Nihilism.
An ideology for Sociopath’s.
There are those out there who destroy for the sake of destruction. There is no intent to rebuild. There is no intent to improve.
They derive satisfaction in the amount of damage they can do. Pride is found in the level of complication and success in the act.
Some seek fame… most do not. They have been employed by socialists as bomb throwers… but never cared the reason. We have seen them on the streets of Greece, Portland and many other places all over the world. You will find them mixed in the protesters, or flying high in personal jets funded by their global investments. They are as old as time and what they all share is a lack of empathy and a high level of intelligence.
This person has been represented in character form as “The Joker” and in “The Man from St. Petersburg”, he is often used when we need an enemy that defies explanation. In reality he is… James Holmes.
While we might subscribe to destruction with intent to rebuild, remodel or change some existing structure or paradigm for the better, tearing something down simply to destroy is beyond our understanding. The few that do understand these people are those who chase them, or the individuals themselves. The rest of us sit silently dumbfounded watching the news and asking ourselves how such a person can commit such an act.
What we need to do is come to a simple understanding. Evil exists.
We do not want to believe this truth, especially when it stares us straight in the face. But history has provided us with myriad examples from the Countess Bathory to Ted Bundy and Jeffery Dahmer et al. Yet we cling to the idea that “if we could have just reached these people and helped them everything would have been OK”… It’s our way of denying evil. It’s our way of defending ourselves from the reality that some people are simply bad.
James Holmes is Bad. James Holmes is Evil. James Holmes was never going to be OK… he was always going to be James Holmes.
No, clearly he did not display this persona at every moment of his life. Yes, there must be people who enjoyed his company even if it was for a brief time. But being a Sociopath does not make you dysfunctional. On the contrary, very little empathy is required to live day-to-day and be successful. Some of these people, like James, even live and die having full lives without the attention of anyone. Such is mental illness… such is evil.
You must accept something;
There are people out there who want to kill you. There are people out there who don’t care if they kill you.
Then there is a brilliant James Holmes, who is both and didn’t need a reason beyond committing the act.
There was nothing any of us could have done to prevent this from happening.
While it may be uncomfortable to think people like this are out there right now… they are nothing new. They are nothing special and history always treats them with little attention. Which is exactly how to handle James.
makeaneffort 