Analysis of Adam Lanza & Eulavism

See: The Ghost of Adam Lanza – Blithering Genius.

Adam Lanza managed to create a more rational philosophy and understanding of the world than most people, especially when considering his young age.

• He managed to independently recognize and describe the philosophical abyss for value all by himself.
• He rejected morality as a cultural delusion.
• He understood that all values spread through force. He accepted that nature and society are violent. Even laws and rights require force for their enforcement.
• He was highly skeptical of modern technology. He prefer anarcho-primitivism to modernity.
• Although he didn’t seem to know much about biological realism or Pragmatospherian epistemology, I see no reasons to believe that he would be opposed to any of its main tenets.
• Unlike most people, Lanza had original ideas about philosophy, and he had a very rational worldview, even if it ultimately wasn’t life-affirming.

Lanza developed his philosophy largely independently of efilism. He definitely would’ve came up to the same conclusions as he did, even if he had never heard of antinatalism or efilism. It’s not clear what influence Efilism may have had on Lanza, if any. From what I heard, Efilism might have persuaded him to believe that death is the solution, and it might have influenced his rhetoric. But beyond that, Efilism doesn’t seem to have had much other influence on Lanza.

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Unlike the Efilists, Lanza independently discovered the Value Abyss all by himself by 19 years old:

’There is no justification whatsoever for negative, positive or neutral attitude’ and I don’t understand why you think that I’m saying anything other than that? There is no justification for anything. I - I believe, I feel that there’s justifications because I’m deluded. I don’t know where I’ve said anywhere that that isn’t the case. Of course there is no justification for anything.“

– Adam Lanza, “To the pro-culturalists 3/3”

I’d argue that this is probably the biggest and broadest difference between Eulavism and Efilism.

The second and third paragraphs from Lanza’s “SomethingSea Response #2: A difference of perspectives?” talk about the self and property rights.

Lanza explains the difference between the feral self and cultural self around ~10:00 of this video: “SomethingSea Response Part 1-2”.

Lanza provides good evidence in favor of his view that culture imposes deprivations, and doesn’t really allow fulfillment of anything:

“However, if that child were encultured, he would develop innumerable goals to achieve various things. Culture did not allow the feral child to discover the pleasure which he can achieve from experiencing any of those things, culture imposed the deprivation of not achieving those things, and thus created out of nothing, the pleasure which results from fulfilling that deprivation. Culture is masochism. Since life seeks to propagate itself, I suspect that culture emerged to prevent human intellect from enabling feral people to lose their aversion to death. Ted Kaczynski’s experience is an example of this happening. When he had spent enough time alone in his cabin, he said that he became okay with dying at any moment because he was happy with his life.”

“My interpretation of this is that he had sufficiently overcome his enculturation to the point where he was no longer being hurt by it. Since he wasn’t hampered with the deprivation which culture imposes, he was not afraid of dying. In the past, the cultural reason why you couldn’t kill yourself was because God said so. Or because it will continue some metaphysical cycle of suffering, or because your parents own your body and suicide is dishonorable. These days, the dominant cultural justification for life is this belief that you can’t kill yourself because there are things that need to be accomplished in life. But you do not live for the achievement of your goals, you have goals so that you will continue to live and thus will continue to propagate life.”

“I used to distinguish between the fulfillment of cultural and feral values, but then I realized that feral values are just as coercive of a delusion as cultural values are. I still emphasize cultural so much because of how prominent it is, and once you understand that culture is a disease, you can recognize that life itself is a disease. The deprivation which results from the existence of both cultural and feral values are the only reason why anyone wants to live. Life is suffering, everyone has heard that statement, but they don’t accept it at face-value. They interpret it to mean that life has suffering, but life is suffering, and suicide is the solution.” (video ends)

– Adam Lanza, “Suffering is life-affirming-Life is suffering”

Lanza is correct that everybody is trying to force their values on others. However, a person is always free to reject any values that are suggested to them. A person must accept other people’s values when does values are imposed on them by force. However, if a person is wanting to cooperate with the system, long enough, they could hypothetically reach a point where they could impose their values on others. However, due degeneration differences, a child may never be able to force their parents and their accepting their values and a student may never be able to force a teacher and accepting their values since the old generation may die out before then or since the younger generation may have learn to accept the values of the generation. Thus the younger generation we get, it’s revenge on the old generation, but that generation would be free to impose. It values onto the next younger generation, especially if they decide to have children of their own I place themselves into some sort of position as an authority figure or someone with great power.

Lanza was so against people imposing values on others, he went as far as to say that even feral values are all a delusion. Since all values are a delusion and he does not want to value anything, he chose death. But if he is against anyone imposing their values on others, that would be hypocritical with how he tried to impose his values on the others by killing all those children or by knowing his thoughts on YouTube. And if someone is going to be one silently against a posting values on anyone, then aren’t they taking a more passive stance towards values that whatever a persons values are should be whatever is natural. But whatever a person’s natural feral values are would ultimately be whatever values are forced on them, since no one can have values within a vacuum. We’re always affecting each other both ways. So it’s inevitable that we will all have some influence of each other and what values we have.

I would agree with Lanza that his ultimate conclusions and choice to die by suicide more rational and consistent than his previous desire for everybody to live according to their pre-cultural “feral self”. That concept arguably doesn’t exist in reality, since culture is unavoidable with life, and culture is inevitably part of who everyone is. Although, there was one part in the recordings where he said that he believed his inclination to meticulous organize things was part of his feral self, since he would’ve behaved that way no matter what.

Also see: Circles of Control and Freedom.

Traditional Efilism has fallacies in its theory of value, since it assumes that morality and value(s) are objective. It also takes altruism and hedonism for granted, without ever recognizing that they can be reasonably rejected. Eulavism has a paradox in its theory of value (valuing having no value), but Eulavism is otherwise vastly more rational, since it acknowledges and accepts the Abyss.

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It’s noteworthy that while Lanza eventually killed himself, he did express admiration for John Zerzan’s work near the end of the Anarchy Radio phone call. On his YouTube channel Lanza expressed his belief that only death could be the full solution to the problems that he perceived. The Anarchy Radio phone call occurred after he had already decided that living according to his would not be enough for him. I believe this indicates that Lanza still had at least some sympathy or desire for anarcho-primitivism, despite wanting to die. I infer that he probably would’ve preferred to live according to his feral values, if he had to choose to continue living his life without ending it by suicide. Lanza also valued rationality, so I think it’s conceivable (although perhaps unlikely) that he could’ve been persuaded to adopt a different theory of value by rational arguments.

Unlike Efilists, Lanza had a clear description and explanation of pain and pleasure, similar to the Drive-Reduction Motivation / Zero Sum Emotions Theory.

“The problem was that I’d not been addressing what happiness is. Happiness is merely the fulfillment of value, I recognized that if cultural values were eliminated, the happiness which results from their fulfillment would not be needed because happiness becomes an unnecessary and incoherent concept when it is removed from its’ concep[sic]-context. A common theme in my quasi-Anarcho Primitivist thought at the time is that non-base values exist only as a consequence of cultural infections, and impede on the happiness which results from the fulfillment of feral values. As if [?] my feral self is - in short metaphysically the real me, whose soul had been devoured by the culturally constructed imposter of the self. But my feral self was also an imposter. Just as I realized that I could eliminate non-base values and have no need for the happiness which resulted from their fulfillment, I could eliminate base-values and have no need for the happiness which resulted from their fulfillment.”

– Adam Lanza, “My Antinatalism”

SomethingSea: “Happiness is merely the fulfillment of value… I disagree. Sometimes you wake up and you’re just happy for no apparent reason, sometimes you just laugh (laughter) for no apparent reason. It doesn’t have to be dependent on a lack of something and the gaining of something, it’s not all about a lack of stuff, it’s not all about being cultural, you attach entirely too much value to culture. Oh isn’t that an irony?”

Adam Lanza: “I agree that happiness isn’t like prayer, where first you pray and then your prayers are answered. Since happiness is just biological, it’s possible to just be happy, but in general the entire point of happiness is to serve as a reward for fulfilling value. First you have this desire, and then when you fulfill the desire, you achieve happiness. So, um… well a lot of the time when you’re randomly happy it’s because you don’t perceive a certain deprivation to be important enough to affect your random happiness. I remember reading that one of the 9/11 hijackers was asked: ‘Why do you never laugh?’ And he responded: ‘How can you laugh when people in Palestine are dying?’ And I think that someone like him wouldn’t, because he has this problem, I don’t think that someone like him would ever, or at least not very often, experience random happiness. I think he would be suffering a lot.”

– Adam Lanza, “SomethingSea Response Part 1-2”

It seems that Lanza never fully rejected hedonism. He still would’ve killed himself regardless of whether he values happiness or not. So we could say that he was de facto not a hedonist, since accepting or rejecting hedonism didn’t resolve the crux of his philosophy:

“Okay this is very rare for me… I’m actually in sort of a positive mood, I have, I’m listening to the… the video of me web surfing and of course when I’m, it’s been sufficiently long enough that of course when I’m listening to that it’s almost as if I’m interacting with someone who is exactly like me. And so that gets me into a positive mood and… uh, this is genuinely in as positive of a mood as I get, when I’m… I mean you could call it hopeful but, okay I’ll just go with that, as hopeful as a mood as I ever get in consciously. And so… what do I think about death right now? Well, even in my most pleasurable state I can conceive of, I mean even that I can imagine, I still see death as the solution because happiness… I’ve already explained my position.”

“Happiness is not really happiness, happiness is actually the cessation of deprivation. Any happiness that you experience is a consequence of your enculturation. I mean any happiness in a cultural context is a consequence of your enculturation… so what do I feel right now? Do I feel none of that matters and I can just enjoy my happiness? Um, basically no, fuck life, I should kill myself (laughter) this is me in my happiest mood.”

“Because there is no happiness. I mean happiness is death, I’ve already outlined in my previous videos, my previous rambling, vlog, whatever videos today… that life is suffering and death is happiness. And it makes perfect sense to me right now, it always makes perfect sense to me, and so even when I’m… there’s not really a difference in my actions based on whether I’m in my worst or best mood. I still persist in just going through the motions and I never pursue death…and I never pursue life, I’m just kind of in an intermediate state. But I am in a good mood so don’t let anyone tell you that I am… I want to die because life is so miserable, because that’s not my position, I’ve said this so many times. Life is a great thing and that’s the problem, and if you don’t understand what I mean by that then…everything that I’ve…it, and if you’ve listened to everything I said earlier then I’m not going to be able to communicate right now, maybe in the future I’ll be able to express that more coherently but… guess that’s it.” (video ends)

– Adam Lanza, “(Pointless) CulturalPhillistine The Movie Part 5/6”

See: Thoughts On Pedophilia, Ephebophilia, And Consensual Child Pornography.

Efilists anthropomorphize DNA, evolution, etc, whereas Lanza anthropomorphizes culture. Lanza took all the agency out of agents and projected it onto memes instead.

This quote from Lanza’s “SomethingSea Response #2: A difference of perspectives?” seems overly rhetorical to the point of being informally illogical:

My position is that we are on a path and we can potentially experience more, but we have not and would not have discovered any of it, we have and would create all of it out of nothing. More awareness does not allow the discovery of any higher experiences, it creates the experiences out of nothing. Think of it in this cultural context, a feral child does not have the desire to read a great novel. If you are encultured, you would subsequently be able to experience the pleasure of reading it, but culture did not allow the discovery of the experience. Culture created the greatness out of nothing. Culture imposed the deprivation of not having read the great novel and thus created the pleasure which had resulted from fulfilling this deprivation. That is why I refer to culture as masochism, which I had described better in my “Suffering is Life-Affirming” video that’s linked below.“

Adam Lanza had a phone call on Anarchy Radio a year before the shooting, which was discovered and connected to Lanza in 2014. Lanza referred to the phone call with John Zerzan under his Smiggles alias. We know that Smiggles was Adam Lanza’s account on the Columbine High School Massacre discussion forum. There are also at least two people who have met Adam Lanza in real life who vouch that the voice on the Anarchy Radio phone call sounded like Adam Lanza. We thus know that the voice on the Anarchy Radio phone call was Adam Lanza’s voice, based on his internet activity and testimonies.

The YouTube channel wasn’t discovered until much later in September 2011, when it was publicized on the r/masskillers subreddit. The voice on the YouTube channel is obviously the same as the voice on the Anarchy Radio phone call. The content on the channel is also connected to Lanza’s widely known interest in pedophilia (as revealed by the official investigation) and his known hatred in culture (as revealed on his hard drive’s file and on Anarchy Radio).

Adam Lanza is also well-documented by the official investigation to have had an essay that defended pedophilia on his computer’s hard drive. There are eight videos on the YouTube channel that narrate content that is identical to the essay file found on Adam Lanza’s computer hard drive in his house after the shooting happened.[1] The simplest and most plausible reason why the person narrating the essay was saying identical things to the text of the pedophilia essay found on Adam Lanza’s hard drive is that he was Adam Lanza himself. By Occam’s Razor, we can deduce that Adam Lanza was the owner of the CulturalPhilistine YouTube channel.

CulturalPhilistine also expressed a strong desire to die by suicide, and the channel never had any activity after January 2012. This is consistent with how Lanza killed himself on 2012 December 14. In one video, CulturalPhilistine described what he believed would be the most likely way how finally he dies.

I don’t know exactly how the YouTube channel was discovered and connected to Lanza in 2021 by the reddit and instagram users who first found it (I would have to find and ask them directly), but they probably used some trail of clues that no one else managed to find, or maybe it came up in their search results. The YouTube channel had videos that discussed themes of pedophilia and culture, both of which Lanza is known to have written files about on his computer, so my speculation is that the channel was found by someone who was fascinated with True Crime who was trying to search for things that were relevant to Lanza’s interests.

It may seem strange that the official investigation never found or acknowledged the YouTube channel, but it also shouldn’t be surprising either. The Anarchy Radio phone call wasn’t widely publicized until early 2014, about a year after the shooting in late 2012.

Given that the YouTube channel only got a few hundred views in total before its 2021 discovery, it makes sense that it took so long for people to find it and connect it with Lanza, especially since Lanza never directly referenced the channel or its videos in any of his other known online activity, as far as we know. It’s essentially a tautology that it took so long for the world to discover a channel that had gotten so few views. By contrast, it would be far more surprising if there was a channel that had a lot of views and publicity, but nobody had known about it and everybody forgot about it for multiple years.

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In an interview with Katherine Dee, a prominent efilist activist, Amanda Sukenick, had expressed astonishment that most of the antinatalist community was unaware of Lanza’s YouTube channel, since it was a small community with greater social connectivity back then. She was also surprised that she never had any videos by CulturalPhilistine recorded in his thousands of hours of antinatalist video archives, despite the channel expressing support for antinatalism. In the same interview however, Sukenick acknowledged that two antinatalists (DerivedEnergy and Tranquil87) had discovered and left comments Lanza’s YouTube channel, so Sukenick cannot deny with accuracy that no one from the antinatalist community had ever discovered CulturalPhilistine back in the early 2010s.

Sukenick also suspects that the channel was private or unlisted for a number of years, but I don’t see any credible reason to believe that.

1. The channel owner never had any further activity on the YouTube channel after January 2021, and he died on December 14, 2012. The only way the channel could’ve been hidden and/or randomly revealed is if some YouTube worker with administration permissions did so, which is unlikely because that would probably violate YouTube’s terms of service.
2. The channel’s videos never got many views to begin with, so it makes sense that not many people had known about it, by the reasoning that I previously explained.
3. The two antinatalists that did discover and comment on the channel’s videos also evidently never shared any of the videos with other people, otherwise the wider antinatalist community would’ve known about it. So, we can partially credit the channel’s invisibility to the wider antinatalist community with how the antinatalists who had seen the channel failed to share the channel’s videos with others.
4. We also know that YouTube made massive changes to its platform in 2013 and 2014, which made it more difficult for people to discover niche videos that they would be interested in. This partially explains why the channel was largely unknown and unconnected with Adam Lanza’s real life identity for so long.

See: YouTube: fuckcomments | 2012 January 31 Archive.

Unfortunately, many of the comments by the fuckcomments account on YouTube have been deleted, and it’s difficult to navigate and see all his comments on the YouTube website, since YouTube drastically changed and degraded its user interface and format around 2014. So, fuckcomments’s comments can only be easily seen in archives:

• Evidence Part I: https://archive.is/dfeA2
• Evidence Part II: https://archive.is/SZtXz

Fuckcomments was probably an alias of Lanza, masquerading under a fake identity. Fuckcomments displayed completely different character and intellect compared to CulturalPhilistine, so it may seem surprising and unlikely that they are the same person. However, the evidence displayed in the links above is compelling and hard to deny. It’s also worth noting that Lanza yelled at his victims, told them to “shut the fuck up”, and taunted them before killing them. So, Lanza is documented to have displayed behavior that is consistent with the kind shown by fuckcomments.

Nevertheless, fuckcomments doesn’t reveal nearly as much about Adam Lanza as what was revealed by his CulturalPhilistine channel. If Lanza had both a philosophical worldview and an alt-persona, then the philosophical side of him would reign supreme, because it could critique desires to kill people for the sake of it, or do a murder-suicide.

Fuckcomments also said a lot of other things about himself that weren’t true (e.g. he lied about living in Canada, he gave conflicting information on his age at different times, etc). We should thus be at least somewhat skeptical that anything that was written by fuckcomments could be considered as representative of Lanza’s true desires and intentions. While Fuckcomments and Lanza had glorified violence and expressed fantasies about kill people, there should be some caution that Fuckcomments may be presenting fake perspectives mixed in with Lanza’s real-life perspectives.

My hypothesis for why Lanza had a second YouTube channel that had no videos on it was so that he could have a way to navigate and comment on YouTube under a more vulgar and violence craving persona of his. After he made his final YouTube videos on CulturalPhilistine on 2012 January 29, he abandoned that channel completely since he was upset over all the harassment, negativity, and irrationality that he was receiving in the comments and dislikes of that channel. So, his only way to access YouTube after he ended his activity as CulturalPhilistine would’ve been through a different YouTube channel and/or account.

(It’s probably only a coincidence, but CulturalPhilistine and FuckComments have the same initials as Child Pornography and Freedom Club respectively. The latter is an acronym invented by Ted Kaczynski. Both of these topics were of known interest to Adam Lanza.)

I believe that this video documentary has a good summary of Adam Lanza’s life up to the shooting. I dislike how the documentary doesn’t analyze Lanza’s YouTube channel nor cover his philosophy or personal pastimes, as described on CulturalPhilistine and the files mined from Lanza’s hard drive. But I believe that the documentary otherwise gives a good summary of Adam Lanza’s life, mental health problems, and warning signs, before he did the shooting.

If anything, the audio recordings on Adam Lanza’s YouTube channel and his phone call to Anarchy Radio offer the best evidence what his motive was. In these audio recordings, you can actually hear what Lanza thought, believed, and how he felt about the world. Lanza’s audio recordings give the best idea of what is going on inside of his head, whereas most people have only merely hypothesized about Lanza’s thoughts and feelings. So while I have not observed every document, report, testimony, or physical primary sources pertaining to Adam Lanza’s life, it’s not necessary to do this in order to figure out what his motives were.

The explanation that I’m proposing for Lanza’s motives is more accurate than all of the main ideas that other people have suggested. Most people have either proposed ideas that are contrary to the known evidence, or they believe that there is inconclusive evidence for determining Lanza’s motives. Most motive theories and conspiracy theories are wrong because they were proposed without listening to or understanding Lanza’s YouTube channel, philosophy, and circumstances. This is in large part because the CulturalPhilistine YouTube channel wasn’t discovered and connected to Lanza until almost 9 years after the shooting. Additionally, most people who have heard about the YouTube channel’s existence never actually listened to everything that Lanza actually said.[2] Most people are tempted to jump to conclusions without fully understanding Lanza’s state of mind or his circumstances, or they wrongly assume that there isn’t enough evidence to deduce his motive.

I believe that the evidence and reasoning supporting my proposed theory are strong and rightfully more conclusive than the inconclusive verdict of the official investigation and other sources. Nobody has ever offered any rational evidence to prove that the YouTube channel does not belong to Adam Lanza, nor has anyone ever refuted the evidence that connects the YouTube channel to Lanza’s possession. There is no reason to hypothesize that Lanza had motives contrary to his own words and the authentic feelings that he expressed on his YouTube channel.

I think that these quotes best detail Lanza’s motives for the shooting, namely his desire to die.

SomethingSea: “What do you mean by you lack the discipline to commit suicide? That doesn’t make any sense to me, lack the discipline… so like when you think about committing suicide, what goes through your mind? Is it uh…”

Adam Lanza: “I’m definitely not happy to be alive. I..um, I would like to die, but the reason why… when I think about, when I get the thought into my head ‘you’re going to kill yourself in one minute’, I… um, I… I’m compelled to live in the same sense that someone who is addicted to cocaine is compelled to continue their indulgence. They definitely don’t, well, heh, sometimes… they definitely don’t want to be addicted to cocaine, but they can’t control it because they don’t have enough self-discipline. And that’s the problem that I have, a cocaine addict will say ‘this is the last time, I’m definitely not going to do it again, once I take it this last time’ but if it were truly the last time then they wouldn’t need to indulge with… they wouldn’t need to have that last indulgence. So they’re not really overcoming their addiction, they’re just continuing to feed it just as much as they were previously and I’m in the same position. I think ‘oh, this period of time will be good and then I’ll die’, and… it ends up not being the last period because if it really were the last period, I would just kill myself instantly, instead of having to continue to live through that.”

“There’s - I can think of two ways that you can choose to overcome an addiction. The first is that you can have the self-discipline to recognize that you need to overcome your addiction, and you know that you’ll have an intense desire to persist in your addiction but if you um… continue to persist in overcoming it, that desire will eventually disappear. And I..I don’t have that discipline. There’s one other way you can choose to overcome an addiction and that is to allow your addiction to get you into some circumstances such that continuing the addiction would have more, would have much more intolerable consequences than ending the addiction would have. Such as a cocaine addict ending up living in a dumpster, blowing strangers for cocaine money, that kind of a thing.

And they would feel forced into giving up their addiction, and I think that’s the position that I need to be in to overcome this, because my life right now is… I hate using this word because it’s misleading, but my life right now is way too comfortable to… for me to feel forced into killing myself. But… that’s probably going to be the way I die, I’m going to… I, well, either that or I’ll develop the discipline to just say ’none of this is helping me I just need to die and I know that I won’t want to go through with it at the last second but I just need to do it’ and I guess that’s the end of the response video, heh, I’m sorry to end on such a macabre note. I know that I can kind of ’rain on the parade’, but… well, hehe, you wanted a response video so here it is. Thanks for listening.“ (video ends)

– Adam Lanza, “SomethingSea Response Part 2-2”

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“I know this is really fucking stupid… all of this. I mean, really when you analyze what I’m doing at this moment, and what I’ve been doing for the last hour, I’m basically just procrastinating because I know that the solution is death. Inbox…no messages, as usual. Subscriptions…this is glitched, as usual. Oh, PinkNun[?] uploaded a video, women and anti-natalism. Oh my headphones hurt, and their battery has been depleted so I guess I’ll watch this later.”

“But what do I think about women and anti-natalism? It depends on what you mean by anti-natalism, because it could mean the conventional perspective anti-natalism or it could be this Efilism stuff that they’re talking about, or it could be this anti-value-ism stuff that I’m talking about. But what do I think of women? Well I don’t think of them any differently than anyone else, I mean… whatever. I don’t… I guess I’ll, just end this here.” “Oh yeah and that reminds me, how much time do I have left? Oh no, 20 seconds, okay… asexuals, asexuality, I meant to add to my prior video, it’s um culturally induced, it isn’t, it doesn’t exist in nature so… if you think you’re asexual, you’re deluding yourself, it’s because of consequence of what you experienced… oh no two seconds away, bye.”

– Adam Lanza, “(Pointless) CulturalPhillistine: The Movie Part 6/6”

I think that the last paragraph / segment of the “SomethingSea Response Part 2-2” explains why Lanza killed himself. I don’t think Lanza ever had the self-discipline to commit suicide without killing other people, otherwise he would’ve easily done it within a year before or after he made the YouTube recordings.[3] He personally said himself that the second way of overcoming an addiction (to life, in this case) were to be forcibly pushed out of one’s comfort zone. In Lanza’s December 2011 call with Anarchy Radio, he also stated that he believed that Travis the Chimpanzee wouldn’t have been any different from a teenage mall shooter who was pushed over the edge. Lanza most likely saw similarities between Travis and himself, given the philosophy described on his YouTube channel, Travis’s actions, and his own actions.

With that in mind, I think the reasons why Adam Lanza did the shooting can be summarized as follows:

1. Lanza didn’t want to be alive. He wanted to die.
2. As mentioned in SomethingSea Response Part 2-2, Lanza said that he probably wouldn’t be able to kill himself until something happens that pushes him over the edge.
3. His mother had to sell the house and wanted to temporarily move Adam into a trailer, which would have evicted him from his room.
4. Lanza had at least some fantasy or desire to kill other people and mimic the Columbine shooters. He had obvious obsessions with mass killings and violence, as shown in his Internet history, his massive spreadsheet detailing and classifying mass killing events, his fuckcomments YouTube account, and the graphic writings that he is documented to have written in school.
   
5. Lanza decided to target an elementary school because school is a symbol of culture and indoctrination, which he strongly opposed and wanted to make a statement against. Elementary schoolers are also easier to physically overpower, which probably enabled him to kill more people, compared to other targets.
6. Lanza knew that if he killed other people, then he would be stressed enough to kill himself before the police show up.
7. The shootings were his final attempt at self-expression. His attack symbolized both a rejection of culture and an attack on culture.

Similarly to Elliot Rodger’s mother, Lanza’s mother, Nancy Lanza, did whatever Adam wanted to the best of her abilities.

Nancy put Adam’s preferences over everything else in their lives. She went above and beyond in the home to cater to her son’s extremely particular and peculiar needs:

• Adam didn’t want to public school (reportedly due to his “severe social anxiety”), so Nancy did whatever she could to get a doctor’s note to excuse him from attending public school.
• Nancy couldn’t find a doctor who agreed with how she was raising her son, so she usually ignored their advice and followed Dr. Fox’s unusual recommendations.
• Adam didn’t want to take medications, so Nancy insisted that he shouldn’t take medications.
• Nancy frequently sent and exchanged emails with the Adam’s IEP school staff, sometimes to the point where she was sending an email every day.
• Adam prohibited a Christmas tree from being put up in the house.
• When Adam did not want their family cat anymore, they got rid of it.
• Nancy instructed people not to ring the doorbell. She also asked neighbors to give her plenty of warning before making any loud noises, such as using power tools, since these noises would bother Adam greatly.
• When people called the house, Nancy would often make up that Adam was busy or not at home, since he usually preferred not to interact with others.
• Nancy took care of all of the daily chores in the house. She cooked some of his meals, cleaned the entire home, and even did Adam’s laundry for him. The only thing that Nancy did not do was clean Adam’s room, because she was strictly prohibited from even entering it.
• According to WashingtonPost.com, Adam was extremely particular with his eating habits. He was very picky about the type of food he consumed to begin with. But even after that, Adam needed to have his food arranged in a certain way on specific types of dishes, in order to be able to eat.
• In spite of all of her extra effort to accommodate his needs, there were times where Adam would only communicate with his mom via email or written letters, despite living in the same house together and often only being a room or two away from each other. This tendency reportedly increased in the months leading up to the shooting, as he started to isolate himself further and stay in his room for longer stretches at a time.
• When Hurricane Sandy knocked out the power in their house for several days in October 2012, Adam absolutely refused to go to a hotel, contrary to his mother’s desires, so neither of them went to a hotel.

– Information from Documenting Evil, “The 2012 Sandy Hook Massacre & What Led Up To It”

Instead of trying to make Adam conform to the world, his mother did whatever she could to make Adam’s world conform to his desires. Adam preferred to spend most of his final two years of life thinking and browsing the Internet alone in his room. Given these conditions, the most discernable thing that I can identify that could’ve pushed Adam over the edge was that his mother had to sell the house.[4]

Whenever she could, Nancy Lanza bent over backwards to do whatever Adam wanted. But she couldn’t do this forever. She eventually had to face the financial and legal constraints of social reality. In December 2012, her house was assessed at $360,000, with a $400,000+ mortgage. Nancy was ordered by a court to either sell the house or refinance the mortgage somehow. One of her friends reported that she considered moving with her son to Washington state or North Carolina. Nancy had to sell the house for financial reasons, but Adam didn’t want to move out of his bedroom and into an RV.

Mrs. Lanza Planned to Move Away from Sandy Hook
Mrs. Lanza indicated an intention to move from Newtown to either Washington or North Carolina. She talked to AL about this move and apparently he indicated he would move to Washington with her. She planned to purchase an RV (Recreational Vehicle) so that she could show the house without AL living in it. AL would live in the RV instead while the house was on the market. Mrs. Lanza told a friend that if she moved to Washington State, she would try to enroll him in a “special school.” She also stated that she wanted him to learn to be more self-sufficient.

…

AL sustained and injury to his head the night before Mrs. Lanza left for a trip to New Hampshire– 2 or 3 days prior to the Sandy Hook shooting. Mrs. Lanza describes his injury in a text message reading “bloody, bloody, bloody.” Mrs. Lanza went on her trip anyway, and returned on December 13, 2012.

The looming prospect of moving from Newtown may have increased AL’s anxiety, as he may have worried about where he would go or live, and the loss of the sanctuary he had developed in his home. This was quite possibly an important factor leading to the shootings.

– “Shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Report of the Office of the Child Advocate”, page 103

Since Adam was eventually going to be evicted from his bedroom sanctuary, this was probably the breaking point that pushed Adam over the edge and motivated him to do the shootings and finally kill himself, as he desired. I believe that if Nancy Lanza had been less accommodating to her son at a younger age, then he would’ve broke down and committed violence sooner.[5]

If Lanza didn’t want to leave his comfort zone, then he backed himself into a corner by failing to become physically nor financially independent. His mother also got backed into a corner when she could no longer do whatever her son wanted her to, due to legal reasons. Once his mother was trying to persuade him or force him to do things that he did not want to do, he finally reached the breaking point, which motivated him to do the math shooting and suicide.

Before the shooting, we know that Nancy Lanza had spent traveled to New Hampshire for two night to take a break herself from the difficulties that came with caring for Adam. She also told friends that she was using this trip to see how leaving Adam alone for longer periods of time would go. Adam killed his mother while she was sleeping on 2012 December 14, a Friday morning. It was her first day back from her trip to New Hampshire.

We also know that on the Thursday day before the shooting, the GPS in Adam Lanza’s car tracked him driving to Sandy Hook elementary school back around and then back home. The only two reasons that I can think of for why he chose to delay the shooting by another day until Friday are:

1. He wanted to wait another day to plan out the shooting, and/or
2. He wanted to wait for his mother to come home so that he could kill her too.

There is no evidence that Lanza did the shootings based on pedophilia. Lanza emphasized multiple times in his videos that he was not a pedophile. He was not sexually attracted to the ages of the people that he killed either. The only reason why Lanza was interested in pedophilia was because he saw no rational reasons why it should be illegal and socially condemned. He disapproved of how society treated pedophiles and pedophilia due to his philosophy and personal values.

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Sukenick’s answer indicates to me that she never listened to Lanza’s recordings,[6] otherwise she would know his views on morality. There’s no evidence that Lanza wanted to “mercy kill” children:

The idea that he was mercy-killing children is too simplistic. But he would not have viewed his actions as harmful to them. In his worldview, death was salvation and enlightenment. However, he did not believe in morality or objective value, or that he had any obligation to act for the good of others. Also, he must have known that killing a small number of people would have no effect on life or suffering in general. He did not kill children to save them from life. He killed them to express his hatred of life.

– Blithering Genius, “The Ghost of Adam Lanza”

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Lastly, there are multiple conspiracy theories about the shooting. They are all false. There is no evidence to support any them, and I believe that Wikipedia does a good job of explaining why their wrong.