Personal Reactions to CulturalPhilistine Audio

Anyone have any thoughts or comments on the videos Adam Lanza made? I have a few.

1) I was surprised at how easily he laughed and how often he joked around even though humor did already come across as a big thing for him in his written content. I'll admit I laughed a bunch of times.

2) I was also surprised at how relaxed he sounds when he speaks after hearing the tightly wound radio call years ago.

3) Listening to his suicidal talk could undo five years of therapy if you're also suicidal and have anything in common with him.

4) He pronounces a number of words wrong which I have found to be true more often for people who learn by reading a lot and interact less.

5) He has trouble speaking and expressing himself clearly. You can see it in his writing at times and his speech can be just as garbled.

6) There's nothing psychotic in anything he expressed in his videos but he does say "no comment" when it comes to the schizophrenia online quiz.

I don't know why he spared his YouTube channel when it came to his "digital suicide" I always expected something like that to get deleted by him out of embarrassment such as the 2draw messages that he attempted to delete but couldn't. It was interesting to hear his worries about someone like Nancy possibly listening in on him speaking to himself, you never got to hear much about his paranoia for prison or hospitalization. His bajillion page pedophile essay was a lot easier to sit through when he's actually reading it out. The quiz taking parts were unexpected, but were also some of the more interesting parts to me. It was a nice and personal video collection, there's much more on display in terms of his personality than ever before. What a weird thing to just stumble across, the channel still gets pretty little attention because it was deleted less than 24 hours after being found.

I also thought it was interesting that he thought Nancy (because who else could it have been, really) might be listening in on him as he was talking. Supposedly, in the last days before the shooting, she found gory drawings or pictures he'd saved in his room. I wonder if she did resort to spying on him because he was so reclusive and refused to openly communicate his feelings with her.

With the quizzes, it's interesting how he talks about having no friends or family to reach out to for support. He did, at the very least, speak to people online and had one friend in real life and he was honest to a degree, especially with the online friend about his depressive episodes and suicidality, his obsession with pedophilia/pedophobes, and his mass killing obsession. There were people who he could reach out to for support if he ever had the inclination.

I think it's also interesting how he notes that he could be doing anything he wants with his life but he just wants to die. Instead of relating that lack of action to all of the philosophical justifications that he constantly lays out for his viewers, he calls himself a loser because has no job and isn't in school. It's a weird thing to say when you think school is a cultural hellhole torturing young minds into submission. Shouldn't he have been proud of himself for resisting the cultural reward system he was born into? Obviously, he couldn't separate himself from "value" fully while he was alive.

I was thinking this morning about the part where Adam was trying to satirize conservatives with his questionnaire answers and how he brought up survivalists. Maybe a nod to Nancy’s inclinations.

sscc wrote:

I was thinking this morning about the part where Adam was trying to satirize conservatives with his questionnaire answers and how he brought up survivalists. Maybe a nod to Nancy’s inclinations.

"Conservatives really piss me off. Actually, everyone does"

On the outside I still can’t believe it happened. I mean, 9 years after the fact, someone finds this channel with practically no views, and puts the pieces together. The feds couldn’t even find it. Did Adam want people to find it? He didn’t delete it like he smashed his hard drive or anything else.

When it comes to the context it’s just baffling comparing the person he is vs all the coverage in the news. The news makes him seem like this sort of alien creature, not quite a human being, but the videos humanize him in a way that makes his actions all the more surreal. It’s really strange to listen to.

HollowPointRose wrote:

The news makes him seem like this sort of alien creature, not quite a human being, but the videos humanize him in a way that makes his actions all the more surreal. It’s really strange to listen to.

It's funny because I spent years on this forum trying to humanize Adam in a way that I felt was appropriate given the evidence, but it was hard to do with the content that I had available to me - although, maybe it's just a matter of what people want to see. There was always a ton of content available to those who cared to look at it but you're right that this really humanizes him in a way that I never thought possible.

HollowPointRose wrote:

Did Adam want people to find it? He didn’t delete it like he smashed his hard drive or anything else.

I was just trying to figure out if we now have more content than the "Columbiners" (sorry) have available to them and I think we always did have more first hand evidence but now we definitely do. We have hours of Adam in his own words. This is the Sandy Hook Basement Tapes to some degree but not exactly on purpose.

To reply your question, I think the answer is a resounding maybe. I lean toward the idea that he didn't mind if it was found. Similar to the way that he didn't delete any of his posts from around the same time on the forum, maybe this was a statement on who he was, should anyone care enough to look:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

At the same time, Adam talks in his videos about killing himself on video, saying people like that sort of thing, and then decides against it because feeling the need to make a statement, to write a manifesto, etc, is against the entire point of what he believes:

"What else can I talk about, that's all that there is to it. It's so stupid, I think, hey why don't I record myself killing myself? People enjoy that. But I'm... doing that would not be recognizing what I'm doing. Still seeking to accomplish something is not saying 'this needs to end'. It's saying 'I need to accomplish something this needs to continue'. I don't really have anything else to say I guess. Whenever someone does have something to say it's because they've hurt theirself, or themself, whatever you grammar Nazis want to tell me. Really, think about it, any time that anyone says anything it's because of a deprivation that has been coerced onto them. X needs to be accomplished, X must be communicated, when you have nothing say, the more silent you are... the closer to death you are. And I always have been silent."

Still, he didn't delete what he recorded. I think he was hoping someone out there would hear it.

I think the audio made me finally understand his motivations. The part where he's against values in themselves... Note how much of his talk was about this or that harming kids.
Perhaps his shooting up an elementary school was his ultimate act of self-discipline - overcoming the value of not harming children.

I think the most jarring part of the audios to me was that the way he spoke was incredibly soothing and easy to follow for me... My prefered way of speaking is slow and articulated like he is, I find that my words get jumbled and I'm difficult to follow or understand because I don't want to sound "autistic" by speaking so methodically and slow, it's hard to explain... It's hard to express myself because my thoughts arer so disorganized, so if I actually try to speak with intent to sound well-spoken I end up sounding a lot like Adam. I could tell where his thoughts were going when he was trying to express something complicated but couldn't get it out properly too. Also, him speaking about Travis the chimp on that radio show was something I could easily recognize as "infodumping" about a topic he was clearly well-read on and passionate about. I sound kinda nuts right now though...

It also gave an incredible amount of insight into his motives for the shooting and I think a lot of people take his "philosophy" with a grain of salt in this case, but I believe it's a necessary piece of understanding it. You could put everything together from other people's accounts of him and his online activity and writings and all... And you could definitely understand what got him to the point that he felt how he did about society. Again, me having a lot of similarities to him made it easy for me to understand his frustrations with culture, as autistic people often feel like they don't belong in the world how it is... Nothing is built for disabled people, so we have a lot of frustration with being forced to act "normal" and "fix" the traits that make us abnormal. Adam could have had a similar experience and learned to hate the world he's forced to be in, a world that isn't comfortable for him to be in. I can definitely understand what might bring him to believe what he did, is all I'm trying to say.

Long story short, I think hearing the CultPhil audios was the first thing that made me feel some sort of "connection" or relation to him, in that I saw how similar we are/were in behavior and beliefs and such... Aside from the murder part. But, sorry for the schizo rant.