I used to enjoy reading some conspiracy stuff about power structures etc. What it all really comes down to in those though is not that there is a secret conspiracy but rather that the world is openly run buy a relatively small group of interconnected people and interests that of course are constantly running into each other. It doesn’t take some weird leap into the absurd to explain what can easily be explained by entrenched power structures and generational wealth.
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This is not even the first one. There have been several others in the news over the last year, including the two children from Idaho(?). I don’t have any details handy because I just read the headlines and cannot bring myself to go deeper into the stories.
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I was fascinated with the JFK thing as a teenager, then spent another couple years absolutely fascinated by then-current conspiracies shortly after the turn of the century. Typing about that reminded me of one of my ‘favorites’ from back then, the Gannon/Gosch story. And I’m now realizing in muted horror that that may have been part of what inspired the fuQers.
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That’s really what it boils down to.
Grand conspiracies really just don’t exist. People are shit at keeping secrets, and stuff like the Manhattan project only bareley manage to keep opsec. And then only because of lots of compartmentalization, limited contact between conspirators and the rest of the world, and national culture at the time. Not to mention the short time frame. We’re talking a couple of years, vs grand conspiracies that are supposed to have been goong on decades or centuries.
All these grand conspiracy theories need thousands and sometimes millions of people to be in on the conspiracy, constantly interact with the rest of the world, and also choose to go out of their way to do evil stuff that doesn’t profit themselves. That kind of thing only works long term in institutions like the catholic church.
And then another wrinkle. Why is anyone worried about a secret kabal of child molesters, when we have one out in the open? Frankly it’s surprising it took this long for us to see catholic churches getting reclaimed for soil enrichment.
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The first time I read something like this everything clicked about why I just can’t buy conspiracy theories. I spent a good number of years in event management. Coordinating the dozens of people required to pull off a good event was hard enough. Never mind getting millions of people to actually follow script for years without somehow fucking up.
Anyone capable of making something like that happen would have enough power they wouldn’t need to hide behind a conspiracy.
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Yes. There’s a number of words for that: asshole, jerk, evil, malignant, etc.
What it isn’t is mental illness, which is an imbalance in brain chemistry and neurotransmitters that people cannot control themselves or be blamed for. As a society, we really need to stop conflating the two.
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Is that true across the board? I am not arguing, because I honestly don’t know, but I thought there were a lot of things considered mental illness that do not have a chemical basis, like personality disorders. Not making any kind of statement about this person, I just was under the impression that mental illness went beyond chemistry.
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I read it. Don’t, just don’t. I’m pretty jaded, but this one just gutted me.
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None of which account for this guy’s motivation being something that only someone completely divorced from reality would say. Sure, he’s an evil asshole, but unless he’s 100% lying about his reasoning, kddonsf’s point still stands. I’m not going to call someone who murdered his children because he thought they were snake people mentally sound. Maybe he’s not mentally ill (especially by your very specific definition), but there is indeed something broken inside him that goes beyond just a lack of morals, and it seems to be manifesting in an awful lot of people these days. We need to understand it and learn how to fight it, and outright denying its existence is not the same thing as protecting mentally ill people from being stigmatized.
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What’s wrong with just plain “evil?” That seems to suit just fine without incorrectly conflating two different situations to the detriment of the innocent.
Here’s the thing: calling evil people “crazy” or “insane” or other words that are used for mental illness lets the evil people off the hook for their behavior while also harming innocent people who are affected by mental illness. It’s the worst of both worlds.
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Works for me.
People with mental health problems rarely harm others, whereas EVIL muthafuckas do heinous shit like kill their own babies.
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I’m not saying we should necessarily call them terms that imply mental illness or that they’re not in control of their faculties, because your points are quite correct. But using just “evil” implies a nebulous, almost supernatural malevolence that cannot be understood or treated. Qanon is a cult, and cult members can (hopefully) be deprogrammed. I’m not saying that cult members are mentally ill or that they have no agency in their beliefs, but they do hold non-rational, delusional beliefs that are divorced from objective reality in a way that is similar to some forms of mental illness, and our society and language are ill-equipped to firmly separate the two.
I suppose my point is, yes, we should fight against the stigmatization of mental illness, but leaving it at “evil” doesn’t offer any solutions and ignores the elephant in the room that Qanon cultists act the way they do because of non-rational beliefs that need to be dealt with if we ever want to fix our society. For someone capable of murdering his own children, maybe it doesn’t make a difference- it’s hard to imagine he could ever function in society if he was capable of that. But for the many who hurt people (including themselves) though foolish choices and policy decisions rather than cold-blooded murder, maybe deprogramming is worth a shot. Or maybe they ARE simply evil, that overrides anything else, and there’s no hope. It certainly feels that way sometimes.
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I’m not an expert, either. I’m just going by what I remember from my biological psychology class from…a long time ago. But IIRC, even personality disorders involve behavior that stems for biochemical dysfunction, similar to addiction but with different triggers & effects.
The difference to me is choice. This evil SOB chose to kill children who trusted him to protect them. Regardless of anything else going on in his head, he made a decision and carried out this act by choice. That’s evil.
ETA:
Then let’s not. It’s not mutually exclusive to avoid describing this kind of thing as mental illness when it’s not, while still seeking to treat the individual and fix the societal problem. I’m not going to tell you what words to use; I was asked what words I would use: but I will definitely point it out when someone chooses words that are harmful to others.
We can change the societal problem in front of us (stigmatization of mental illness). It just takes work to pick the right words rather than be lazy about it (which I am also guilty of, BTW). And it takes holding each other accountable. I don’t know if I can help this guy or if I even want to, but there are millions of people who don’t seek help or treatment for curable diseases because of the stigma we put on mental illness. That has to stop. And we have the power to stop it, if we can summon the will to do so.
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I think we as a society are struggling to wrap our collective mind around, via language et al, a pattern that we are seeing come in to focus. The feeling that what Hofstadter described is learning to jump from sociopolitical to epigenetic has a lot of otherwise reasonable people trying to remember how to spell DSM.
So until ~everybody agrees on something better, I’m just gonna call it The Pattern. It’s orthogonal to conventional mental illness, yet it’s very far from healthy, and it’s an observable pattern that transcends the specifics of the current moment. Also, fuck that guy.
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Because one distant day, he and others like him might emerge from whatever institution we lock them into. And the being that emerges from that institution might be at least partly shaped by how we treat the problem.
I don’t want him off the hook. I want him handled for what he is.
ETA: to be clear: fuck that guy. But let’s not just kick the can down the road for our grandkids to deal with.
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If you choose any single English word it is going to be nebulous and inaccurate. You would have to create a jargon that is defined as describing the thing you want to describe. And for that to have any real meaning it would have to exist within a larger body of work that validates that the concept is a real thing in the world and studies its impacts. In this case, the relevant fields of study might be psychology, anthropology, sociology, or maybe something else.
We’re talking about a person who adheres a violent conspiracy theory, sees parts of that theory that most of us would say plainly don’t accord with reality as literal, and acts violently on those beliefs. As far as I know there isn’t a word that grasps all of that and puts it together. That may be because it isn’t common enough to merit it’s own specific term, it could be because the term is something that only a few academics really use, and it could be because that just isn’t a coherent category to sort people into (just like we wouldn’t have a jargon term for a person who is has size 14 feet, rides a bike to work, and likes stilton).
It feels like there is something there, but I don’t even know that there is. It could just be that:
- a person who adheres a violent conspiracy theory, sees parts of that theory that most of us would say plainly don’t accord with reality as literal, and acts violently on those beliefs
Is not distinguishable from:
- a person who adheres a violent conspiracy theory and acts violently on those beliefs
I know this is going to sound like I’m a little crazy (by any sensible definition I am anyway) but the idea that alien reptiles have secretly infiltrated human society by shapeshifting into humans is foolish and wrong, but you don’t have to have anything wrong with your brain to believe it.
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We can do that and fix the immediate problem of how we treat people with mental illness.
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All behavior is physiologically based. All perception is physiologically based. It all boils down to brain chemistry in the end. Societies expect a certain level of conformity. When a person behaves in ways that fall well outside the bounds of that conformity they are often called ill. Sometimes they are called evil.
Whether this man has the brain chemistry we in the USA call schizophrenia or not, we don’t know. But given the nature of his actions, something is out of kilter. His ability to believe things counter to the consensual perceived reality of our society is one hint. Murdering his children is another.
What would the conversation here look like if his references to serpent DNA had been left out of the article?, Parents alas, murder their children far too often. What do we say about the man who kills because the kids were noisy?
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But relative to his own subsection of society, his beliefs did not run counter to the shared consensus.
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Easy. It others the perpetrators. “I’m not mentally ill, so I don’t have to worry about this sort of thing.” Sort of like the mythical “responsible gun owner” who would never, of course, make a mistake or any such thing. And I am glad you guys tackled this. I was struggling with how to do so without just shrieking.
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