DUNCAN, Okla. — With the simplest of motives — breaking up the boredom of an Oklahoma summer — three teenagers followed an Australian collegiate baseball player who was attending school in the U.S. and killed him with a shot to the back for “the fun of it,” prosecutors said Tuesday as they charged two of the teens with murder.
I guarantee you that the shooter was an avid first-person-shooter video game player. And I would also suspect that he was on SSRI's.
SSRI's work by placing the brain into a dream state. If I remember correctly, that class of drugs was discovered through LSD research. Their effects are similar in quality, though not magnitude.
So you've got a kid who exists in a dream state and whose unconscious mind finds entertainment in killing what are represented as people in an immersive environment called a video game, an environment that the unconscious mind does not know is not real. The unconscious mind does not think. It feels and it experiences.
That kid is living inside an abstraction layer that is not real, but his actions inside that abstraction layer are "spilling over," so to speak, into this reality.
Do you see? His physical body is sleepwalking, essentially. His body is being controlled by an otherwise healthy mind that is trapped elsewhere. (Incidentally, I suspect that schizophrenics are those whose minds, by way of whatever biological and environmental collusion, have been placed into a higher abstraction layer, one that is roughly enough similar to the real world, but not precisely similar. This explains their distorted behavior. Of course it does; they were somehow shocked into a higher, and incorrect, abstraction layer. The argument can be made that the schizophrenic is responding quite rationally to the higher, though incorrect, abstraction layer.)
You will be seeing much more of these kinds of killings. And this is why violent video games and SSRI's are bad enough by themselves, but positively deadly when combined.
It's not that the kid is a wanton murderer or insane; it's that he is inhabiting a false reality, an abstraction layer. Most of American society inhabits an abstraction layer of one sort or another.
(It can further be said that one function of the comedian is to represent thing after thing to his audience, using every last trick of the trade, in an effort to illuminate for them the false, and potentially quite dangerous, abstraction layers in which they unwittingly live. Nothing he says or does can be divorced from that context and retain meaning.)
(Moreover, the behavior of persons inhabiting a more real, more fundamental abstraction layer will ALWAYS appear irrational to those who inhabit a higher, less real abstraction layer. In my show, for example, when a new audience member finally "gets" me, they descend one more fundamental and realer abstraction layer and join the rest of us here. So give yourself a hand. You no longer live in Dreamland, USA. Welcome to Chris' Wonderland.)
(Almost done. One of the many upsides to my dealings with that jurisdiction's legal system is that it has been legally forced to acknowledge my perfect sanity, my clinically certified genius, and my cute and cuddly handicap, Aspergers Syndrome. I now officially qualify for my handicap placard.)
Everything I do has a reason, though it may be indiscernable to someone inhabiting a higher, and less real, abstraction layer.
