I have an opinion that will probably piss off several completely different groups of people at the same time.
Good.
I think we have become intellectually obsessed with explaining evil and morally terrified of condemning it.
Look at murder across completely different populations and circumstances.
A person can be raised inside a culture where religious extremism teaches that killing an enemy is righteous.
A kid can be raised inside a gang subculture where retaliation, territory, reputation and killing become normalized.
Someone else can develop severe antisocial and psychopathic traits and experience other human beings as objects.
Someone experiencing psychosis can become detached from reality altogether.
Those are NOT the same psychological phenomena.
That's the point.
I want to understand every fucking one of them.
I want psychologists, neuroscientists, sociologists and criminologists studying exactly how an ordinary human prohibition against killing gets overridden.
What I don't understand is why studying the mechanism apparently requires me to feel sorry for the murderer.
It doesn't.
And Lindsay Clancy is where this hypocrisy becomes impossible for me to ignore.
She killed her three children.
Three children.
And somehow there is an entire population of people emotionally organizing themselves around HER suffering.
I find it revolting.
Mental illness may be critically important to understanding what happened. It may be critically important legally. It may tell us something incredibly important about prevention.
It does not require me to transfer my sympathy from three dead children to the adult who killed them.
And here's the question nobody is going to convince me isn't relevant:
What if she had killed somebody else's three children?
Same woman.
Same brain.
Same alleged mental state.
Same deaths.
But she walks into another mother's house and kills HER babies.
Are you still making supportive TikToks?
Are you still talking about how much she loved children?
Are you still showing up outside the courthouse for her?
Are you still telling everyone not to judge?
Bullshit.
And let's make it even more uncomfortable.
What if Lindsay weren't a white suburban mother and nurse?
What if the exact same brutality came packaged inside somebody society found frightening, ugly, foreign, male, poor or otherwise impossible to identify with?
Would we suddenly discover our appetite for condemnation again?
Because I think a tremendous amount of what we're calling "compassion" is actually identification.
People look at Lindsay and think:
That could have been me.
And suddenly the murderer becomes human.
Interesting.
Because every murderer was human five minutes before you learned what they did.
Jeffrey Dahmer had a brain.
Gang murderers have brains.
Terrorists have brains.
Parents who kill their children have brains.
Every one of them has genetics, experiences, conditioning, pathology, environment and a story.
We don't have to pretend those stories are equivalent to study them equally seriously.
And we sure as hell don't have to LOVE anybody because we understand how their brain got there.
I actually think our obsession with killers is diseased.
We sexualize serial killers.
We make celebrities out of them.
We binge-watch dramatizations of their lives.
We write to them in prison.
We build fandoms.
We cheer for Dexter because somebody gave the psychopath a moral code and made his victims worse than him.
Apparently murder becomes entertainment if the murderer is charismatic enough and the writers give us permission.
Then we're shocked that damaged people living in an attention economy sometimes become fascinated with notoriety.
Maybe society needs a much less complicated relationship with murder:
Killing innocent people is fucking repulsive.
No fame.
No romance.
No fandom.
No mythology.
No sainthood because your particular route to homicide makes people feel compassionate.
Study the brain.
Study the family.
Study violent subcultures.
Study religious radicalization.
Study psychopathy.
Study psychosis.
Study poverty, trauma, social learning, ideology, misogyny, honor violence, gangs and every other environment capable of normalizing brutality.
Find every pattern.
Interrupt every pattern we can.
But the second "understanding" becomes "therefore you aren't allowed to despise what this person did," we've lost the plot.
I can understand how a human being became dangerous and still want society to reject what they became.
Those aren't contradictory thoughts.
They're probably the two thoughts we should have been holding at the same fucking time all along.
My curiosity belongs to the psychology.
My sympathy belongs to the victims.
