Can we know anything?

Can we - really, honestly, truly?

Who is Eric Harris? What is he?

At one time, he was a living, breathing boy. But then he blew his brains out, and his flesh rotted away.

Nowadays, he's little more than a pile of bones in a coffin (or a pile of ashes in a box?) and a jumble of ideas in people's heads.

What is an idea?

Strictly speaking, it's a bunch of electrical impulses in someone's brain. Somehow our mind derives meaning from a particular combination of neurons. It's hard to say precisely how this happens, but that big gray blob finds a way to distinguish between various objects and ideas. We learn to draw the boundaries between entities, and to describe the differences between them - a Hello Kitty lunch box is an inanimate object, Brooks Brown is a living person, psychopathy is an abstract concept.

Our species has developed a method to transfer ideas from one brain to another, using the technologies of speech and writing (among others). But this method is highly prone to distortion and error. We can never be sure whether our words are capable of transmitting even the barest essence of an entity, let alone the entirety of its awesome complexity.

Eric Harris was able to record some of the ideas floating around in his head. Some of them were recorded with a pencil; others, with a camcorder. We cannot be certain whether the ideas he recorded are especially helpful in determining whether *our* ideas about his motivation(s) are valid or not. We assume that the ideas he did record bear more weight than other potential ideas that he did not record. But we don't really know.

It is theoretically possible that Eric Harris was a huge fan of Hello Kitty lunch boxes, but was mercilessly ridiculed by his fellow classmates when he brought one to school. Perhaps his hatred of his peers grew to pathological levels, driving him to try to kill as many of the Hello Kitty-mockers as he could. But there is no evidence that Eric liked Hello Kitty merchandise. Thus, it is irresponsible (at best) for us to speculate that Hello Kitty had anything to do with the massacre.

I look at the available evidence and I draw one conclusion; someone else looks at the same evidence and draws another conclusion. Some people contend that Eric was a diabolical psychopath who was thirsty for blood; others argue that he was a scrawny nerd who reacted badly to his confinement at the bottom of the social pyramid; still others maintain that he was a misguided child who turned homicidal only after he was savagely raped by a police officer. Most people, I think, are inclined to throw up their hands and say, "Kid was fuckin' nuts."

I don't believe that Eric was all that special, really. Males in their late teens and early twenties are the most violent people on the planet. Eighteen-year-olds with Y chromosomes have been killing other eighteen-year-olds with Y chromosomes for as long as there have been eighteen-year-olds with Y chromosomes. I doubt that the carnage will ever end. Hormones rage, testosterone flares, and people die.

But that's just an idea floating around inside my head. Who knows whether it has any resemblance to reality or not? And who knows whether there is even such a thing as an objective reality, separate from all observers' perspectives?

Not me.

You are so right, we here just can speculate and speculate in base of evidence and witnesses stories but we, like them too, dont really know what really was in Eric's mind or Dylan's mind and thats something that happen with everyone and us too, there are thoughts in our mind that many people around us dont know and other things that we leave out and that takes them to think that we are in some way when we probably aren't in that way. We can leave a journal or a recording showing many of our thoughts and what bother us or makes us happy but there are always other thoughts and things that we dont leave in a piece of paper and that we keep with ourselves, around our head and life everyday. With Eric and Dylan could happen the same and with more or less evidence we won't find a clear answer about this case like in many other cases like this also happen. They are dead now like all the other victims so if they liked Hello Kitty, we will never know and we will always speculate, getting closer to the real answers and other times dont.

I'm gonna go on a limb here and say that both Eric and Dylan would probably have found Hello Kitty really ''gay''.

JayJay wrote:

I'm gonna go on a limb here and say that both Eric and Dylan would probably have found Hello Kitty really ''gay''.

Do people still use "gay" as a pejorative, or have the LGBTTQQIIAA activists stamped that out?

LPorter101 wrote:

What is an idea?

Strictly speaking, it's a bunch of electrical impulses in someone's brain. Somehow our mind derives meaning from a particular combination of neurons. It's hard to say precisely how this happens, but that big gray blob finds a way to distinguish between various objects and ideas. We learn to draw the boundaries between entities, and to describe the differences between them - a Hello Kitty lunch box is an inanimate object, Brooks Brown is a living person, psychopathy is an abstract concept.

Our species has developed a method to transfer ideas from one brain to another, using the technologies of speech and writing (among others). But this method is highly prone to distortion and error. We can never be sure whether our words are capable of transmitting even the barest essence of an entity, let alone the entirety of its awesome complexity.

Eric Harris was able to record some of the ideas floating around in his head. Some of them were recorded with a pencil; others, with a camcorder. We cannot be certain whether the ideas he recorded are especially helpful in determining whether *our* ideas about his motivation(s) are valid or not. We assume that the ideas he did record bear more weight than other potential ideas that he did not record. But we don't really know.

You used this concept as to explain the difficulties of researching a Mass Shooting, but I think we very well can use it as a concept to explain how a Mass Shooting can occur.
Eric and Dylan had huge difficulties to communicate with their environment, in several senses. At first, they obviously experienced emotions and thoughts, that were difficult for other people to understand. So, they hid them and kept them inside. In their vertiginously and constant-working minds, these emotions were organized into an ideology, during the process of recording.
Their ideologies, however, were even more far away, that what could explain and expressed towards other people. This was not simply, because they would appear "crazy" while doing it. It was because there is no way to articulate your ideas with the same amount of connected emotions, feelings and allusions. I feel this, every time, I am reading Dylan's diary. I can "feel" very much (or I believe so) what he is writing about, I have an intuitive understanding of the connections between the Halcyon, the Lost Highway, the Thought Boxes, the Infinitive Realities and his doomed love. But if you would ask me to write downs Dylan's ideology in a coherent way, the result would be not the same. Sure, we could make out something straight out of his idea. We could compare his views to those of Buddhism, Gnosticism (there are a lot of similarities) and other esoteric/occult systems and we get some very interesting results. But it would not be the same. We would have to exclude some allusions and we would probably add some other ideas to the concept, without even knowing it. Because the basic vibe, the certain Aura of Dylan's thoughts is only possible to experience in subjective feeling.
In case of Eric, this might be less true, but also not wrong.
And now see their world views in the connection of the perception about live, that most people around them had.

I think Columbine and also other Mass Shootings are about failed communication between the Shooters and their environment. Their perceptions of reality drift apart to an extent, in which the only apparent solution is to declare a war against society.
Maybe Eric described it very appropriate, in his typical simple and short way:

Eric wrote:

Why should I have to explain myself to you survivors when half of this shit I say you shitheads won’t
understand and if you can then woopie fucking do.

Hmm....I have the feeling, that I didn't really expressed what I tried to express, but maybe that just proves the point.

LPorter101 wrote:

JayJay wrote:

I'm gonna go on a limb here and say that both Eric and Dylan would probably have found Hello Kitty really ''gay''.

Do people still use "gay" as a pejorative, or have the LGBTTQQIIAA activists stamped that out?

Oh yes, people still use that in a pejorative way. Nothing has been stamped out, even if advances have been made (I guess, maybe not so much in the States). Some teenagers will brand anything and anyone they didn't like as ''gay'', and Eric and Dylan were no exception.

JayJay wrote:

LPorter101 wrote:

JayJay wrote:

I'm gonna go on a limb here and say that both Eric and Dylan would probably have found Hello Kitty really ''gay''.

Do people still use "gay" as a pejorative, or have the LGBTTQQIIAA activists stamped that out?

Oh yes, people still use that in a pejorative way. Nothing has been stamped out, even if advances have been made (I guess, maybe not so much in the States). Some teenagers will brand anything and anyone they didn't like as ''gay'', and Eric and Dylan were no exception.

Ah.

I still use Firefox, even though the CEO was canned for opposing gay marriage. And I still go to Chick-fil-A, even though the CEO was excoriated for opposing gay marriage.. So that makes me ... an apolitical moderate?

LPorter101 wrote:

JayJay wrote:

LPorter101 wrote:

JayJay wrote:

I'm gonna go on a limb here and say that both Eric and Dylan would probably have found Hello Kitty really ''gay''.

Do people still use "gay" as a pejorative, or have the LGBTTQQIIAA activists stamped that out?

Oh yes, people still use that in a pejorative way. Nothing has been stamped out, even if advances have been made (I guess, maybe not so much in the States). Some teenagers will brand anything and anyone they didn't like as ''gay'', and Eric and Dylan were no exception.

Ah.

I still use Firefox, even though the CEO was canned for opposing gay marriage. And I still go to Chick-fil-A, even though the CEO was excoriated for opposing gay marriage.. So that makes me ... an apolitical moderate?

If you want. But if you're apolitical then, I'm not sure how you could be called moderate. You're just not interested in politics, maybe? As they say, ''we pick our political battles'' or you can also choose not to battle at all on that front. I suppose we can't just ban every company and organization that is doing something against any and every progressive idea out there. I'm not one to judge, I do my part my own way on certain issues but I can't participate in everything.