We need to discuss something very dear to us all. Murder. There seems to be nothing that fascinates the human imagination more than the topic of murder. Statistically speaking 99% of all Hollywood movies have murder in them. Novels and their plots would be difficult to develop and finish without a murder and a few accidental deaths which may also amount to murder of necessity. We may discount acts of god such as a floods, pestilence and famine as murders because god only kills us to teach us a lesson. Less easy to ignore is the child’s play obsession with killing, hardly one of us has grown up without uttering the phrase: “I am going to kill you.” Silky as that might sound it is bordering the edge of the precipice between life and death.
Why the obsession with Murder? It would be to simplistic to attribute it to our fascination with mortal death or to a natural fear of it. War, violence and the multiplicity of murders have shown that we do not have a fear of death or of murder. The ease with which men can be conditioned to kill one another in a military manner betrays a lack of fear of death. Some will argue that the reason they killed was because they had no choice, they were in a war situation, it is preposterous to imagine a grown adult saying that they had no alternative but to be in a war theater. Difficult indeed and surprisingly shocking how few opt to defect from the battle field. But war brings the murderer, irresistible attributes that are certainly fascinating as much as they are real: anonymity and prestige. The soldier that murders usually does not see his victim, and even when he does at least he does not know them. The soldier that murders does not have a personal reason to bring about the infraction of murder, a soldier can never be personally proven guilty of murder as long as he maintains the stance of patriot following orders, the soldier has the ability to exercise a killing with complete impunity, if a soldier rapes and abuses human rights while on the campaign to murder the atrocious enemy, it will largely go unheard and unpunished. This is a side benefit of war, we can ravage our passions with the lust of the moment and survive grievance as comeuppance.
Everyone takes it for granted that there is going to be killing in war, and everyone knows that their son Joey, cute little Joey wouldn’t harm anyone and doesn’t really want to go to war, but Joey has to go to war, to defend freedom and to defend nationalistic honor and to defend his girlfriend Suzy. When Joey gets back he will get a purple heart, that is if he manages to get wounded and survive, and he will be respected as a war veteran; and if he manages to kill enough of the enemy he might even be hailed as a war hero instead of as the murderer that he is. That in order to be a hero like Wellington or Napoleon Joey might need their killer instincts is not possible, Joey does not like to murder people like Hitler or McArthur , not that McArthur wanted to kill anyone, he was merely defending his country and did a damn good job of it.
Neither Joey or McArthur are murderers, they are efficient killing machines but normally when they are not killing they are more likely to enjoy a nice BBQ with the family, and Joey would prefer to be captain of the football team and McArthur would rather that there be no wars period; in other words McArthur was not a general by instinct.
It would be difficult to prove, in a case study, that there are wars for the sake of war and wars for the sake that Joey might get a chance to kill someone in anonymity. Nice kids need to satisfy these urge but they would never admit it, besides its not something that any sane person would or ought admit.
Really fascinating how this Murder thing can be promiscuously practiced without any conscientious objections from the moral self; war after all is a moral act, so much so that even the enemy does not know that they are the bad guys.
Sometimes however, Joey strays, there is no war, he is selling insurance, one day Joey gets a strange rage, and kills someone. Joey kills a man he did not know, a man that merely opened his car door and scratched Joey’s cherry red paint on the side of his classic roadster. No one can believe it, Joey’s mother knows her son is not a murderer, she realizes that he has killed a man because he scratched the cherry red paint on his roadster, but she well knows that Joey is not a criminal and that while he did lose his temper Joey would never ever commit murder ever again. Joey does not need correcting because Joey has never killed anyone before, never even stolen chocolates from the grocery store, Joey is not a murderer, Joey’s mother does not know that most murders are committed by people that only murder one time in their lives, serial murderers are the exception not the rule, and so by Joey’s mother’s emotional reasoning it is not necessary to put all of the one time murderers in jail because the only reason for jail is to prevent recalcitrant behavior and that would not be the case for Joey and his lot.
Joey’s wife knows her husband is not a murderer, she knows Joey more intimately than anyone, he is tender, why he cried in her arms when their baby daughter fell from her cradle and broke her nose. She will testify to the love inside of this man, she will testify to the gentleness and to the kindness and to how Joey is not a murderer, he was stressed, many bills to pay, problems with his boss at work, the stress caused by a poor economy that was preventing Joey from hitting sales quotas, but Joey is a good man your honor!
Joey’s friends are more surprised than his wife, the wife can see that there was lots of things unreasonably pressuring Joey, but Joey’s friends and relatives just would never imagine that such a wholesome boy, man, friend, cousin, such a well humored pall, such a helpful fellow, such a nice neighbor, well he would just never do something like that, its not in his character to do something like that!
Perhaps the most important person that can not imagine Joey committing murder is Joey. Joey can not believe it, he does not comprehend what came over him, Joey knows he is not a murderer, Joey did not sit in his living room planning to kill anyone, Joey would never picture himself hiring an assassin, much less planning a murder or even killing because of anger. Joey more than anyone else, not only knows that he is not a murderer, he also knows something that no one else knows, it wasn’t Joey that killed that man!
Of course Joey does not intellectualize that knowledge, Joey knows he got angry upon seeing his cherry red paint roadster all scratched up, he blew up and started pounding his fists into this inconsiderate man’s head, and pounding him, and the next second, before Joey could react with real world reactions to real world conditions, before that, this man was dead. And immediately after that Joey reflected and reacted, but before that, before that reaction, that was not Joey punching away at that man with his angry fists, not Joey!
Then who is the mystery killer?
An act of war is a society feuding with another. It is very simple to complete the murderers list of war, every citizen of the participating countries have mentally rigorously superceded the desire for peace and conquered their divine nature to accomplish a society at war.
No one wants to fight a war, except the supra consciousness of a society that needs to fight a war beyond peace. That is what conjures the war effort, that is what manifest the inevitability of war, war becomes an imperative when the social consciousness reaches such superlative manifestations within the extricating reality that no one can ignore it and must face a conscientious decision to behave pro or against war. A conscientious decision is an activating trigger mechanism for the underlying events as they begin to superimpose themselves into a given reality. When the supra social consciousness reaches critical pro war mass, in effect the country is at war; whatever preparations had been conceived will superimpose discipline, struggle and endurance over any peaceful options.
I think we can go back to our test case, Joey, and proceed to callously investigate his actions and their effects. Sometimes, just to tickle myself, I fancy myself a logician.
Joey is perplexed because Joey knows that he is not a murderer; Joey does not comprehend how he could have reasonably acted in such a way as to bring about the death of another. At night Joey tries to find the lord, not because Joey was an atheist, he wasn’t that, Joey was a somewhat regular Sunday participant in religious ceremony, though he had cheated on his wife with one of her best friend’s, still Joey did not consider any of his would be sins biblically impossible, instead Joey believed that overall he was a nice guy and that in the end God would more or less accept that as a valid argument against eternal damnation. Only now Joey was not so sure that God would be equally as forgiving of this murder thing, and so Joey was trying to get closer to God so as to tell him that he really did not mean to do it, and to please help with the judge and the compassion quotient of the general populace. God of course did not talk to Joey anymore than he had normally talked to Joey, but Joey felt that God was closer and that he was considering forgiving Joey, only Joey first had to do a lot of penance and personal purification in order so that God might come closer once Joey was less soiled.
Faith is easy to get, reason more difficult, and Joey was using faith to comprehend better his act at a rational level. Only rational tells you that you don’t kill a man for scratching the cherry red paint on your roadster. So Joey finds himself in a perplexingly difficult situation, faith can find compassion but Joey’s Brain can only tell him that what he did was wrong and that it can not go unpunished. Joey’s Brain tells him that if the crime goes unpunished other’s will be willing to kill their fellow men that much faster. Brain tells Joey that he should have thought about things more carefully before he acted, Brain tells Joey that had he done so he would not have acted so egregiously; Brain tells Joey that one must learn to control one’s emotions, that it is not good to act in rage, that one must always think before one acts; these are not consoling things that Brain tells Joey. Rationally Joey can not be consoled, and the Justice system is rational. The justice system is a social grievance system contrived to eliminate individual acts of vengeance. Joey comprehends that a just world can not tolerate a man killing another men regardless of the cause to anger and violence; a civilized society is a civilized society. Joey recognizes this and feels weaker by the moment for it. Looking at himself with a rational stance Joey concludes that he must be punished, for posterity and for the sake of justice. Of course Justice is no one in particular and one might rightly believe that the Justice system could withstand the injustice of not punishing Joey and survive unscathed; but Joey does not go to such embellished theoretical options. Joey believes now, as told by Brain, that he will be punished and that the best that can happen is that the judge sympathize in that Joey is not your typical murderer but rather a nice man that went wrong for only a second and wouldn’t ever kill again, so that while he will be found guilty, the sentence will be lenient enough that Joey will be on probation within two years and justice, Joey and everyone will be well served.
But Joey now knows the name of the man that he murdered, Phillip. Phillip is all over the news, nice guy too, church going, hard working gentle man, he was the manager at a hamburger joint, and had a young wife and two very lovely daughters and so on. Obviously if Joey had had a chance to meet Phillip and learn all these things about him he probably would not have killed him, Phillip died mostly because he was an unknown, that is the first true thing that we know about this case. We still don’t know however who killed him, for that we have to enter more exotic realms.
First why are we willing to pose the question that Joey did not kill Phillip? Because Joey did not know Phillip, because the motive is to fragile to support murder, because Brain has told us that there is no logical reason why Joey ought have killed Phillip, and in rare happenstance Brain is right. Joey did not kill Phillip.
We begin with the premise, am I sounding logical enough for you, we begin with the premise that Joey was ordered to kill Phillip by forces that Joey does not understand though he is obviously receptive to those forces. Joey is just the obvious, the easy pick, but Joey really had nothing to do with this murder. It is true, as his lawyer will correctly argue, that his client is not in the habit of killing people for scratching the cherry red paint on his car. We all rationally know that this would not be the case and so what remains as a justifiable reason is something unreasonable, Joey was coerced into killing Phillip by forces that were working on Phillips demise; yes Joey is guilty of execution, but not of the premeditation nor even the knowledge of his crime. As such Joey is the least guilty party of the guilty we are about to unravel.
First there are social forces that call for murder, within each of us lies a murderer dormant, waiting to act out our crime, but we suppress this murderer self because it would be very antisocial to exercise its malicious will. This is not to say that all murders are malicious, one has to seriously ponder why someone did not kill Hitler, the entire world would have been thank full. We don’t know how many murderers have saved us from their victims, but there has to be some validity in that we maybe killing people that deserve to die and whose atrocities may never rise to justify their deaths; and this does not make them any less real, nor does it exculpate the fact that society may intuitively order the death of many it considers a threat and malice to its greater objectives. Bottom line, society may have ordered the murder of Phillip, not necessarily because Phillip needed to be murdered, hardly possible to imagine a hamburger joint manager a threat to society at large, but we could dare say society killed Phillip because it needed to satisfy the murder rate necessary to appease the murderer in us all! Phillip died to quench our thirst for violence, it could have been someone else, it does not matter, we sent the message to Joey, kill this guy, in you we now congregate all the murderers in us, Phillip is the perpetual sacrificial lamb, and Phillip even participated in his own death with his dormant murderer self. Our sanguinary thirst was reduced by our reading of Joey and Phillip in the news.
There is another way that Phillip could have participated in his own murder. Phillip wanted to die. Phillip may have done something for which he could not forgive himself, maybe something as simple as robbing money from the hamburger joint, cooking the books, or maybe he too cheated on his lovely wife like Joey, and so he could not find forgiveness within himself, Phillip secretly wished to die, he was sending signals out on to the social ether, “I want to die, I want to be killed, I am not suicidal enough to act this necessity out myself but I am suicidal.” Phillip ordained his own death, his signal onto the social ether begins to coalesce with the murderous desires of the social lot and with the murderous instincts inhibited within Joey; the sacrificial victim begins to urge its own death. A death willed by personal fear, any sacrificial victim must be fragile, Phillip was unstable, Phillip was fragile, he was sensitive to the idea of his own death.
Then there is the anger that Phillip might have generated in others. His wife aware that Phillip had cheated could not herself forgive the trespass, she wanted to see him dead. When Phillip confessed to his priest that he had cheated on his wife the priest felt inquisitorial towards such betrayal and silently opened the gates to the emotional ether to execute this sinner. Subconsciously the priest would certainly be disgusted by the fragility displayed by Phillip, such could only add another wave of murderous desire, weakness is as worthy of death as is guilt. Secretly we all want weakness dead.
Joey had killed in the war, of course he had never witnessed his victims, Joey felt angry at himself, he felt a coward for not having felt his victims, Joey had to redeem himself, he had to absolve himself of all those faceless, nameless murders that he had committed during the war, Joey needed to bring himself to atonement, only Joey had no clue what atonement was, he did not comprehend spiritual harmony, Joey liked football because it was a rough sport, because a sort of ritualized killing took place in a blameless setting, every goal was a death, every victory justified the rising death toll, Joey never felt a victory from the war and had silently pronounced himself guilty of unsatisfied desires. Joey became susceptible to the murderous waves that cross and weave through the social psyche.
One day, it’s a very nice day, the sun is shining gloriously, Joey could not imagine a more perfect day to take his classic roadster out onto the open highway, and the moment mnemonically brought back his carefree high school days, the sound of that motor running, the echoes of his high school buddies and the blossoming spring smells, all served to disarm joy of his rational faculties, he enters a partial dream state, and to magnetize the moment one has to have a cheeseburger with fries and a shake; he drives to the hamburger joint, carelessly parking too close to another car that has just finished parking. Phillip is worried, so many things on his mind, he is tense, he has to get into work where a partial personal hell awaits him, he opens his door with the aggression that he needs to sell a million hamburgers, and Joey suddenly hears that screeching cherry red sound and brutally awakens from his high school day and pounds his fists into Phillip.
And that’s how it really happened.
