Social Darwinism and Morals

[lucksack]

Here in Finland we had this guy that went to shoot 8 people in the name of natural selection, and then himself. It went like this:

He decided he had abandoned slave morality and created himself a master morality which is based on natural selection. He also described this as "going through synthesis and becoming an overman". (He also said he had "refined" some of Nietzsche's ideas, so he seems to define an overman as someone who creates his own morality and thinks about philosophy and existentialism.)

Then he decides he wants either all humans destroyed or human race to evolve to a better direction, and he wants to help in that so he makes this terrorist attack to kill some people and also to get a ton of publicity for his thoughts (and himself).

However, when he went to do the shooting, it seems that he started to feel pity for the victims, he shot a few first and then started to let people live, he also didn't shoot nearly all his bullets.

Now it seems to me that the big logical problem here is, that he only thought he had achieved this "master morality", when truely he had not and was really thinking like he used to deep inside. Is this a valid argument? Other good arguments, that might make a similar "social darwinist" change his mind, if one is planning a massacre? (And no, I'm not planning one, and neither is anyone I know.)

[tarheeljks]

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Other good arguments, that might make a similar "social darwinist" change his mind, if one is planning a massacre? (And no, I'm not planning one.)

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idk, if there is anyway to reason with a guy who has convinced himself that he is an ubermensch and that his master morality trumps all. it appears that his change of heart didn't involve any logic or argumentation. it was a completely emotional, as prior to actually killing anyone he had all ready convinced himself that it was logical to do so. then again idk the specifics of his morality and the logic behind it

[lucksack]

Well, he seemed to value philosophical and rational thinking very highly, and see himself as part of an elite group that thinks deeply and is intelligent, while also being "strong-minded" and having master morality, so I'd assume he would be willing to re-evaluate his "synthesis", if it would be questioned with good arguing instead of just ridiculing. I don't think he considered himself supernatural or anything. Anyone clearly outside of that group would have no value.

[tame_deuces]

The ability to function normally in a society is THE prime survival trait. He seems to have missed that bit. Also while this tragedy is horrible almost beyond imagination - I still think a social darwinist who commits suicide is pretty much a moron.

[lucksack]

He thought current society is too [censored] up, unnatural and enslaves people, so he wouldn't want to live in it, and that anything better isn't realistic to be achieved any more, so he wanted to "inspire some kind of revolution" or inspire destruction of mankind, because we are "scum of earth".

I think he was the kind of guy that wants to make world a better place, but he came to sick conclusions in his long thinkings (he also used to support different ideologies, like some kind of socialism, earlier). I also think there may well be others like him out there, so I've tried to locate the weakest points in his thinking.

[InTheDark]

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Here in Finland we had this guy that went to shoot 8 people in the name of natural selection, and then himself. It went like this:


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Eight students dead in tiny Finland is proportionally the same as 460 murdered in America. Who has the bigger problem?

Sorry about the hijack.

[Alex-db]

American lives are 50 times less valuable??

2 times maybe...

[Splendour]

[ QUOTE ]
Here in Finland we had this guy that went to shoot 8 people in the name of natural selection, and then himself. It went like this:

He decided he had abandoned slave morality and created himself a master morality which is based on natural selection. He also described this as "going through synthesis and becoming an overman". (He also said he had "refined" some of Nietzsche's ideas, so he seems to define an overman as someone who creates his own morality and thinks about philosophy and existentialism.)

Then he decides he wants either all humans destroyed or human race to evolve to a better direction, and he wants to help in that so he makes this terrorist attack to kill some people and also to get a ton of publicity for his thoughts (and himself).

However, when he went to do the shooting, it seems that he started to feel pity for the victims, he shot a few first and then started to let people live, he also didn't shoot nearly all his bullets.

Now it seems to me that the big logical problem here is, that he only thought he had achieved this "master morality", when truely he had not and was really thinking like he used to deep inside. Is this a valid argument? Other good arguments, that might make a similar "social darwinist" change his mind, if one is planning a massacre? (And no, I'm not planning one, and neither is anyone I know.)

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This guy sounds like a personification of the left temporal lobe gone wild. I recently read this in a chapter out of "Where God Lives" by Melvin Morse, M.D..

Lobe Shifting

When did it happen that humans shifted from being primarily right-temporal-lobe to left-temporal-lobe oriented? One of the best historical analyses of this question was done by Princeton psychologist Julian Jayne, Ph.D., who has studied the physiology of consciousness.
Dr. Jayne theorized that early humans did not have an individual sense of consciousness. They were so linked to each other and to the universe that they thought of themselves as sharing consciousness, not only with other humans but with everything in the universe. Dr. Jayne defines consciousness as the "I" each one of us has and takes for granted.
The Vikings adhered to the early human concept of a shared community and "group thinking." Yet each individual had a particular skill that he or she used to contribute to society as a whole. Often, individuals were known by their profession-the blacksmith, the baker, the king, the serf, the warrior. Yet each individual was firmly embedded in a structured society and understood his or her relationship to that structure.
Individual consciousness occurred because of a dysfunction within the human brain. Modern man, in spite of all our accomplishments, is brain imbalanced. Dr. Jayne has shown that the origins of human consciousness came from a breakdown in the proper integration of the right and left temporal lobes, which explains why he titled his book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The bicameral mind is the mind humans had for the first 195,000 years of their existence. It has been in the past 5,000 years that we have suffered from a lack of communication between the two sides of the brain, leaving an unhealthy dominance of the left temporal lobe and a relative atrophy of the right temporal lobe.
When we think of being part of a communal mind, we think of cults or senseless group thinking. That's because we are dominated by the concept of individual consciousness and have neglected, at least in a conscious way, our connections with each other and with the divine. People need a strong sense of individual consciousness. If they don't have it, they do not do well in our society. Children who do not have a strong sense of "I" can, to their detriment, have their needs overlooked and ignored.
That sort of neglect did not often happen in early human societies. Individuals had specific rights and obligations unique to their situations. They did not have to learn to assert themselves. We still see elements of this "old way" of thinking in small towns or isolated areas of our Western culture. "

This Finn actually had such a great sense of individual consciousness that he temporarily lost all sense of human or group consciousness.

[madnak]

This guy isn't a logical thinker. His premises are probably so far gone that a psychological approach is superior to a logical approach.

[bluesbassman]

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Here in Finland we had this guy that went to shoot 8 people in the name of natural selection, and then himself.

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That's no different than shooting people in the name of the uncertainty principle, or in the name of the inflationary period after the big bang. In other words, it's sheer lunacy.


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He decided he had abandoned slave morality and created himself a master morality which is based on natural selection. He also described this as "going through synthesis and becoming an overman". (He also said he had "refined" some of Nietzsche's ideas, so he seems to define an overman as someone who creates his own morality and thinks about philosophy and existentialism.)


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Yep, raving lunacy.

[Yet more lunacy snipped for brevity.]

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However, when he went to do the shooting, it seems that he started to feel pity for the victims, he shot a few first and then started to let people live, he also didn't shoot nearly all his bullets.

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Seems as though his mentally ill brain still harbored the remnants of his humanity, which somewhat came to fore when he started killing people.

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Now it seems to me that the big logical problem here is, that he only thought he had achieved this "master morality", when truely he had not and was really thinking like he used to deep inside. Is this a valid argument?

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I don't have a clue what you are trying to say, or what is your argument here. I will say it's silly to attempt to deconstruct any logical "reasons" for this act, or from the deranged ranting of this type of killer.