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Analysis of Adam Lanza & Eulavism

Among the best material on axiology ever created

1. Introduction & Links

CulturalPhilistine was a YouTube channel that was owned and operated by Adam Lanza. On 2012 December 14, Lanza murdered his mother and 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School before committing suicide. This page presents an analysis of Adam Lanza, based on his YouTube channel’s audio recordings and information from other source.

Disclaimer: I strongly condemn Lanza’s killings of innocent people to the fullest extent possible. I believe that everybody should have a right to die and take their own life if they choose to, but I cannot condone someone taking someone else’s life without their consent. I only wrote this webpage because I find his philosophy and YouTube channel to be interesting and worth analyzing. While I don’t support Adam Lanza’s actions, I also believe that it would be a guilt by association fallacy to dismiss his ideas on the basis that he committed such heinous acts.

Also see:

2. Philosophy

2.1. Adam Lanza’s Philosophical Accomplishments

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 in his recordings, 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.


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.

2.2. Eulavist Axiology

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 ultimately doesn’t 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 such values are imposed on them by force. However, if a person is willing to cooperate with the system long enough, they could hypothetically reach a point where they could impose their values on others. However, due to generational differences, a child will probably never be able to force their parents into accepting their values. A student will probably never be able to force a teacher into accepting their values. More likely, the younger generation will have learn to accept the values of the older generation. The older generation(s) may also die out before their values can ever change.

Thus the younger generation usually never gets its revenge on the old generation. However, it’s always free to impose its values onto the next younger generation. If they decide to have children of their own, they can become an authority figure themself.

To allow values to be imposed on anyone is to take a more passive stance towards values. The implication is that a person’s values should be whatever was spontaneously adopted by them. No one can have values within a vacuum. So whatever a person’s natural feral values are would ultimately be whatever values are forced on them. 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.

Lanza was so against people imposing values on others, he went as far as to say that even feral values are all a delusion. He didn’t want to value anything, he chose death. His opposition against anyone imposing their values on others is hypocritical. He tried to impose his values on the others by killing all those children, and by publishing his thoughts on YouTube.

Also see: Circles of Control and Freedom.

Traditional Efilism has fallacies in its theory of value. 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.


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.

2.3. Adam Lanza on Hedonism

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”

2.4. Pedophilia and Cultural Taboos

See: Adam Lanza’s Pedophilia Essay.

Lanza had two response videos that he created as a reply to SomethingSea’s response video to him. Apparently, SomethingSea was arrested in 2019 for having sexual activity with two 6-year-olds. Coincidentally, SomethingSea was a pedophile, and Lanza was obsessed with analyzing pedophilia. Allegedly, SomethingSea doesn’t even remember talking to Lanza, even after someone explained the conservation to him. SomethingSea is also transgender and has demonstrated other creepy behavior.

2.5. Adam Lanza’s Fallacies

Efilists anthropomorphize DNA, evolution, etc, whereas Lanza anthropomorphized culture. Lanza took all the agency out of agents and projected it onto memes instead. This is logically inconsistent.

To a great extent, Lanza’s fixation with culture was probably a way of him of blaming something that wasn’t himself, something outside of him, as a way to cope and feel less ill as a human being. Lanza had multiple mental disorders and mental problems that he was unable to reconcile. It’s hypothetically possible that Lanza could’ve resolved some of his problems himself if he were to embrace his own agency, accept that the world is the way it is, and take action. However, he chose not to, beyond dying by suicide. Lanza’s choice to avoid blaming himself for his problems partially (or entirely?) explains why Lanza fallaciously anthropomorphized culture so much.


Lanza believed in a concept that he referred to as the true self (the feral self), which he believed was smothered by culture. In reality, there is no such thing as a “feral self”:

Like the other types of anarchism, primitivism is naive. It imagines a freedom that never existed and cannot exist. Humans have always had culture, including language and some forms of technology. The ancestral way of life was not a paradise. Our ancestors were not in a superior mental or physical state. There was no primitive utopia.

– Blithering Genius, “Circles of Control and Freedom

If the “feral self” doesn’t exist, then there’s no reason to pursue it.


Lanza’s views on life and hedonism were rather inconsistent, at least in his presentation. In this quote, Lanza simultaneously said “happiness is death” and “Life is a great thing and that’s the problem”:

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.

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


This quote 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, “SomethingSea Response #2: A difference of perspectives?”


Lanza hated it when people bullied their values onto other people. Given that value, his final act was ironic and arguably contradictory:

There was a strange irony to his final act. By committing mass murder, he was trying to impose his values onto others. He was horrified by life, and he wanted others to feel the same way. He hated life and value, and he wanted to propagate that value to others. He was trying to bully the world into accepting his values. – Blithering Genius, “The Ghost of Adam Lanza

3. Commentary, Notes, and Assessment of Videos on CulturalPhilistine

For anyone who is interested in understanding Lanza’s philosophy, I personally recommend listening to the audio recordings, while reading the transcripts side-by-side. In the audio, you can hear the intonation and emotion of Lanza’s voice, so it feels more like an authentic experience.

Although all of Lanza’s videos are a total of 6 hours long, you only really need to listen to 3-4 hours to fully know almost everything that there is to know about his philosophy. His other videos could be worth listening to, if you want to understand Lanza better as a person and/or get a better feel of the early Efilist and YouTube community in the early 2010s.


If these were the only videos that I could listen to, then I would pick the following:

  • “My Antinatalism”
  • “Antinatalism at light speed!”
  • “Cults and Culture”
  • “A few things”.
  • “Rambling vlogrant of a ruminative vagrant (Part 1/2)”
  • “Rambling vlogrant of a ruminative vagrant (Part 2/2)”
  • “SomethingSea Response Part 1-2”
  • “SomethingSea Response Part 2-2”
  • “Done with YouTube”
  • Lanza’s Phone Call to Anarchy Radio about Travis the Chimpanzee

These videos aren’t as good as the ones above, but I enjoyed listening to them:

  • “(Pointless) CulturalPhillistine The Movie Part 1/6”
  • “(Pointless) CulturalPhillistine The Movie Part 2/6”
  • “SomethingSea Response #2: A difference of perspectives?”
  • “Suffering is life-affirming-Life is suffering”
  • “Strange Dream #1: Beyond Dreams Door Is Where Horror Lies”
  • “Strange Dream #2: Which side of the door, again?”
  • “Strange Dream #3: Door…”
  • “On pedophiles and children -Part 1-8”
  • “To the pro-culturalists 1/3”
  • “To the pro-culturalists 2/3”
  • “To the pro-culturalists 3/3”

The videos where Lanza was reading things that he had written out were more structured, and usually more interesting. Other times, he was just freely rambling. His last three videos (~45 minutes) felt identical to Blithering Genius’s comment response videos, in terms of structure. It’s may never have access to all of his writings, but we do have access to at least some of the files retrieved from his computer hard drive.

Personally, I didn’t care much for listening to “(Pointless) CulturalPhilistine The Movie Parts 3 through 6. In those videos, Lanza was basically filling out some Internet quizzes. He wasn’t explaining his philosophy or revealing much about himself in those videos, since everything that he was saying was instead influenced by some random webpages that he was looking at.

He had many rational arguments and good points in his 8-part video series where he was narrating an essay that he planned to submit as part of a college application. I initially found it difficult to listen to those videos, since I am personally quite disgusted by pedophilia. However, I was able to eventually finish listening to them, after I saw his document file and revised it into a finished essay. I was then able to see why he found the topic so interesting and why he was passionate about defending pedophiles. Those videos could be worth listening to for some people. But I think that the revised essay that I created is easier to read, follow, and comprehend that both the original essay and the audio recordings.

4. Hypothesizing About Lanza’s Motives For The Shooting

4.1. Most People Jump To Conclusions And/Or Have Inadequate Evidence

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.[1] 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.

4.2. Quotes Revealing Lanza’s Shooting Motives

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”


“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”

4.3. The Most Likely Reasons

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.[2] 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.

4.4. Nancy Lanza Did Whatever Adam Wanted, Until She Could Not

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.[3]

4.5. Nancy Lanza Had To Sell The House

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.[4]

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.

4.6. The Timing When Adam Lanza Killed His Mother

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.

4.7. Disproven Theorized Motives

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.


Did [Adam Lanza] believe that he was some kind of Antinatalist savior, freeing children from their imposition? We may never know. – Amanda Sukenick, “An Unabridged Conversation with an Efilist

Sukenick’s answer indicates to me that she never listened to Lanza’s recordings,[5] 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


Lanza killed himself and others because he was depressed.

Lanza’s shooting was not motivated by depression. It was motivated by the pursuit of a rational philosophy:

“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.”

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


Lanza did the shooting because he wanted to spread his philosophy and teach the world a lesson.

Lanza never intended for the shooting to “teach the world a lesson”. That was the objective of his YouTube channel, not his murder-suicide. The main objectives of his shooting were to die by suicide and live out his violent fantasies while doing so.

If he wanted people to find his YouTube channel, then he would’ve left a note about it or something where people could easily find it. It’s difficult to fathom that he wanted other people to listen to his videos, when he consistently received negative responses on everything that he said, besides maybe the response from SomethingSea.


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.

5. Understanding Lanza

5.2. Why Didn’t Lanza Leave A Suicide Note?

Lanza wrote in the video description of his first pedophilia video that he will never have the motivation to never finish writing his pedophilia essay. To quote:

I recognize that my anti-pedophobia was only a futile retaliation against culture, so I will never have the motivation to improve any of this.

He was also clearly upset and agitated in his last three YouTube videos. He never made another video after those, since he thought it would be pointless, especially since all or most of the criticisms against him would be negative anyway.

He certainly knew that the shooting would make him famous. He definitely would’ve wanted society to embrace a more culture-critical or culture-skeptical philosophy instead, if he had to make a choice.

The main reason why he never wrote a suicide note is probably because he simply didn’t have the motivation or desire to write one, just as he didn’t have the motivation to finish writing his pedophilia essay. He also knew that even if he did write a suicide note, most people would’ve just dismissed it and insult him, just as they did in the comments on his YouTube channel. So writing a suicide note would’ve been futile from his perspective.

He instead spent his final days researching mass murders and planning his murder-suicide, because he thought those actions were a better use of his time.

5.3. Why Lanza Stopped Shooting

The reason why Adam Lanza stopped shooting people before he killed himself was that his rifle was overheating and breaking down. The Glock pistol he used to kill himself jammed several times. While he was trying to solve the problem, he heard police sirens and/or the police were already inside the building. The room where Lanza was in only had dead bodies, and there was a live person in a nearby room who was on the phone.

Lanza mainly did the shooting because he wanted to die. The pressure of all the conditions finally motivated him to kill himself.

5.4. Could A Debate With Adam Have Prevented The Shooting Altogether?

Yes. If anything, a rational debate with Adam Lanza would’ve been the best possible way to prevent the shooting. Most normies and average-IQ people think it would’ve been better to just bully and indoctrinate him more into conforming with society, but that would’ve done nothing except to make him angrier and more depressed.

Lanza 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. Lanza specifically complained about people not giving him any rational arguments in his comment response videos. He was looking for people to rationally explain why he was wrong. And yet, no one was able to accomplish that nor communicate that to him while he was still alive. Lanza was open to rational debate, so a rational debate is likely to have persuaded make him reconsider his beliefs and actions.

A single conversation is often sufficient for revealing great insights to other people. All it takes is to hear something new that you never thought about or considered before.


Adam was intelligent. He was an excellent student, and he graduated high school a year earlier than most people, despite having more personal problems with school than most people would ever have. He also had multiple higher IQ hobbies (e.g. philosophy, programming, computer hardware, languages, great theatre writing (see his screenplay), etc).

The only college course where he got a C was some bogus ethical theory class. He frankly should’ve gotten an A, since he could understand that morality is an illusion. The class taught some delusional objective morality nonsense, and marked him down for giving a more intellectual honest assessments of morality. If it weren’t for that class, he would’ve had a 4.0 GPA on his final college transcript.

Unlike most people, Lanza had correct (and original) ideas about philosophy. He managed to discover the Abyss by the time he was ~19.5 years old (or earlier). His philosophy was far more rational than the average person’s. Most people don’t even have explicit, thought-out beliefs on the human condition. If anything, Adam’s higher intelligence is a great indicator that rational persuasion would’ve been even more effective with him than with most people.


Finally, I speak from experience. For a couple of years, I felt sympathetic to Efilism. I had had many people make arguments from intuition, labels and dismissals, and other fallacies against the philosophy. Many of these so-called “arguments” were similar to what Lanza experienced when people berated him for talking about his own philosophy. The only thing that destroyed my sympathy for Efilist philosophy (which has many similarities with Adam Lanza’s Eulavist philosophy) was rational arguments for dissecting the problems with Efilism.

Lanza didn’t seem to be aware of it (in great part because no one talked to him about it), but there are multiple fallacies and problems with his philosophy. Once again, Lanza was intelligent and he cared about rationality above all else. If Lanza had instead seen rational criticisms of his philosophy (precisely the ones that I explain in the previous link), instead of the trolling, bad faith, and abusive comments that he responded to his last three YouTube videos, then I think that would’ve been the world’s best hope for preventing the shooting. If he could be persuaded that the philosophy which justified his desire for suicide was wrong, then he would’ve acted very differently.

I also think that Lanza could’ve been persuaded to change his views on pedophilia too. For example, he didn’t seem to have any knowledge or awareness that childhood sexual activity can cause people to develop abnormal sexual desires later in life due to abnormal imprinting. Having an abnormal sexuality makes individuals more susceptible to being bullied by culture and society. This is a great argument for prohibiting and/or discouraging pedophilia, and I think Lanza would agree if he had known.

Footnotes:

1

There is a documentary about Adam Lanza that was released in 2024 August 28, with over 1 million views, as of June 2025. The documentary does mention Lanza’s YouTube channel, but it only does so briefly, and it doesn’t cover its content enough to fully reveal to the viewers how Lanza thought and felt. We can assume that most of those 1 million views had listened to that part of the video. We can probably also infer that most people who had listened to that video never bothered to actually listen to the YouTube channel itself or read its transcripts (given that the view counts on archive.org, odyssey, and other locations hosting Lanza’s content and transcriptions have drastically smaller numbers), so this validates the claim that most people who have heard about the YouTube channel have probably never actually listened to (and understood) most of its content. The philosophical nature of Lanza’s content also makes the intelligence that is necessary to understand all of his ideas too far out of most people’s reach.

2

Lanza’s computer also had two images of Lanza pointing a gun to his own head.

3

Other factors probably also contributed to Lanza’s final actions, such as worsening discomfort and mental health from his OCD, depression, anxiety, anorexia, etc; the fallout with his last and only friend in June, etc. But I’m still certain that his philosophical desire to die, his desire for violence, and his potential upcoming eviction were probably the biggest factors.

4

To be clear, I do not condone how Nancy raised Adam Lanza. Although she may not have ever seen any evidence to believe that Adam would commit violence or access her insufficiently guarded guns, that does not excuse her from leaving her guns unguarded. I believe that would’ve been the most important thing that should’ve been done to prevent the shooting. I also respect that she wanted to be supportive of her son (especially as an autistic person myself), but she still should have done more to prevent Adam from becoming violent.

5

Sukenick also incorrectly stated the “Lanza’s last video on the CulturalPhilistine channel was on October 14th, 2011”. However, the “Done with YouTube” video was released on 21 October 2011, “Strange Dream #3:…Door” was published on 22 October 2011, and “To the pro-culturalists” parts 1, 2, and 3 were published on 29 January 2012. Lanza even stated that it was January in “To the pro-culturalists (part 1/3)” and that his last video was 3 months ago. Aside from how Sukenick doesn’t understand that Lanza was too amoral to want to be some sort of antinatalist savior (as she suggested), this is more evidence to me that she never listened to Lanza’s videos, nor does she understand (or care about) his beliefs. I personally think this is very unfortunate. Sukenick has tried to get Efilism and herself involved in academia, and yet she doesn’t have the curiosity nor the intelligence to care about other ideas, like Eulavism, even in spite of its similarities to Efilism.

Last Modified: 2025 November 28, 09:53

Author: Zero Contradictions