content themselves with shooting their victims one at a time. Ultimately, the police surround Columbine High School, demanding justice. 

Standing over the bodies of their victims, with their plans in ruins, and with nowhere to run to, Eric and Dylan must face the realization that their acts of violence, rather than being a magnificent transfiguring elevation to the status of culture hero, are, in the eyes of society, nothing more than vicious random murders. Their reward, instead of sexual and social conquests, will be a lifetime of incarceration in institutions where young boys tend to become “somebody’s bitch,” the unwilling bottom end of the sadomasochistic equation. This represents the total annihilation of the very identities they are willing to kill to create and maintain, and like Hitler before them they choose death at their own hands over surrender and admitting they are nothing but a couple of “losers” after all.

Theme II: Primitive ego structures: Splitting, Binary Thinking, Justification

Primitive ego structures.  Eric and Dylan’s paradoxical and divided worldview becomes more understandable when we view what we find in the journals through the lens of the psychoanalytic theories discussed earlier.  The language used in the journals, that of retribution, rage and sadism, lends support to the idea that Eric and Dylan had punitive superegos which create enough emotional intensity to collapse their normal functioning when faced with negative environmental input. “I want to tear a throat out with my teeth, find some weak little freshman and tear them apart like a wolf, show them who is God” says Eric, while Dylan believes that the “little zombie human fags will know their errors and be forever suffering and mournful.” 

Justification, splitting, projecting and binary thinking.   This puts them in the chronic-neurotic part of Alexander’s continuum of criminal behavior.  They also indulge mightily in justification through suffering, explaining their own antisocial acts and attitudes as reasonable given the level of pain they experience, which is in keeping with this formulation.  Eric exclaims, “if I am free why can’t I deprive some dumbshit of his possessions?”

Both Eric and Dylan make extensive use of splitting defenses, as well as projection, and both display cognitive distortions that support the idea that they suffered from compromised internal object relations.  One aspect of this is seen in the way that both shooters appear to experience the world in terms of pairs of polarized binaries.  Eric “must not be sidetracked by sympathy, mercy etc.” because “it’s either me or them, I have to turn off my feelings.”

This way of seeing the world is often symptomatic of a failure to successfully introject a model for containing opposites, especially good and bad feelings about the same object.  Integration becomes impossible and the good internal objects must be kept drastically separated from the bad (Kernberg, 1976).  Instead of seeing the object as whole, the person divides it into good and bad, and will utilize dissociative processes to keep from having to see both sides at the same time.

Cognitive distortions are particularly rife in Dylan’s case, but Eric displays them as well.  In both journals there are indications that Eric and Dylan are unclear on the difference between internal and external reality.  Dylan’s journal contains references like “the Everything is his realm,” “the happiness is close, visible, ending,” and “fate put me in need of you but Earth blocked that with uncertainty.”  These have the feel of talion (Klein and Mitchell, 1987).  

Eric expresses the splitting behind his thought processes most clearly in his hatred of all ethnic or gender minorities who brought his hate “on themselves,” because “they deserve hatred, other wise I wouldn’t hate them.”  This justification by tautology hides a deeper need to make these social non-conformists the container of disowned negative feelings through projection.  All of these imply that Eric and Dylan regress to what Klein would call a schizoid position and retreat into pure schizoid processing when stressed. 

Impossible hope.  Eric and Dylan seem to have little or none of the hope that Winnicott (Winnicott, 1984) ascribes to antisocial behavior.  However, if we account for their substantially distorted cognition and primitive internal structure, we can begin to see that they do have hope, its just hope for an impossible fulfillment. Both shooters appear to feel that they are poised for an apocalyptic transcendence. The language Dylan uses to describe this event, “a happy feeling in the presence, absolutely nothing wrong, nothing ever is”, where he is “free to explore the vast wonders of the stars, to cascade down everlong waterfalls and thru the warmest seas of pure happiness, no limits,” and “the only challenges are no challenges” with “no awareness, just pure bliss, unexplainable bliss,” refers to endless unconditional acceptance and a nurturing, supportive environment that is easily recognizable as a fantasy of returning to a primal womb, a return of the good object mother.  At the same time, paradoxically, Eric and Dylan are in reality profoundly depressed, and hopeless about their ability to ever lead normal lives, enough so that “Thinking of suicide gives me hope.” 

Though Eric and Dylan believe that “in 26.4 hours I’ll be dead and in happiness,” “I’ll finally not be at war with myself, the world, the universe,” they are, in fact, poised on the brink a brutally violent expulsion/excretion of their inner contents onto the outside world in the form of a killing spree that can only end in either suicide or incarceration, the ultimate manifestation of the punitive superego.

Theme III: Scripts and Fantasies

Cultural scripts.   This perceptual framework has an unfortunate resonance for young men in a patriarchal society like ours.  Virtually all of the secular hero’s of the Western world were, in fact, murderers.  We disguise this by calling them founding fathers, pioneers, or conquistadors, but the fact remains that the actions that put them in the history books invariably involve killing or enslaving somebody.  Spiritual peacemakers like M. K. Gandhi or Martin Luther King.  Jr., have only become popular media figures in the last century.  Killers and sadists, on the other hand have been praised and lionized for their many external successes for over 5000 years.  This bias is particularly potent in the modern media, the only culture most adolescents, like Eric and Dylan, are exposed to.  Given their already dark and divided worldview, the binary good-versus-evil world of the media represents a cognitive set that the two boys find irresistibly attractive as a source of possible role models.

Fantasies of death and rebirth.   Like Gilligan’s (Gilligan, 1996) murderers, Eric and Dylan feel themselves to be dead, or at least dead to society, the only deadness a teenager cares about.  The shooters experience humiliation, and commit suicide after their shooting spree.  The impersonal nature of their attack does, however, seem at odds with Gilligan’s formulation.  They certainly don’t spend any time destroying eyes or genitals in particular, for example, and a number of the victims have no connection whatsoever to the attackers other than attending the same school. 

In their quest to become alive again, Eric and Dylan discover a different path than carving up the eyes and genitals of those who had witnessed their “death.”  Instead they see these attacks as being directly addressed to society as a monolithic entity.  From this angle the individual victims are the crucial body parts, the eyes and genitals of society as it interacted with the shooters.  This somewhat twisted vision of society as a singular entity, with the shooters as heroes battling this monster, is quite easy to extrapolate from the intensely split, binary way that Eric and Dylan see the world.  In the absence of a solid internal ego structure, external, social myths are extremely seductive.  As the person seeks to replace their own crumbling and weak inner structures with the certainties represented in the myths, they begin to believe that they are the hero or protagonist.

 In reality, mass murder is a road that usually ends in isolation, incarceration and eventually execution.  However in Eric and Dylan’s fantasy, mass murder leads to true love, happiness, and international fame.  This idea is reiterated again and again in the video games Eric and Dylan play, where a high body count equals a high score, and in the other ultraviolent films and TV shows they saw constantly around them.  From here it is but a short hop to the path referred to in the journals as NBK, “Natural Born Killers,” a movie to most of us, but to Eric and Dylan, a symbolic path to transcendence, leaving them one only question in the face of what Dylan calls “infinite suffering in infinite directions in infinite realities.”  As Eric puts it, “do I want all humans dead, or just the ‘civilized’ developed and known of world?” 

Symbiosis fantasies.  Both Eric and Dylan fantasize about achieving symbiosis, and are envious of those they see around them who appear to be able to achieve it.  These fantasies express a deep, overmastering need to transcend the ordinary world of relationships and connect on a deeper level with other people.  Dylan is particularly clear and poignant in his need for intimacy, and expresses this need as a literal quest for some kind of mystic fulfillment.  Dylan wraps his fantasy up in the guise of a perfect “soulmate,” he wants to join with this person and “have revenge on society and be free too exist in a timeless sourceless place of pure happiness” because “the true great person achieves happiness only when he has met his soulmate.”  This love is “something we cannot even conceive in the toilet earth” because “fate put me in need of you but Earth blocked that with uncertainty” and Dylan is “made human without the possibility of being human.”  Eric expresses his frustrated rage at his inability to function normally in society in terms of destroying civilization and creating a new utopia, as one might expect from a person who externalizes as much as Eric does.  Eric expresses his symbiosis fantasy in terms of direct sadistic fantasies.  He wants to  “kill and damage as much as nature allows,” or to “tear a throat out with my teeth, find some weak little freshman and tear them apart like a wolf, show them who is God”. 

Theme IV: Fantasy meets Reality: Envy and Hate

Failure and fantasy.  However, symbiosis is impossible for someone who cannot balance and consider the needs of both self and other, or who cannot differentiate between internal and external reality.  The shooters’ repeated attempts to achieve symbiosis meet with perpetual failure.  Eric is, in fact, short, scrawny, and an object of lust or fear to no one, and Dylan is a dismal failure at connecting to his “beloved.”  He never musters up the nerve to do more than shove notes full of delusional ramblings into her locker, notes that he fails to sign (Cullen, 2009).  The bitter disappointment of these failures is absolutely incompatible with the grandiose self-image the shooters had developed, and threatens to destroy the narcissistic fantasy world that they inhabit. 

Envy: Envy of those around them who are capable of having relationships drives both the splitting dynamic that maintains the fragile tissue of fantasy role models they have instituted to shore up fractured internal object relations, and the “revenge” the shooters take for its destruction.

 In coping with the observable difference between themselves and others, between their symbiotic fantasies and the harsh reality of their true place in the social world, Eric and Dylan face an unsolvable dilemma; in Dylan’s words, “the zombies have something that me (overdeveloped me) wants.” 

 Hate: As one might expect, they handle this dilemma by splitting the object, this time the outside world.  This split puts Eric and Dylan on one side, along with all the good things they hoped for, like Dylan’s “halcyons”, with the outside world of real and frustrating interactions on the other.  The internal world, removed from any form of outside input by the splitting process, becomes a domain of magical thinking and fantasy.  The outside world, populated by inferior beings who seem to possess a secret means of attaining fulfillment that is denied to Eric and Dylan, becomes a realm of paranoia, populated by dark, mysterious, projected, forces.  They feel, as Dylan says,  “screwed and destroyed by EVERYTHING”, that  “everyone is conspiring against me,” and that “they all set out to hate and ignore me.”  These ideas of reference, and grandiose fantasies of persecution, are readily reinforced by Eric and Dylan’s daily interactions with bullies and authority figures.  In fact, much of the hostility that Eric and Dylan perceive in the outside world is simply a projection of their own envious, infantile, rage.  Little wonder then, that Eric begins his journal by saying “(I) hate the world” that he hates “people, and they better fear me, and I guess I want people to know it.”  These are simply statements of fear and envy.

In the end, they turn to each other for symbiosis, envy turns to hatred of anyone outside of their world of two, and the desire to transcend through connection to others becomes contaminated by the fantasy of becoming a violent killer/culture hero.  Through this fantasy, the impossible to fulfill urge to connect is replaced by a fantasy of taking revenge on the society that wronged them, in an orgy of sadistic and self-destructive action, murder and suicide. 

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Chapter 6: Conclusions

 

Social constructions and comforting answers.   Understanding the murder suicides at Columbine High School is a complicated process.  The first temptation is to seek a proximate cause (Newman, 2004) or triggering event.  It is also comforting to blame the shootings on individual flaws and pathologies in the characters of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. However, the phenomenon of school shooting is more complex, and has become a meme in our culture.  Others have repeated the actions of the Columbine shooters, and such incidents occur with increasing frequency (Timeline, 2009). 

Psychopathic/borderline outbursts, and societal memes.  Meanwhile America continues to unknowingly feed in to the toxic cultural myths that young lonely disempowered men use as an excuse for brutality.  The meme of school shootings seems to have moved off campus into the community at large. 

 Recently, Jared Loughner, a lower middle class male in late adolescence in Tucson, AZ, let loose with a barrage of gunfire at a public political gathering on 1/8/11 that left a Federal Judge dead, and severely wounded a congresswoman.  Jared says “The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar,” (Loughner, 2011).  He conveys his disdain for the rules of grammar in almost identical language to that of Eric Harris who decries  “social words, ‘normal’, ‘civilized,” as being “one big quote.”  In particular he proclaims himself to be the only possible judge of what was meant by his words, a sentiment that Eric Harris shares, despising “the real world, justice, pity, sorry, religion, etc” as mere “robot words.”  

This seems to imply that Jared’s underlying cognitive processes may share some of Eric’s arbitrary, impenetrable, and narcissistic patterning.  Loughner’s cultural script may well have been provided by the highly polarized and violent rhetoric used as a tactical tool in recent political discussion, rather than the violent movies and video games that inspired Eric and Dylan.  However, he sees the world through a distorted, binary and polarized cognitive set that feels disturbingly familiar.  If school shootings, and other spree killings, are actually a meme in our culture, and a meme that is spreading at that, all of the containment measures, all the metal detectors, prisons, and police in the world are not going to be enough to stop them.

The distressing normality of Eric and Dylan.  It takes a fairly distorted cognitive set to act out this meme as an actual plan, rather than simply daydreaming about it in a cathartic fantasy.  In the case of Eric and Dylan the distortion was amply provided by the exigencies of dealing with a compromised set of internal object relations.  The distortions we are talking about are not the extreme distortions of psychosis, and are not necessarily the product of some kind of early childhood abuse.  Instead, as Winnicott says (1984) this kind of disruption in object relations can come about from an absent, overworked parent, or even from a simple mismatch between caregiver and infant personality traits.  This makes the possibility of other adolescents in our culture succumbing to the distorted cognitive set of the school shooters far too common for comfort. 

Intervention 

Individual intervention I: seeing beyond the myths.  Intervention means attempting to prevent, or at least contain, and reduce the damage done by potential future school shooters.  Any attempt at intervention will naturally depend on how we formulate our conception of who Eric and Dylan are as individuals, and what their actions on 4/20/1999 mean. 

 In doing this we must remain clinically detached, keeping in mind that the only thing we actually know about Eric and Dylan is that they are dead, and thereby unavailable to confirm or deny any hypothesis we may formulate.  Depending on how we see the phenomenon of school shootings, we will choose which of these strategies to emphasize.  If we see only the popular mythology, which represents Eric and Dylan as inherently incurable, and essentially broken, we are likely to favor containment and damage reduction, when prevention may be possible.  

We must look beyond the mythology of the imagined Eric and Dylan that has become popular in the media since the shootings, the myth of the psychopath and his depressed codependent follower, and the imaginary world of natural born killers.  This mythology which is embodied in the movie of the same name, features a violent, but charming and intelligent psychopath, and his killing partner/mate, an emotionally unstable survivor of child abuse.  It is organized around the idea that those who murder represent oddities and aberrations derived from clearly defined biological anomalies and traumatic events.  

The idea that school shooters are psychopaths, and/or survivors of clear-cut early childhood trauma or abuse is centered in the popular narrative about murderers in general.  Believing in the myth helps people to contain their anxiety.  This belief does very poor service, however, to the individuals who are acting out the myth, with the fear and stereotyping they experience feeding into their already paranoid and turbulent emotional stew. It has the potential to do damage to society in general, when the myth narrative has an impact on what form intervention is chosen. 

Containment, prevention, and psychopathy.   Containment is expensive and inevitably forces individuals and institutions to make a difficult choice: draconian security measures bring greater social control, but heighten the tension in society, encouraging sadomasochistic interactions (Fromm, 1941), while more relaxed security measures reduce tension in general, but increase the risk of allowing society to be overrun by violence and violent people.  Prevention is very difficult and elicits difficult feelings in the eyes of society, but it is cheaper, both monetarily and socially.  The answers chosen, and which side of the balance they favor, depend largely on the cultural construction of psychopathy, which is not the same thing as the clinical condition of psychopathy, also known as antisocial personality disorder, upon which the cultural construction is loosely based.

Psychopathy is seen as a biological condition, stemming from malfunctions in the formation of the brain. Psychopaths are thought to be without empathy or concern for others, true predators (Cleckley, 1941).  They tend to be indifferent to social pressure and entirely unconcerned about how others perceive them unless there is tangible gain involved. Psychopathy is considered untreatable, and can only be contained.  This is where the clinical and popular narratives begin to diverge. In the popular imagination psychopaths are natural born killers, inevitably turning to murder to satisfy their sadistic hunger for ultimate control over others. In the real world, most psychopaths figure out that cooperating with society brings many opportunities for sadistic pleasure (Hill-Tout, 2004).  They can be powerful, popular, and successful, and this provides them with more than enough outlets for their lust for power.  Eric and Dylan wear a mask of psychopathy, but underneath are desperate for approval and love, despite the hate filled rhetoric they utilize as a defense. 

 Primitive ego structures, identity confusion, and masks.   Eric and Dylan, as they present themselves in the journals, exhibit signs and symptoms consistent with borderline ego structures (Kernberg, 1976).  People with this kind of ego structure are well known for enacting fantasies, assuming identities, and taking on the appearance of people with a variety of mental conditions ranging from florid psychosis to absolute normality, depending on the social context they are trying to function in.  In treatment milieus patients with borderline personality structures are often quite difficult to treat and diagnose.  They go through dramatic recoveries, and equally dramatic decompensation, as they strive to assume the identity of functional adults.  A small percentage eventually learn that normal functioning in society, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, has a number of inherent fulfillments, like having stable living situations, and being well thought of by teachers, employers, and peers. 

Confusion about identity creates a tension that extends beyond the psychic structure of the shooters, creating confusion in the consciousness of the people who observe, or interact with them. Even simply reading their journals generates a feeling of eerie wrongness, a sense of a something buried and distorted striving towards normal functioning and reality testing, a feeling of “being made human without the possibility of being human,” as Dylan says. This feeling makes it easy for outside observers to label Eric as a psychopath, and Dylan as his depressed, passive, follower These personae however, may be nothing but roles, parts played by a pair of adolescents with little or no durable identity structure of their own. 

Taking on the appearance of a dangerous psychopath and his unstable cult follower creates an atmosphere of fear around Eric and Dylan and give them a sense of power and puissance that remains even after their deaths.  If we, as observers, allow ourselves to be taken in by this illusion, we find ourselves confabulating with Eric and Dylan.  This places us in a very poor position for understanding them and youth like them.  This misunderstanding may lead to our mistreating other youths that superficially resemble Eric and Dylan whom we may encounter.  It is so much easier to write Eric, Dylan, and their ilk off as the accidental product of brain damage, to think more in terms of containment than of treatment.

 Individual Intervention II: Treatment  

A window of opportunity.  Healthy individuals derive their sense of puissance and power from experiences of success and/or of coping with failure that grow out of role taking, identification and healthy internal object relations (Kernberg, 1976). Adolescent patients are just beginning to be able to consciously consolidate roles into identities using reason and logic, formal operations that are relatively novel to adolescents’ brains.  These newfound abilities are closely related to the development of the frontal cortex, and the corresponding period of increased brain plasticity that accompanies this development. The adolescent becomes, for the first time, capable of meta-processing, and so treatable through talk therapy. 

Intervention at the level of the individual.  As Winnicott (1984) said, this is a time when the possibility exists to repair and restore a patient’s sense of identity by providing experiences of appropriate containment of dysfunctional behavior, and predictable and consistent rewards and consequences for their actions.  This provision of containment and predictability, occurring right at a moment of maximum brain plasticity, creates the possibility of helping a disturbed adolescent, like Eric or Dylan, to consolidate their fractured interior landscape into something resembling an identity.  This work is often accomplished by interactions with society, especially in milieu-based programs, drug treatment programs, and the military.  Remedial emotional containment can also be accomplished by the troubled adolescent forming a relationship with a committed, and mature adult individual, like a parent, teacher, therapist or mentor.  There is no one answer that will absolutely prevent school shooting.  However, this developmental window of opportunity creates a glimmer of hope that disturbed adolescents with borderline ego development could be prevented from becoming school shooters, given time and commitment by society and a few dedicated individuals.

Intervention in the immediate social environment (school and family).  Providing youth with alternate versions of what success can feel like, especially success in a non-competitive or nonviolent context, creates greater cultural room, in general, for nonviolent, non-sadomasochistic social interactions.  This idea is used in interventions that are intended to prevent recidivism in violent prisoners (Gilligan and Lee, 2005).  

Adolescents like Eric and Dylan are trying to find a solution to the problem of positive identity in the social world. It is clear from the journals that they want to be loved and appreciated, to participate in healthy interactions. It is equally clear that Eric and Dylan are at their wits end as far as solving the identity problem, and desperate enough to try anything, up to and including suicide and homicide, in the hope of becoming somebody in particular, of establishing a stable identity. Making it easier to find a less destructive identity could slow and perhaps stop the development of a school shooter. 

This would require a major intervention directed at changing the culture of our schools.  Mentoring programs in particular, or other programs that pair the adolescent with an adult who is both an ally, and a container for out of control emotions, can be effective at providing a template for appropriate adult role taking, and can reduce the strength of the toxic myths that lead homicidal behavior.

Intervention at the level of society at large.  The notion that school shooters may be treatable is an uncomfortable thought. Placing sole responsibility on the shooters, simply labeling them as natural born killers, as they perhaps would wish, while frightening, absolves society of any responsibility except the responsibility to contain the violence, and control the perpetrators. The age-old game of isolate, scapegoat, and punish is something that Western culture is very good at.  It is familiar, and it helps to manage anxiety and guilt. 

Society’s responsibility.  Thinking of school shooters as potentially treatable, on the other hand, places a greater responsibility on society.  We have to ask: “If the Columbine shootings could have been prevented, why weren’t they?” and,  “Should someone be held responsible for the fact that they weren’t prevented?” and, if so whom?  In this welter of guilt, confusion, finger pointing, and blaming, we run the risk of losing track of the deeper cultural and psychodynamic forces that drive the phenomenon of school shootings. 

 Rather than cope with the ugliness exposed by delving into the minds of the shooters, we typically opt for containing them; controlling their behavior, often in prisons and juvenile facilities, where they rarely receive treatment, and instead consolidate their identity around a vicious sadomasochistic pecking order.  Unwittingly, we end up buying into and perpetuating the binary thinking, the paranoia, and the pessimism that young people like Eric ands Dylan already feel.  By enacting the drama of crime and punishment that helps society feel better (Gilligan, 1996), we reify and confirm the very myths that cause young people to pick up firearms when all they really want is to be loved in the first place. 

Fortunately, treatment for the shooters, which society, for the most part, lacks the will for, is not the only route to intervention. Incidents like Columbine occur at the intersection of poor object relations and the normal social pressures of a lower middle class adolescence. It is hardly surprising then, as family life comes under greater and greater economic pressure, that school shootings, and spree killings in general, are getting more and more common. 

Intervention could come through changes in the social environment that would serve society as a whole, and specifically provide solutions to common, practical problems, like providing universal health care and other forms of economic relief, so parents don’t have to work two jobs.  Also extending the time granted for parental leave, to cover more of the crucial periods early internal object formations, might be an effective intervention in the lives of potential school shooters that also serve a practical end.  This puts the entire question of school shooters, guilt and responsibility in general, on the metaphorical back burner because these are changes that involve improving the lives of everyone.

Ultimately the responsibility has to rest on us, the adults in society.  We have all but abandoned our youth, relegating them electronic babysitters, like television, and the internet, while cutting funding for teachers, and for youth oriented programs like mentoring or after school sports, which could provide the much needed adult contact.  We continue to stereotype youth, as was done intensely in the wake of the Columbine shootings, as a hopelessly incomprehensible subculture of violence and raucous music. If instead we treated our young people as what they in fact are, our future leaders and members of society, the meme of spree killings in schools could become more controllable. It could be reduced in potency, if not removed from our cultural repertoire. This work needs to be done, not because the adolescents in question might become killers, but because they are our children, and they are in incredible pain.

Further research.  A number of future treatment possibilities present themselves as likely to be fruitful, and with these come possibilities for empirical research into which ones work.  For example, are teenagers engaged in mentoring programs statistically less likely to engage in violence?  How is their ability to engage in perspective taking and empathy developed by mentoring? Can new role models be introduced that will prevail over the force of violent media be created?  All of these questions are amenable to empirical research.  Case studies of violent youth in treatment settings who did or did not go on to become homicidal, in order to tease out which variables, i.e. social role models or containing emotional interactions, were the most germane to preventing violence would be useful. 

In addition research on whether the stronger social net that is in place in many European countries, including socialized medicine, longer early parental leave etc., has an effect on the number of spree killings there, would prove valuable, although it would be difficult to tease out this factor from the generally lower level of violence found in Europe.

This study only includes the writings of two school shooters. In the time it has taken to write this a number of other school shootings have occurred, and it is possible that those shooters left written materials that could be analyzed to confirm or deny the generalizability of the observations made here. 

In addition, Eric and Dylan, particularly Dylan, left a number of nonverbal records, in the form of marginalia in their journals. It would be very interesting for someone who is experienced in neurocognitive picture assessments, like the Bender Gestalt test or the House, Tree, Person test, to examine these drawings in order to glean what information they may contain about Eric and Dylan’s cognitive processes.

Along similar lines it might prove useful to examine the differences in Eric and Dylan’s thinking as influenced by their comparative levels of literacy.  Dylan was much more literate than Eric, did this have an effect on how the two of them functioned? Did Dylan’s literacy make him less prone to the anti-logic created by his fragmentary internal landscape, or was his literacy actually used to reify and justify the shooters actions?

Finally it would be a very germane and meaningful study, at this turbulent moment in history, to examine how much of the rage, paranoia, xenophobia, racism and violence currently being espoused by a large number of lower middle class Americans is projected, driven by similar flawed object relations to those of school shooters, and how much is driven by disinformation and fear mongering in the media. 

It may be that instead of being isolated lunatics, Eric and Dylan are, in fact, the tip of the iceberg, responding to pressures that are present in our society and culture, pressures that many others respond to in a similar fashion.  If we open up our search to include other apparently random acts of violence we may ultimately come closer to finding a cause for the many random killings and seemingly senseless attacks that plague our world today, whether they be shootings of schoolmates, bombings of mosques, synagogues and churches, acts of piracy and terrorism, or invasions foreign countries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Appendix I

The process, illustrated.

A memo.

Alienation: Eric and Dylan are alienated from society and see it as false, even hypocritical

Eric: original copycats and social words-Eric sees society as hypocritical, superficial and senseless

• “why explain myself when you shitheads wont understand, if you could whoopee fuckin do, it’s just something to say

• “quotes are worthless, specially rearranged phrases like “don’t fight your enemies make your enemies fight” dumbfuck shit

• “expect shits to criticize anyone who isn’t one of your social words, “normal,” “civilized”

• [society is] “one big quote” 

• “different is good, don’t want to be like you or anyone else”

•  “original copycats”

• “degrading worthless shits brainwashed into 90’s society”

Dylan: true and false people- Dylan vs the zombies- Dylan sees society as a false reality and himself as an authentic being

• “I could never be a zombie, even if I wanted to”

• “nature of my entity”

• “I’m stuck in humanity

• “nonthinking stasis”

• “maybe going NBK (gawd) with Eric is the way to break free”

• “humanity is blocking me again”

• “I know that I am different”

• “afraid to tell the society”

• “the zombies were a test to see if our love was genuine”

• “the humanity was a test”

• “the zombies will never cause us pain anymore

Typical index cards:

Eric:

 “people say you shouldn’t be so different”

• “fuck you don’t tell me what to do”

• “different is good”

• “don’t wan to be like you, or anyone else”

• “original copycats”

• “degrading worthless shits”

• brainwashed into 90’s society

Dylan:

“I know that I am different”

• “afraid to tell the society”

• “abandonment, persecution is not something I want to face”

• “so primitive to me”

• “being yourself means letting people know about inner thoughts”

 

 

Appendix II

The journals (note: no attempt has been made to edit the journals)

Eric’s Journal.

 I hate the fucking world, to many god damn fuckers it in. to many thoughts about societies all wrapped up together in this place called AMERICA. everyone has their own god damn opinions on every damn thing and you may be saying “well what makes you so different?”. because I have something only me and V have, SELF AWARENESS, Call it exortenstiolism or whatever the fuck u want. we know what are to this world and what everyone else is. we learn more than what caused the civil war and how to simplify quadratics in school. we have been watching you people. we know what you think and how you act, all talk and no actions. people who are said to be brave or couragous are usually just STUPID then they say later that they did it on purpose cause they are brave when they did on fucking accident. GOD everything is so corrupt and so filled with opinions little and points of view and peoples’ own little agendas and shedules. this isnt a world anymore, its H.O.E. and [no]one knows it. self awareness is a wonderful thing. I know I will die soon, so will you and everyone else. maybe will we be lucky and a comet will smash us back to day 1. people say it is immoral to follow others, they say be a leader. well here is a fuckin news flash for you stupid shits, everyone is a follower! everyone who says they arent a follower and then dresses diff. or acts diff. … They got that from something they saw on TV or in film or in life. no originality, how many JO MAMMA jokes are there and how many do u think are original and not copied. KEINE. Its a fucking filthy place we live in. all these standards and laws and Great Expectations (webb) are making people into robots even though they might “think” they arent and try to deny it. no matter how hard they try to NOT copy someone I still AM! except for this fucking piece of paper right here, and B.T.W spelling is stupid unless I say. I say spell it how it sounds, it’s the fuckin easiest way. hey try this sometime, when someone tells you something, ask “why?” eventually they will be stumped and cant answer anymore. thats because they only know what they need to know in society and school, not real life science. they will end up saying words to this “because! Just shut up!” people that only know stupid facts that arent important should be shot, what fucking use are they. NATURAL SELECTION. KILL all retards, people w/ brain fuck ups, drug adics, people cant figure out to use a fucking lighter. GEEEAWD! people spend millions of dollars on saving the lives of retards, and why. I don’t buy that shit like “oh hes my son though!” so the fuck what, he aint normal, kill him, put him out his misery. he is only a waste of time and money, then people say “But he is worth the time, he is human too” no he isnt, if he was then he would swalow a bullet cause he would realize what a fucking waste and burden he was. — 4/10/98

as I said before, self awareness is a wonderful thing. I know what all you fuckers are thinking and what to do to piss you off and make you feel bad. I always try to be different, but I always end up copying someone else. I try to be a mixture of different things and styles but when I step out of myself I end up looking like others or others THINK I am copying. One big fucking problem Is people telling me what to fuckin do, think, say, act, and everything else. Ill do what you say IF I feel like it. But people (I.E. parents, cops, God, teachers) telling me what to [arrow points to do, think, say, act, and everything else] just makes me not want to fucking do it! thats why my fucking name is REB!!! no one is worthy of shit unless I say they are, I feel like GOD and I wish I was, having everyone being OFFICIALLY lower than me. I already know that I am higher than almost anymore in the fucking welt in terms of universal Intelligence and where we stand in the universe compared to the rest of the UNIV. and if you think I dont know what Im talking about then you can just “ßUCK DICH” and saugen mein Hund! Isnt america supposed to be the land of the free? how come, If im free, I cant deprive a stupid fucking dumbshit from his possessions If he leaves then sitting in the front seat of his fucking van out in plain sight and in the middle fucking nowhere on a Fri fucking day night. NATURAL SELECTION. fucker should be shot. same thing with all those rich snotty toadies at my school. fuckers think they are higher than me and everyone else with all their $ just because they were born into it? Ich denk NEIN. BTW, “sorry” is just a word. it doesnt mean SHIT to me. everyone should be put to a test. an ULTIMATE DOOM test, see who can survive in an environtment using only smarts and military skills. put them in a doom world. no authority, no refuge, no BS copout excuses. If you cant figure out the area of a triangle or what “cation” means, you die! if you cant take down a demon w/ a chainsaw or kill a hell prince w/ a shotgun, you die! fucking snotty rich fuckheads [Censored by J.C.Sheriff Office] who rely on others or on sympathy or $ to get them through life should be put to this challenge. plus it would get rid of all the fat, retarded, crippled, stupid, dumb, ignorant, worthless people of this world. no one is worthy of this planet only me and who ever I choose. there is just no respect for anything higher than your fucking boss or parent. everyone should be shot out into space and only the people I saw should be left behind. 4/12/98

ever wonder why we go to school? besides getting a so called education. its not to obvious to most of you stupid fucks but for these who think a little more and deeper you should realize it. its societies way of turning all the young people into good little robots and factory workers thats why we sit in desks in rows and go by bell schedules, to get prepared for the real world cause “thats what its like”. well god damit no it isnt! one thing that seperates us from other animals is the fact that we can carry on actual thoughts. so why don’t we? people go on day by day. rutine shit. why cant we learn in school how we want to. why cant we sit on desks and on shelves and put our feet up and relax while we learn? cause thats not what the “real world is like” well hey fuckheads, there is no such thing as an actual “real world”. its just another word like justice, sorry, pity, religion, faith, luck and so on. we are humans. if we dont like something we have the fucking ability to change! but we dont, atleast U dont. I would. U just whine/bitch thoughtout life but never do a goddamn thing to change anything. “man can eat, drink, fuck, and hunt and anything else he does is madness” – Based on Lem’s quote. boy oh fuckin boy is that true. when I go NBK, and people say things like, “oh it was so tragic,” or “oh he is crazy!” or “It was bloody!” I think, so the fuck what, you think thats a bad thing? just because your mommy and daddy told you blood and violence is bad, you think its a fucking law of nature? wrong, only science and math are true, everything, and I mean everyfuckingthing else is man made. my doctor wants to put me on medication to stop thinking about so many things and to stop getting angry. well, I think that anyone doesnt like me is just bullshitting themselves. try it sometime if you think you are worthy, which you probly will you little shits, drop all your beliefs and views and ideas that have been burned into your head and try to think about why your here. but I bet most of you fuckers cant even think that deep, so that is why you must die. how dare you think that I and you are part of the same species when we are sooooooo different. you arent human you are a Robot. you dont take advantage of your capabilites given to you at birth. you just drop them and hop onto the boat and headdown the stream of life with all the other fuckers of your type. well god damit I wont be a part of it! I have thought to much, realized to much, found out to much, and I am to self aware to just stop what I am thinking and go back to society because what I do and think isnt “right” or “morally accepted” NO, NO, NO GOD FUCKING DAMIT NO!I will sooner die than betray my own thoughts. but before I leave this worthless place, I will kill who ever I deam unfit for anything at all. especially life. and i fyou pissed me off in the past, you will die if I see you. because you might be able to piss off others and have it eventually all blow over, but not me. I dont forget people who wronged me. like [Censored by J.C. Sheriff Office] he will never get a chance to read this because he will be dead by me before this is discovered — 4/21/98

The human race sucks. human nature is smuthered out by society, jobs, and work and school. instincts are deleted by laws. I see people say things that contradict themselves, or people that dont take any advantage to the gift of human life. they waste their minds on memorizing the stats of every college basketball player or how many words should be an a report when they should be using their brain on more important things. the human race isnt worth fighting for anymore. WWII was the last war worth fighting and was the last time human life and human brains did any good any made us proud. now, with the government having scandals and conspiracies all over the fucking place and lying to everyone all the time and with worthless pointless mindless discraceful TV shows on (scratched out) and with everyone ub-fucking-sessed with hollywood and beauty and fame and glamour and politics and anything famous, people just arent worth saving. Society may not realize what is happening but I have; you go to school, to get used to studying and learning how youre “supposed to” so that drains or filters out a little bit of human nature. but thats after your parents taught you whats right and wrong even though you may think differently, you still must to have more of your human nature blown out of your ass. society trys to make everyone act the same by burying all human nature and instincts. Thats what school, laws, jobs, and parents do If they realize it or not and them, the few who stick to their natural instincts are casted out as psychos or lunatics or strangers or just plain different. crazy, strange, weird, wild, these words are not bad or degrading.. if humans were let to live how we would naturaly it would be chaos and anarchy and the human race wouldnt probably last that long, but hey guess what, thats how its supposed to be!!!!! society and goverments are only created to have order and calmness, which is exactly the opposite of pure human nature. take away all your laws and morals and just see what you can do. if the goverment was one entity it would be thinking “hey, lets make some order here and calm these crazy fucks down so we can be constructive and fight other goverments in our own little so called self created “civilizied world” and get rid of all those damn insticts everyone has” well shit I’m to tired wright anymor tonight, so until next time, fuck you all — 5/6/98

It has been confirmed, after getting my yearboook and watching people like [censored] and [censored] the human race isn’t worth fighting for, only worth killing. give the Earth back to the animals, they deserve it infinitely more than we do. nothing means anything more, most quotes are worthless, especially the rearranged ones like “dont fight your enemies, make your enemies fight” you know, quotes that use the same phrase just rearranged, Dumbfuck shit [illegible] wear. its funny, people say “you shouldn’t be so different.” to me, and 1st I say fuck you dont tell me what I should and shouldn’t be and 2ND mother fuckers different is good, I dont want to be like you or anyone which is almost impossible this day w/ all the little shits trying to be “original-copycats”, I expect shits like you to criticize anyone who isnt one of your social words; “normal” or “civilized” – see tempest and Caliban. allyou degrading worthless shits. all caught up and brainwashed into the 90’s society. “what? you AREN’T going to college, are you are crazy!” holy SHIT that is one fucking BIG Quote that just proves my point. step back and look at yourself fuckers, I dare you, maybe I’ll get lucky and you’ll step back to far like Nick in Elm3. w/ the same concequence. — 5/9/98

 

 

wooh, different pen. HA! alright you pathetic fools listen up; I have figured it out. the human race strives for exellence in life and community always wanting to bring more =good= into the comm. and nulify =bad= things. anyone who thinks differently than the majority or the leaders is deamed “unusual” or weird or crazy. people want to be a part of something; a family, a service, a club, a union, a community, whatever. thats what humans want. who cares waht you as an individual thinks, you must do what you are told, whether it is jump of a bridge or drive on the right side of the road. protesters in the past protested because the human race that was dominant (Ghandi and the Brits or the king and the americans) wasnt working out = they had fault = they failed = their ideas didnt work. humans dont change that much, they only get better technology to do their work quicker/easier. people always say we shouldnt be racist. why not? Blacks ARE different, like it or not they are. they started on the bottom so why not keep em there. it took the centuries to convince us that they are equal but they still use their color as an excuse or they just discriminate us because we are white. Fuck you, we should ship yer black asses back to Afri-fucking-ca were you came from. we brought you here and we will take you back. America=White. Gays….well all gays, ALL gays, should be killed. mit keine fragen. lesbians are fun to watch if they are hot but still, its not human. its a fucking disease. you dont see bulls or roosters trying to fuck do you? no, I didn’t think so. women you will always be under men. its been seen throughout nature, males are almost always doing the dangerous shit while the women stay back. its your animal instincts, deal with it or commit suicide, just do it quick. thats all for now. — 5/20/98

 

 

If you recall your history the Nazis came up with a “final solution” to the Jewish problem… kill them all. well incase you havent figured it out yet, I say, “K I L L M A N K I N D” no one should survive. we all live in lies. people are saying they want to live in a perfect society, well utopia doesnt exist. It is human to have flaws. you know what, Fuck it. why should I have to explain myself to you survivors when half of the shit I say you shitheads wont understand and if you can then woopie fucking do. that just means you have something to say as my reason for killing. and the majority of the audience wont even understand my motives either! they’ll say “ah, hes crazy, hes insane, oh well, I wonder if the bulls won.” you see! it’s fucking worthless! all you fuckers should die! DIE! what the fuck is the point if onlu some people see what I am saying, there will always be ones who dont, ones that are to dumb or naive or ignorrant or just plain retarded. If I cant pound it into every single persons head then it is pointless. fuck mercy fuck justic fuck morals fuck civilized fuck rules fuck laws… DIE manmade words…people think they apply to everything when they dont/cant. theres no such thing as True Good or True Evil, its all relative to the observer. its just all nature, chemistry, and math. deal with it. but since dealing with it seems impossible for mankind, since we have to slap warning labels on nature, then… you die. burn, melt, evaporate, decay, just go the fuck away!!!! YAAAAAH!!!! – 6/12/98-

KEIN MITLEID

“when in doubt, confuse the hell out the enemy” – Fly 9/2/98

wait mercy doesnt exist….

heres something to chew on….: today I saw a program on the discovery channel about satelites and radar and aircraft and stuff, and at the end of the show the narrator said some things that made me think “damn, we are so advanced, we kick ass, america is awesome, we have so many things in our military, we would kick anyones ass.” for a minute I actually had some pride in our nation…. then I realized, “hey, this only the Good things that I am seeing here. only the Pros, not the cons. maybe thats what people see, only the Pros, and thats why they are under control. but me, I see all… you can only blind me for so long. but alas, I have realized that Yes, the human race is still indeed doomed. It just needs a few kick starts, like me, and hell, maybe even [censored]. If can whipe a few cities off the map, and even the fuckhead Holding the map, then great. hmm, just thinking if I want ALL humans dead or maybe just the quote-unquote “civilized, developed, and known-of” places on Earth. maybe leave little tribes of natives in the rain forest er something. hmm, I’ll think about that. eh. done for tonight -REB- 6/13/98

As part of the human race, and having the great pleasure of being blessed with a brain, I can think. Humans can do whatever they want. There are no laws of nature that prevent humans from making choices. maybe from actually DOING some of those choices, but not from making the choice. If a man choosses to speed while driving home one day, then it is his fault for whatever happens. If he crashes into a school bus full of kidies and they all burn to death, its his fault. Its only a tragedy if you think it is, and then its only a tragedy in your own mind. so you shouldn’t expect others to think that way also. it could also be a miracle for another person. maybe the bus stopped the car from plowing into a little old lady walking on the sidewalk. one could think it was a “miracle” that she wasnt hit. you see, anything and everything that happens in our world is just that, a HAPPENING. anything else is relative to the observer, but yet we try to have a “universal law” or “code” of what is good and bad and that just isnt fucking correct. we shouldn’t be allowed to do that. we arent GODS. just because we are at the top of the food chain with our technology doesnt mean we can be “judges” of nature. sure we can think what we can think what we want, but you can “think” and “believe” you can judge people and nature all you want, but you are still wrong! why should your morals apply to everyone else. “morale” is just another word. and thats it. I think we are all a waste of natural resources and should be killed off, and since humans have the ability to choose… and I’m human… I think I will choose to kill and damage as much as nature allows me to so take that. fuck you, and eat napalm + lead! HA! only Nature can stop me. I know I could get shot by a cop after only killing a single person, but hey guess the fuck WHAT! I chose to kill that one person so get over it! Its MY fault! not my parents, not my brothers, not my friends, not my favorite bands, not computer games, not the media. IT is MINE! go shut the fuck up! 

-REB- 7/29/98

someones bound to say “what were they thinking?” when we go NBK or when we were planning it, so this what I am thinking. “I have a goal to destroy as much as possible so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that, so I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom like FH or FS or demons, so It’s either me or them. I have to turn off my feelings.” keep this is mind, I want to burn the world, I want to kill everyone except about 5 people, who I will name later, so If you are reading this you are lucky you escaped my rampage because I wanted to kill you. It will be very tricky getting all of our supplies, explosives, weaponry, ammo, and then hiding it all and then actually planting it all so we can achieve our goal. but if we get busted any time, we start killing then and there, just like Wilks from the AlIENS books, I aint going out without a fight. 

Once I finally start my killing, keep this in mind, there are probably about 100 people max in the school alone who I dont want to die, the rest, MUST FUCKING DIE! If I didnt like you or if you pissed me off and lived through my attacks, consider yourself one lucky god damn NIGGER. Pity that a lot of the dead will be a waste in someways, like dead hot chicks who were still bitches, they could have been good fucks. oh well, too fucking bad. life isnt fair… not by a long fuckin shot when Im at the wheel, too. God I want to torch and level everything in this whole fucking area but Bombs of that size are hard to make, and plus I would need a fuckin fully loaded A-10 to get every store on wadsworth and all the buildings downtown. heh, Imagine THAT ya fuckers, picture half of denver on fire just from me and Vodka. napalm on sides of skyscrapers and car garages blowing up from exploded gas tanks…. oh man that would be beautiful. — 10/23/98

you know what, I feel like telling about lies. I lie a lot. almost constant. and to everybody, just to keep my own ass out of the water. and by the way (side note) I dont think I am doing this for attention, as some people may think. lets see, what are some big lies I have told; “yeah I stopped smoking,” “for doing it not for getting caught,” “no I’m havent been making more bombs,” “no I wouldn’t do that,” and of course, countless of other ones, and yeah I know that I hate liers and I am one myself, oh fucking well. Its ok If I am a hypocrite, but no one else. because I am higher then you people, no matter what you say if you disagree I would shoot you And I am one racist mother fucker too, fuck the niggers and spics and chinks, unless they are cool, but sometimes they are so fucking retarded they deserve to be ripped on. some people go through life begging to be shot. and white fucks are just the same. if I could nuke the world I would, because so far I hate you all. there are probly around 10 people I wouldnt want to die, but hey, who ever said life is fair should be shot like the others too. – 11/1/98

heh heh heh. I sure had fun this weekend. lets see, what really happened. before going to the Rock n Bowl we stopped by King Soopers and one and [censored] picked up some big ass stoges. we then went to the Rock n Bowl and I had a few cigarettes and one of brand new cigars. we then went back to [censored] house where her mom had previousely bought us all a fuck load of liquor. personally I had asked for Tequilla and Irish cream, Vodka got his vodka, and there was beer, whiskey, schnopps, puckers, scotch and of course, orange juice! so we had some fun there playing cards and making drinks. we eventually made it to bed at about 5AM. got up at 10, went to safeway got some donouts and then I took Vodka home. the bottle of Tequilla is almost full and is in car, right by my spare tire and right by the bottle of irish cream. heh heh. I’ll have to find a spot for those. and by the way, this nazi report is boosting my love of killing even more. like the early Nazi government, my brain is like a sponge, sucking up everything that sounds cool and leaving out all that is worthless, thats how Nazism was formed and thats how I will be too! 

11/8/98

Fuck you Brady! all I want is a couple of guns, and thanks to your fucking bill I will probably not get any! come on, I’ll have a clean record and I only want for personal protection. Its not like I’m some person who would go on a shooting spree…. fuckers. Ill probably end up nuking everything and fucking robbing some gun collectors house. Fuck, thatll be be hard. oh well, just as long as I kill a lot of fucking people. Everyone is always making fun of me because of how I look, how fucking weak I am and shit, well I will get you all back: ultimate fucking revenge here. you people could have shown more respect, treated me better, asked for my knowledge or guidence more, treated me more like senior, and maybe I wouldn’t have been as ready to tear your fucking heads off. then again, I have always hated how I looked, I make fun of people who look like me, sometimes without even thinking sometimes just because I want to rip on myself. Thats where a lot of my hate grows from, the fact that I have practically no selfesteem, especially concerning girls and looks and such. therefore people make fun of me… constantly… therefore I get no respect and therefore I get fucking PISSED. as of this date I have enough explosives to kill about 100 people, and then if I get a couple bayonetts, swords, axes, whatever I’ll be able to kill at least 10 more. and that just isnt enough! GUNS! I need guns! Give me some fucking firearms! 

11/12/98

HATE! I’m full of hate and I Love it. I HATE PEOPLE and they better fucking fear me if they know whats for em. yes I hate and I guess I want others to know it, yes I’m racist and I don’t mind. Niggs and spics bring it on themselves, and another thing, I am very racist towards white trash p.o.s.s like [censored] and [censored] they deserve the hatred, otherwise I probly wouldnt hate them. Its a tragedy, the human nature of people will lead to their downfall. Peoples human nature will get them killed. whether by me or Vodka, Its happened before, and not just in school shootings like those pussy dumbasses over in Minnesota who squeeled. throughtout history, Its our fucking nature! I know how people are and why and I cant stand it! I love the nazis too… by the way, I fucking cant get enough of the swastika, the SS, and the iron cross. Hitler and his head boys fucked up a few times and it cost them the war, but I love their beliefs and who they were, what they did, and what they wanted. I know that form of gov couldn’t have lasted long once the human equation was brought in, but damnit it sure looked good. every form of gov leads to downfalls, everything will always fuck up or yeah something. its all DOOMed god damnit. this is beginning to make me get in a corner. I’m showing too much of myself, my views and thoughts, people might start to wonder, smart ones will get nosey and something might happen to fuck me over, I might need to put on one helluva mask here to fool you all some more. fuck fuck fuck it’ll be very fucking hard to hold out until April. If people would give me more compliments all of this might still be avoidable… but probably not. Whatever I do people make fun of me, and sometimes directly to my face. I’ll get revenge soon enough. fuckers shouldn’t have ripped on me so much huh! HA! then again its human nature to do what you did… so I guess I am also attacking the human race. I cant take it, Its not right… true… correct… perfect. I fucking hate the human equation. Nazism would be fucking great if it werent for individualism and our natural instinct to ask questions. you know what maybe I just need to get laid. maybe that’ll just change some shit around. thats another thing, I am a fucking dog. I have fantasies of just taking someone and fucking them hard and strong. someone like [censored] were I just pick her up, take her to my room, tear off her shirt and pants and just eat her out and fuck her hard. I love flesh… weisses fleisch! dein weisses fleisch emegt mich soo… Ich bin dech nur ein gigilo! I want to grab a few different girls in my gym class, take them into a room, pull their pants off and fuck them hard. I love flesh… the smooth legs, the large breasts, the innocent flawless body, the eyes, the hair; jet black, blond, white, brown. ahhh I just want to fuck! call it teenage hormones or call it a crazy fuckin racist rapist… BJ ist mir egal. I just want to be surrounded by the flesh of a woman, someone like [censored] who I wanted to just fuck like hell, she made me practically drool, when she wore those shorts to work.. instant hard on. I couldnt stop staring. and others like [censored] in my gym class, [censored] or whatever in my gym class, and others who I just want to overpower and engulf myself in them. mmmm I can taste the sweet flesh now… the salty sweat, the animalistic movement… Iccchhh… lieeebe…… fleisccchhhh. who can I trick into my room first? I can sweep someone off their feet, tell them what they want to hear, be all nice and sweet, and then “fuck em like an animal, feel them from the inside” as Reznor said. oh… thats something else… that one NIN video I saw, broken or closer or something, the where the guy is kidnapped and tortured like hell… actual hell. I want to do that too. I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can. I want to gut someone with my hand, to tear a head off and rip out the heart and lungs from the neck, to stab someone in the gut, shove it up to the heart, and yank the fucking blade out of their rib cage! I want to grab some weak little freshman and just tear them apart like a fucking wolf. show them who is god. strangle them, squish their head, bite their temples into the skull, rip off their jaw. rip off their colar bones, break their arms in half and twist them around, the lovely sounds of bones cracking and flesh ripping, ahh… so much to do and so little chances. — 11/17/98

“weisses 

fleisch”

– perfect

– song

– for

– me

Well folks, today was a very important day in the history of R. Today along with Vodka and someone else who I wont name, we went downtown and purchased the following; a double barrel 12ga. shotgun, a pump action 12ga. shotgun, a 9mm carbine, 250 9mm rounds, 15 12ga slugs, 40 shotgun shells, 2 switch blade knives, and total of 4 – 10 round clips for the carbine. we……. have…. GUNS! we fucking got em you sons of bitches! HA! HAHAHA! neener! Booga Booga. heh. its all over now. this capped it off, the point of no return. I have my carbine, shotgun, ammo and knife all in my trunk tonight and theyll there till tomorrow… after school you know its really a shame. I had a lot of fun at that gun show, I would have loved it if you were there dad. we would done some major bonding. would have been great. oh well. but, alas, I fucked up and told [censored] about my “flask”. that really disappoints me. [censored] I know you thought it was good for me… in the long run and all that shit, smart of you to give me a such big raise and then rat me out, you figure it was supposed to cancel each other? god damn flask, that just fucked me over big time. now you all will be on my ass even more than before about being on track. I’ll get around it though, If have to cheat and lie to everyone then thats fine. THIS is what I am motivated for, THIS is my goal. THIS is what I want to do with my life! you know whats weird, I dont feel like a punching through a door because of the flask deal, probly cause I am fucking armed now. I feel more confident, stronger, and more Godlike. I have confidence in my ability to dese(cei)ve people. hopefully Ill make it to April, but that might not happen. Ug, Its been a busy weekend, I need to sleep, I’ll continue tomorrow. 

11/22/98

yesterday we fired our first actual firearms ever. 3 rounds from the carbine. taught that ground a thing or 2. I even had the 2 clips in my pocket while talking to vodkas dad about senior ditch day. God it felt great firing off that bad boy, and hopefully I’ll be able to get more than just 4 clips for it. I dubbed my shotgun “Arlene” after Arlene Sanders from the DOOM books. She always did love the shotgun. Vodka’s DB is looking very fucking awesome, all cut down to the proper lengths. this is a bitch trying to keep up on homework while working on my guns, bombs, and lying. by the way, I bought that flask in the mall and I had a friend fill it up w/ scotch whiskey, only had about 3 swigs in the 3 weeks I had it. plus monday I gave my T and IC to Vodka, just in case. I never really did like alcohol, just wasn’t my thing, but It felt good to just have around. that argument on the 22nd was a real bitch, but I think I should have won a fucking oscar. I even quoted a few movies, remember “what the hell am I gonna do now man?! what am I gonna do!?” thats good ole Hudson from aliens. Sounded good too. and hey goddamnit I would have been a fucking great marine, It would have given me a reason to do good. and I would never drink and drive, either. It will be weird when we actually go on the rampage. hopefully we will have plenty of clips and bombs. Im gonna still try and get my calico 9mm. just think, 100 rounds without reloading…. hell yeah!

We actually may have a chance to get some machine pistols thanks to the Brady bill. If we can save up about 200$ real quick and find someone who is 21+ we can go to the next gun show and find a private dealer and buy ourselves some bad-ass AB-10 machine pistols. Clips for those things can get really fucking big too.

12/3/98

Woohoo, I’ll never have to take a final again! feels good to be free. I just love Hobbes and Nietzche. Well tomorrow I’ll be ordering 9 more 10 round clips for my carbine. I’m gonna be so fucking loaded in about a month. the big things we need to figure now is the time bombs for the commons and how we will get them in and leave then there to go off, without any fucking Jews finding them. I wonder if anyone will write a book on me. sure is a ton of symbolism, double meanings, themes, appearance vs reality shit going on here. oh well, it better be fuckin good if it is writtin. 

12/17/98

heh, get this. KMFDM’s new album is entitled “Adios” and it’s release date is in April. how fuckin appropriate, a subliminal final “Adios” tribute to Reb and Vodka. thanks KMFDM… I ripped the hell outa the system 

12/20/98

jesus christ that was fucking close. fucking shitheads at the gun shop almost dropped the whole project. oh well, thank god I can BS so fucking well. I went and picked up those babies today, so now I got 13 of those niggers. WOOHAH. the stereo is very nice, but having no insurance payments to worry about so I could concentrate of BOMBS would have been better. oh well, I think I’ll have enough. now I just need to get Vodka another gun. 

12/29/98

Months have passed. Its the first Friday night in the final month. much shit has happened. Vodka has a Tec 9, we test fired all of our babies, we have 6 time clocks ready, 39 crickets, 24 pipe bombs, and the napalm is under construction. Right now I’m trying to get fucked and trying to finish off these time bombs. NBK came quick. why the fuck cant I get any? I mean, I’m nice and considerate and all that shit, but nooooo. I think I try to hard. but I kinda need to considering NBK is closing in. The amount of dramatic irony and foreshadowing is fucking amazing. Everything I see and I hear I incorporate into NBK somehow. Either bombs, clocks, guns, napalm, killing people, any and everything finds some tie to it. feels like a Goddamn movie sometimes. I wanna try to put some mines and trip bombs around this town too maybe. Get a few extra flags on the scoreboard. I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things. And no don’t fucking say, “well thats your fault” because it isnt, you people had my phone #, and I asked and all, but no. no no no dont let the weird looking Eric KID come along, ohh fucking nooo. 

Dylan’s journal. AH yes, this is me writing just writing, nobody technically did anything, just i felt like throwing out my thoughts – this is a wierd time, wierd life, wierd existence. As i sit here (partially drunk w. a screwdriver) i think a lot. Think Think that’s all my life is, just shitloads of thinking all the time my mind never stops music runs 24/7 (xpt for sleep), just songs i hear, not necessarily good or bad, & thinking about the asshole [edited] in Gym class, how he worries me, about driving, & my family, about friends & doings with them, about girls i kno (mainly [edited] & [edited]), how i kno i can never have them, yet i can still dream I do shit to supposedly ‘cleanse’ myself in a spiritual, moral sort of way (deleting the ‘limits’ on my comp, not getting drunk for periods of time, trying not to ridicule/make fun of people ([edited]) at school, yet it does nothing to help my life – moraly. My existence is shit. To me – how i feel that i am in eternal suffering. in infinite directions in infinite realities – yet these [Dylan scribble] realities are fake- artificial, induced by thought, how everything connects, yet its all so far apart & i sit & think. Science is the way to find solutions to everything, right? I still think that, yet i see different views of shit now like the mind – yet if the mind is viewed scientifically HMM I dwell in the past thinking of good & bad movies 

 

a lot on the past though… ive always had a thing for the past – how it reacts to the present & the future – or rather vice versa. I wonder how/when i got so fucked up… my mind, existence, problem – when Dylan Benet Klebold got covered up by this entity containing Dylan’s body as i see the people at school – some good, some bad – I see how different i am (aren’t we all you’ll say) yet i’m on such a greater scale of difference (as far as I kno, or guess) I see jocks having fun, friends, woman, LIVEZ

[two drawn arrows pointing down to the text below]

or rather shallow existences compared to mine (maybe). Like ignorance = bliss – they don’t know this world (how I do in my mind or in reality, or in this existence) yet we each are lacking something that the other possesses  i lack the true human nature that Dylan owned, & they lack the overdeveloped mind/ imagination/ knowledge tool I don’t sit in here thinking of suicide gives me hope, that I’ll be in my place wherever I go after this life. that ill finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe – my mind, body, everywhere, everything at PEACE… me- my soul (existence). & the rotine – is still monotonous, go to school, be scared & nervous, somewhat hoping that people can accept me that i can accept them the NIN song Piggy is good for thought writing The lost Highway sounds like a movie about me. im gonna write later, bye – <<-VoDkA->> 

 

  Well well, back at it, yes, (you say) [scribble] whoever the fuck ‘you’ is, but yea. My life is still fucked, in case you care maybe, (not?) I have just lost fuckin 45$, & Before that I lost my zippo & knife – (i did get those back) Why the fuck is he being such an ASSHOLE??? (god i guess, whoever is the being which controlls shit) He’s fucking me over big time & it pisses me off. OOOh god i HATE my life, i want to die really bad right now – let’s see what i have that’s good: A nice family, a good house, food, a couple good friends, & possessions. What’s bad: no girls (friends or girlfriends), no other friends except a few, nobody accepting me even though i want to be accepted, me doing badly & being intimidated in any & all sports, me looking wierd & acting shy – BIG problem, me getting bad grades, having no ambition of life, thats the big shit. Anyway… I was Mr. Cutter tonight – I have 11 depressioners on my right hand now, & my fav. contrasting symbol, because it is so true & means so much [sketch in margin labeled ‘cut] – The battle between good & bad never ends OK, enough bitchin well im not done yet. ok so I dont know what i do wrong with people (mainly women) – its like they all set out to hate & ignore me, i never know what to say or do, [edited] is soo fuckin lucky he has no idea how I suffer.

  ok here’s some poetry this is a display of one man in search of answers, never finding them, yet in hopelessness understands things

 

  Existence.. what a strange word. He, set out by determination & curiosity, knows no existence, knows nothing realevent to himself. The petty destinations of others & everything on this world, in this world, he knows the answers to. Yet they have no purpose to him. He seeks knowledge of the unthinkable, of the indefineable, of the unknown. He explores the everything…using his mind, the most powerful tool known to him. Not a physical barrier blocking the limits of exploration, time thru thought thru dimensions. the everything is his realm. Yet, the more he thinks, hoping to find answers to his questions, the more come up. Amazingly, the petty things mean much to him at this time, how he wants to be normal, not this transceiver of the everything. Then, ocuring to him, the answer. How everything is connected yet seperate. By experiencing the petty others actions, reactions, emotions, doings, [scribble] and thoughts, he gets a mental picture of what, in his mind, is a cycle. Existence is a great hall, life is one of the [scribble] rooms, death is passing thru the doors, & the ever-existant compulsion of everything is the curiosity to keep moving down the hall, thru the doors, exploring rooms, down this never-ending hall. Questions make answers, answers conceive questions, and at long last he is content. 

 

TTYL <<-VoDkA->>

 

 

Yo. Whassup  heehehehe Know what’s on wierd? Everyone knows everyone. I swear, like im an outcast, & everyone is conspiring against me. Check it (this isn’t good, but I need to write, so here..)

 

    Within the known limits of time within the conceived boundaries of space the average human thinks these are the settings of existence Yet the ponderer, the outkast, the believer, helps out the human. Think not of 2 dimensions says the ponderer, Just of 3, as your world is conceived of 3 dimensions, so is mine. While you explore the immediate physical boundaries of your body, you see in your 3 dimensions – L, W, & H. Yet I, who is more mentally open to anything, see my 3 dimensions, my realm of thought – Time, Space, & THOUGHT. Thought is the most powerful thing that exists – anything conceivable can be produced, anything & everything is possible, even in your physical world. After this so called lecture the common man feels confused, empty, & unaware. Yet, those are the best emotions of a ponderer. The real difference is, a true ponderer will explore these emotions & what caused them.

Another… a dream.

    Miles & miles of never-ending grass, like a wheat. A farm, sunshine, a happy feeling in the presence, Absolutely nothing wrong, nothing ever is, contrary 180 degrees to normal life. No awareness, just pure bliss, unexplainable bliss, The only challenges are no challenge, & then [sketch of a wall] BAM!!! realization sets in, the world is the greatest punishment: life.

  Hypnosis Place- It is a sky – with one large cloud, & sort of a cloud-made chair – the sun is at the head of the chair 10 o’ clock up into the sky. Below, i sometimes see myself & the green (Great green) Earth – sorta a city, yet I hear nothing. i relax on this chair – actually like a chaise – & i am talking to what? i dont know – its just there, i have the feeling that i kno him, even though I consciously don’t & we talk like we are the same person – like hes my soul

[sketch of a ‘thought box’] The everlasting contrast.

Dark. Light. God. Lucifer. Heaven. Hell. GOOD. BAD. Yes, the ever-lasting contrast. Since existance has known, the ‘fight’ between good & evil has continued. Obviously, this fight can never end. Good things turn bad, bad things become good, the ‘people’ on the earth see it as a battle they can win. HA fuckin morons. If people looked at History they would see what happens. I think too much, I understand, I am GOD compared to some of these unexistable, brainless zombies. Yet, the actions of them interest me, like a kid w. a new toy. Another contrast, more of a [scribble] paradox, actually, like the advanced go for the undevelopeds realm, while some of the morons become everything dwellers  but, exceptions to every rule, & this is a BIG exception – most morons never change – they never decide to live in the ‘everything’ frame of mind.

Laterz

<<-VoDkA->>

It is not good for me right now (like it ever is) but anyway

My best friend ever: the friend who shared, experimented, laughed, took chances with, & appreciated me more than any friend ever did has been or desired. “passed on”. in my book. Ever since [edited] (who I wouldnt mind killing) has loved him thats the only place hes been with her If anyone had any idea how sad I am I mean we were the TEAM. When him & I first were friends, hell I finally found someone who was like me: who appreciated me & showed very common interests. Ever since 7th grade ive felt lonely when [edited] came around, I finally felt hapiness (sometimes) we did cigars, drinking, sabotage to houses, EVERYTHING for the first time together & now that he’s”moved on” I feel so lonely w/o a friend. Oh well, maybe he’ll come around——> I hope. That’s all [arrow points to] for this topic…. maybe Ill never see this again… [arrow points down]

o=[edited]=o

<<-VoDkA->>

OH My God… I am almost sure I am in love… With [edited]. Hehehe… such [scribble] a strange name, like mine Yet everything about her I love from her good body to her almost perfect face, her charm, her wit, & cunning, her NOT Being popular, her friends (who I know) -some – I just hope she likes me as much as I LOVE Her. I think of her every second of every day, I want to be with her, I imagine me & her doing things together, the sound of her laugh, I picture her face, I love her. If soul mates exist, then I think I’ve found mine. I hope she likes Techno. 🙂

[Edited], I love you,

Dylan

oooh god, i want to die sooo bad such a sad, desolate, lonely, unsalvageable i feel i am not fair, NOT FAIR!!! I wanted happiness!! I never got it!!! Let’s sum up my life the most miserable existence in the history of time My best friend has ditched me forever, lost in bettering himself, & having/enjoying/ taking for granted his love. Ive NEVER knew this not 100 times near this they look at me [edited] like I’m a stranger; I helped them both out thru life, & they left me in the abyss of suffering when i gave them the boat out. The one who I thought was my true love, [edited], is not. Just a shell of what I want the most The meanest trick was played on me – a fake love She in reality doesn’t give a good fuck about me doesn’t even know me.. I have no happiness, no ambitions, no friends, & no LOVE!!! [Edited] can get me that gun I hope, I wanna use it on a poor S.O.B. I know his name is vodka, dylan is his name too. What else can I do/give i stopped the pornography, I try not to pick on people. Obviously at least one power is against me. [edited] funny how Ive been thinking about her over the last few days giving myself fake realities that she, others MIGHT have liked me just a

bit my god, I have always been hated, by everyone & everything, just now more Goodbye all the crushes ive ever had, just shells images, no [scribble] truths BUT WHY? Yes, you can read this, why did god [incoherent scrawl]

[arrow points down to text below

A dark time, 

infinite sadness,

I want to find

love.

Goodbye, 

sorry to everyone…

I just can’t take it

all the thoughts…

to many… make my

head twist…

I must have happiness,

love, peace.

goodbye

Ignorance is bliss

happiness is ambition 

desolation is knowledge 

pain is acceptance 

despair is anger 

denial is helpless 

martyrism is hope for others 

advantages taken are causes of martyrism 

revenge is sorrow 

death is a reprieve 

life is a punishment

others achievements are tormentations

people are alike

i am different -Dylan

me is a god, a god of sadness

exiled to this eternal hell

the people i helped, abandon me

i am denied what i want,

to love & to be happy

being made a human

without the possibility of BEING human

The cruellest of all punishments

to some i am crazy

it is so clear, yet so foggy

everythings connected, seperated

I am the only interpreter of this

Id rather have nothing than be nothing

some say godliness isnt nothing

humanity is the something I long for

I just want something I can never have

The story of my existence -Dylan

Me. sorry I didn’t write, A SHITLOAD in my existence mist. Ok hell & back ive been to the zombie bliss side & I hate it as much if not more than the awareness part. Im back now. a taste of what I thought I want wrong. Possible girlfriends are coming then [edited].. Ill give the phony shit up in a second. want TRUE love. I just want something i can never have. true true I hate everything. why cant I die not fair. I want pure bliss… to be cuddling w. [edited], who i think i love deeper than ever I was hollow, thought I was right. Another form of the Downward Spiral deeper & deeper it goes. to cuddle w. her, to be one w. her, to love; just laying there. I need a gun. This is a wierd entry I- should feel happy, but shit brought me down. I feel terrible. The Lost Highway apparently repeats itself. I want drink. now. [edited] lucky bastard gets a perfect soul mate, who he can admit FUCKIN SUICIDE to & I get rejected for being honest about fuckin hate for jocks. From the wrong people maybe [edited] & [edited].. Anyway… heres a 2 poems

2 FUCK 

me

Die 

me

Awareness signs the warrant for suffering. why is it that the zombies achieve something me wants (overdeveloped me). They can love, why can’t i? The true existence lives in solitude, always aware, always infinite, always, looking, for, his love. Peace might be the ultimate destination… destination unknown i want happiness. Abandonment is present for the martyr. my thoughts exist in, want to exist live in. I want to find a room in the great hall & stay there w. my love forever. sadness seems infinite, & the shell of happiness shines around. Yet the true despair overcomes it this lifetime. How tragic too my 

FUCKIN DUMASS SHITHEAD

I HATE SHIT motherfuckin

goddam piece of death

thought and nothin

        FUCK

FUCK

                    FUCK!

No emotions. not caring. 

yet another stage in this 

shit life. suicide… -Dylan Klebold

Farther & farther distant That’s what’s happening. me & everything that zombies consider real just images, not life. Soon I will be at peace I hope..

Burn –> [musical note] with all yer life fucked up around you. [musical note] I get more depressed with each day… more shit…. & I CAN’T EVER STOP IT!!!! [illegible scrawl]

Some god i am All people i ever might have loved have abandoned me, my parents piss me off & hate me want me to have fuckin ambition!! How can i when i get screwed & destroyed By everything??!!! I have no money, no happiness, no friends Eric will be getting farther away soon… Ill have less than nothing how normal. I wanted to love i wanted to be happy and ambitious and free & nice & good & ignorant. everyone abandoned me. i have small stupid pleasures, my so called hobbies & doings those are all thats left for me. < clinging onto the smallest rocks  many people climbing up a never-ending vertical cliff. [edited] & [edited] found a plateau to exist on..they walked up me to get to it. Nobody will help me only exist w. me if it suits them. i helped, why cant they? [edited] will get me a gun, ill go on a killing spree against anyone I want. more crazy deeper in the spiral, lost highway repeating, dwelling on the beautiful past, ([edited] & [edited] getting drunk) Home, everyone moves up i always stayed. Abandonment. this room sux. wanna die.

everything is as least expected. The meak are trampled on, the assholes prevail, the gods are decieving, lost in my little insane asylum w. the outhouse redneck music playing wanna die & be free w. my love if she even exists. She probably hates me finds a [illegible] or a jock who treats her like shit. I remember details nothing worth remembering i remember. I don’t know my love: could be [edited], or [edited], or [edited], or [edited], or anyone. I dont know & im sick of not KNOWING!! to be kept in the dark is a punishment!!! 

I have lost my emotions like in hurt the song. NIN. People eventually find happiness i never will. Does that make me a non-human? YES. the god of sadness [edited] church was so fun…. the rec thing w. mara…

anything < no, everything < NO!

everything

 

 

 

… Beeerr… man I dont

 

know whats up lately never do in existence. All this shit w. [edited] and [edited] friends… so wierd & different from past yet again, thats the way in existence. I wonder if ill ever have a love… my love. [edited] got his, I dont, wont ever get mine. Heres all the people ive loved, or at least liked (or thought I loved) – all the same meaning.

(edited) {list of redacted names, 15 in all]

[edited] is the newest…

the purest, (for now) seems perfect for meI seem perfect for her. I was delusional & thought she waved at me the last day of school. Oh well my emotions are gone so much past pain done, my senses are numbed, the beauty of being numbLates

One of my symbols –> O

 

 {three more redacted names]

The cliff theory… everyone trying to get higher & stable… 

Well well so much changes  (like ..existence). I understand almost everything now so close to my love – [edited]. The runes have shown it, she has shown it, i have felt it. I know the meaning of each life: To be loved by yer love, & to be happy with ones self.

Only for the gods though (me, [edited] & etc.) The zombies & their society band together & try to destroy what is superior & what they don’t understand & are afraid of. Soon either ill commit suicide, or I’ll get w. [edited] & it will be NBK for us. My hapiness. her hapiness. NOTHING else matters. Ive been caught w. most of my crimes  xpl drinking, smoking, & the house vandalism & the pipe bombs. If by fates choice, [edited] didnt love me, id slit my wrist & blow up atlanta strapped to my neck. Its good, understanding. a hard road since my realization, but it gets easier. BUT IT DOESNT! That’s part of existence. Unpredictable. Existence is pure hell & pure heaven at the same time. I will never stop wondering, the lost highway will never end, the music in my head will never stop It’s all part of existence. The hall will never end. The love will always be here. GOD

I LOVE HER!!! It’s so great to love.

society is tightening it’s grip on me, & soon I & [edited] will snap, he will have on revenge on society, & then be free, to exist in a timeless sourceless place of pure hapiness. The purpose of life is to be happy & be with yer love who is equally happy. Not much more to say. goodbye.

 

 

 

I love

   her, & she loves

       me. Almost happiness in

slavery  the real people (gods)

are slaves to the majority

of zombies, but we know

& love being superior.

 

I didnt want to

be a jock… i hated

The hapiness

that they

have – & I will

have something

infinitely

better…

 

(By the way, some zombies are smarter than others,

some manipulate like my parents.)

I am God. [edited] is God.

& zombies will pay for

their arrogance, hate, fear, abandonment, &

distrust.

I LOVE YOU [edited] That’s all I think about anymore… I know that this humanity is almost done. that we will be free.

We have proven to fate that we are the everything of purity & halcyon, & that we deserve, need, love, cant exist w/o each other. He had thoughts that i might not be enough, my mind sometimes gets stuck on its own things, i think about human things. All i try to do is imagine the happiness between us. that is something we cannot even concieve in the toilet earth. The everything, the halcyon, the happiness is ours. There will be no notes from me. Let the humans suffer w/o my knowledge of the everything.I am trying not to think about the happiness, somehow thinking that will destroy it if i concieve/relish it when I’m a human. But i love her- we are soulmates.

I LOVE YOU, [edited]

[surrounded by hearts]

[edited],

(Please dont skip to the back: read the note as it was written)

    You don’t consciously know who I am, & doubtedly unconsciously too. I, who write this, love you beyond infinince. I think about you all the time, how this world would be a better place If you loved me as I do you. I know what you’re thinking: (some psycho wrote me this harassing letter) I hoped we could have been together… you seem a lot like me. Pensive, quiet, an observer, not wanting what is offered here (school, life, etc.) You almost seem lonely, like me. You probably have a boyfriend, though, & might have not given this note another thought. I have thought you my true love for a long time now, but… well… there was hesitation. You see I can’t tell if you think of anyone as I do you, & if you did who that would be. Fate put me in need of you, yet this Earth blocked that with uncertainties. I will go away soon, but I just had to write this to you, the one I truly loved. Please, for my sake, dont tell anyone about this, as it was only meant for you. Also, please don’t feel any guilt about my soon-to-be absense of this world. Oh… the thoughts of us… doing everything together, not necessarily anything, just to be together would have been pure heaven. I guess it’s time to tell you who I am. I was in a class with you 1st semester, & was blessed w. being with you in a report. I still remember your laugh. Innocent, beautiful, pure. This semester I still see you rarely. I am entranced during 5th period, as we both have it off. To most people, I appear… well… almost scary, but that’s who I appear to be as people are afraid of what they don’t understand. I denied who I was for a long time. until high school… Anyway, you have noticed me a few times, I catch every one of these gazes with an open heart. I think you know who I am by now. Unfortunately… even if you did like me even the slightest bit, you would hate me if you knew who I was. I am a criminal, I have done things that almost nobody would think of condoning. The reason that I’m writing you now is that I have been caught for the crimes I comitted, & I want to go to a new existence. You know what I mean. (Suicide) I have nothing to live for, & I won’t be able to survive in this world after this legal conviction. However, if it was true that you loved me as I do you… I would find a way to survive. Anything to be with you. [arrow points to margin where Dylan writes: I would enjoy life knowing that you loved me.] 99/100 chances you probably think I’m crazy, & want to stay as far away as possible. If that’s the case, then I’m very sorry for involving an innocent person in my problems, & please don’t think twice. However, If you are who I hoped for in my dreams & realities, then do me a favor: Leave a piece of paper in my locker, [arrow to margin note reading: combo=19-37-9 Locker #837 near the library] saying anything that comes to you. Well, I guess this is it- goodbye & I love(d) you.

I LOVE [edited]!!

I love her to infinice. I look back on my awareness journey, see the parts & sections of my understanding… its almost done, yet it is never done, I love [edited], she is my soulmate, my love, all the imaginative halcyons & pure existences I have with her (to me) are almost happiness… I just wish I could call her… something blocks me from calling her, my human side is putting up a wall, to prevent me from calling her, like a few of its truth. BS. I will overcome all fears, doubts, & zombie-based thoughts (oxymoron). I will follow our hearts to the halcyon, loving her. I love you, [edited] 

i think I don’t care

Forever, Fate, up & down spiral

Human years… so much changed in small time, my friends (at my choice) are

depleting & collapsing under each other (Eric & [edited]) like i thought they would. I am ready to be w. [edited]. The ups & downs of fate are forever, good & bad, equal me. [tri-tier cross] the Lost Highway & downward spiral never end. existence is like infinity times itself. [two infinity symbols] I have passed thru this much of the ever existence. this is almost a checkpoint. The zombies have set their place in my mind. for the cliff theory I’ve jumped off w. [arrow down to] [edited] & we’ve floated away to the halcyon. the zombies will pay for their being, their nature. I know everything, yet I know nothing. I am a true god. my infinite memories, thoughts,

perceivations of purity come a lot more w. her, there is pure pure hapiness  the purpose of our existence. I hate, love things. hate everything, love me and [edited]. I understand that i can never ever be a zombie, even if i wanted to. the nature of my entity. Soon, we will live in the halcyons of our minds, the one thing that made me a god. Things are so simple, now that they are infinitely complicated. HAHAHAHA 

I UNDERSTAND

THE EVERYTHING

I AM THE GOD 

OF THE EVERYTHING 

W. [edited]

Fate is my only master

This is prob. my last 

entry. [line points to “I will never stop learning.”] i love my

self, close second to 

[edited], my everlasting 

love. Goodbye, 

[written beside a few hearts and the words: I LOVE YOU]

I hate this non-thinking stasis. Im stuck in humanity. maybe going NBK (gawd) w. eric is the way to break free. i hate this. 

[heart with small Love you]

 

The weather is a replication of our thoughts. The happiness is possible, iminent, I love you [edited].

 

 

The happiness is close,

visible, ending, end of

the beginning of the

halcyons.

 

 

The humanity is blocking me again. Time to go. Hahahaha fuck all. hate this shit need to be me. We, I love her 

  The framework of society stands above & below me. The hardest thing to destroy, yet the weakest thing that exists. I know that i am different, yet i am afraid to tell the society. The possible abandonment, persecution is not something I want to face, yet it is so primitive to me. I guess being yourself means letting people know about inner thoughts too, not just opinions & fashions. (Heheh) I will be free one day, in the land of purity & my happiness, I will have a love, someone who is me in a way. Someday… Possibly thru this life, maybe another, but it will happen… 

Love is more valuable than anything I know. To love is to enter a completion of one’s self. I hate those who choose to destroy a love, who take it for granted. love is greater than life even. As i look for love, i feel i can’t find it. ever. but something tells me i will. Someday. Somewhere. As my love will find me. She feels as i do right now, i can feel it. we will be inseperable. Her & i. Whether it is [edited] or not, i think ill find it. (my love). we will be free, to explore the vast wonders of the stars. To cascade down everlong waterfalls, & thru the warmest seas of pure happiness… no limits… no limits. Nothing will stop us. 

everyone else – “this

book cannot be opened,

some supernatural force

blocks it to common force

people”

everything sucks in

letting go

I know its

her… everything

is true…

my love is

genuine

Love…

existence for

ever is the 

happiness

that we have

achieved

w. each other

I now know the final

battle. the pain of

humanity is our love…

I love

you

 

[edited] is for the [edited] joy

   she gives me

[edited] is for the how she [edited]

   the helpless with her beautiful

   gaze

[edited] is for the [edited]

moments times she shares w. me

[edited] is for the [edited] found

love that ive been looking for

 all my life

[edited] = is the [edited]

of us as a couple

[edited] = How [edited] I hope to

   spend time with her

[edited]= how she is the [edited]

   one i love, that i have ever loved

[edited] = [big scribble] is for 

    the [edited] where we can

   look at the stars

[edited] = How [edited] beautiful

   she is

[edited] = Her [edited] for everything

   she does

 

[text below was written sideways in Dylan Klebold’s journal]

To my Love

As a man, a conquerer does his deeds of

greatness, He thinks he is complete. Yet, the true 

great person achieves happiness only when he 

has met his soulmate.

Alone unknown until the first time they lay

eyes on each other. A true love is hard to come

by, yet the most fulfilling, beautiful, completing

achievement any man can have. Some have wealth,

some have power, some have great intellect, yet i feel

an infinant # of times greater than those as i

have found my true love.

                 V

 

<<– 5 –>>

My whole existence is flawed…

You get me closer to god….. (nin)

          Self-awareness…..

Infinince…..

Existence…..

Knowledge…..

Neutrality…..

Possibility of Happiness…..

Understanding of the everything….. The candle burns….,

the stars set the 

mood….. the

smoke fills the room…..

the hope is sent

thru infinite places…

all of purity….

 

 

 

 

 

[Please don’t show this note to

anyone….. it was meant only for

     you. ] (Don’t tell anyone either)

(You know me…)

[scrawled over everything are the words I LOVE YOU

[edited], I am SO

Sorry… I see i have made

you sad & fucked us up somehow.

i will try… always… i will always

love you please know this….

                     love

                     me

[sketch of the lost highway Dylan likes to draw appears under the following words]

I love

you I LOVE

YOU

[edited], If you dont know who I am still then I apparently haven’t been noticeable enough…. please dont take offense or worry about this note… if you do know who I am, or if you want to anyway, please leave me a note in my locker saying whatever you want whether that be telling me to fuck off or else youll call the cops, or if you want to say whatever, just pleasedo me that favor… if you tell me to

leave you alone, I will. 

I like you [edited], but I won’t force that ever. #837 

19-37-9

PS (I DID try to call you but you must have been asleep)  

The humanity of here & now clouds all that I see. yet the me, the one, can now control the pain, & it is done. 5 more days. 5……. A very influential number, another brick in my journeyed wall. Humans are zombies, they search for acceptance & greed & kill themselves thru each other. They will never learn, or maybe they will, but wont have the stregth to learn. to be aware is not a trait, its a godlike thing, Blessed God. Not a christian, jesus, mt. sanai, Abraham, David, bible gay shit god, but a true controller of existence. [chaos/fate symbol] has to make us this way.

These moments will be lost in the depressions & caverns of the human books forever, like, tears, in, pain, but the thoughts will be eternal. To explain the happiness is impossible ever for fate. its just a pure halcyon set to last more existences than a conceivable number. stupid gay nigger humans think im  crazy. or they think im childish. hahaha. because i cant solve S sin52xss3xdx. That makes me dumb! Because i cant stay thinking in a 2nd dimension, i go to the 5th! haha. so i wait 5 more days. 5 more days. 5 eternitys. & i know he & i are concieved from ourselves & each other. every night of the self-awareness journey, every thought we concieved, we have finished the race. time to die. everything we knew, we were able to understand it, to percieve it, into what we should, everything we knew, we know & use. an understanding of the everything. An einstein stuck in an ant’s body. we are the nature of existence. the zombies were a test to see if our love was genuine. we are in wait of our reward, each other. the zombies will never cause us pain anymore. the humanity was a test. I love you, love. Time to die, time to be free, time to love. 

1      One day. one is the beginning? the end. hahaha. reversed, yet true. About 26.5 hours from now the judgement will begin. Difficult, but not impossible, necessary, nervewracking & fun.

What fun is life without

a little death?

Its interesting, when im in my human form, knowing im going to die. Everything has a touch of triviality to it. like how none of this calculus shit matters. the way it shuldn’t. the truth. In 26.4 hours ill be dead, & in happiness. The little zombie human fags will know their errors, & be forever suffering & mournful, HAHAHA, of course i will miss things. not really.

will

WILL

Ok, this is my will. This is a fucking human thing to do, but whatever,

[edited] – You were a badass, never failed to get me up when i was down. Thx. You get

 

FUCKT

27 PB’s:

V –> 

    –> 

  –> 1 or 2 grens w. crickets attached

All pocket crickets

1 Charlie

3 alpha 

2 beta — in BP?

3 delta

1 fx tnt

1 echo

 

snapple bottles

of gas &

oil in camera

pouch

Walk in, set bombs at 11:09, for 11:17

Leave, set car bombs.

Drive to clemete Park. Gearup.

Get back by 11:15

 

Park cars. set car bombs for 11:18

get out, go to outside hill, wait.

When first bombs go off, attack.

have fun!

 

BP, with…

P bombs,

napalm gas/oil bomb =) Duffel bags.

– blankets

surrounding

shit / books, sports shit, etc.

Had 

to do

After Lunch starts – more ppl!

more cover.

 

DO SHIT FOR NBK

File off clip.

Buy suspenders.

Buy cargo pants

work out carrying gear plan            BDay shit

Find out how to carry Tec-9

Get pouches – geologist in yer old closet.

Get napalm containers

Buy straps Figure out how to carry knife

Practice in-car gearups

Get bullets

Get shells – .00

Give Reb powder

Buy Adidas soccer bag(s)

Give Reb glass containers

Fill up gascans

Find volatile combo. of gas & oil

Look for voltage amplifier, Internet or Radioshak

Buy “wrath” t-shirt

Buy punk gloves.