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 independently recognized the philosophical abyss {(1), (2), (3), (4), (5)} all by himself.
• He rejected morality as a cultural delusion (because it is).
• 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 preferred 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 the main tenets.
• Unlike most people, Lanza had original ideas about philosophy. He had a 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. Lanza always referred to Efilists in third-person and he described himself as a “more of a Eulavist”. Lanza never identified as an Efilist.

Related: Wikipedia: Efilism.

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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.“[1]

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

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

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. See: The Case Against Efilism.

Lanza criticized the Efilists for having moral dogmas (i.e. being obsessed with reducing suffering). He characterized them as “chasing black balloons”:

I’ve always dismissed the Efilists as being moralizers, the first minute that I saw Inmendham, I knew that he was just a moralizer and I’ve dismissed the antinatalists here as such in multiple places, multiple times. I remember I explicitly called them black balloon chasers once, actually I’ll find that quote.

– Adam Lanza, “Done with YouTube”

Second quote from Adam Lanza:

And my comment was: ’I completely agree, I’ll kill myself whenever I stop being a coward, I’m an antinatalist not because of its being the right position to have, but only because I am alive and thus am still deluded by value. It’s irritating how the antinatalists here are moralizers who treat suffering as transcendently mattering, so they must live to prevent others from going through this. They don’t recognize that they’re chasing black balloons and that they’re no different from anyone else who’s ever lived.’ And I posted that two weeks ago.

– Adam Lanza, “Done with YouTube”

By contrast, Eulavism recognizes morality as a delusion. Lanza didn’t believe in any objective values. He recognized even his own values as subjective:

I was not and I am not in some existential crisis, I’ve never had the slightest problem with the obvious nonexistence of free will, objective purposes, and all of that. I have always been entirely psychologically capable of accepting my own subjective values and goals, even though I know they are consummately inconsequential, and it doesn’t bother me at all. The problem is not that I seek meaning and cannot find it. The problem is that I do feel immense meaning, and so does everyone else who is alive. Meaning is an abstract interpretation of value which exists only because of life. Just as I sought to eradicate the delusional values which culture infected me with, the final solution is the termination of my life, to rid myself of all value. The solution cannot be to embrace some aspect of life, as if the erosion of delusions is the cause of this. Life is what urgently caused me to have value, and changing my life will never do anything but create different delusions than the ones I already have. Unfortunately as of right now I lack the discipline to pursue my death and to rid myself of the values which delude me, even though I recognize [that] the solution to life is death. But I do commend others who do commit suicide. They have freed themselves from culture, life and all value. They have freed themselves from themselves.

– Adam Lanza, “My Antinatalism”

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. Eulavism is amoral. Amoralists reject objective morality similarly to how atheists reject the existence of “God”.

Lanza’s definition of morality makes more sense than the (circular) definitions that most people use:

Rights are just euphemisms for the use of violence against someone who deviates from the fulfillment of the subjective values of a group which has a capacity to kill’, I think that basically describes it, and that’s really all that it is. It’s just a group with the capacity to kill who is coercing people to behaving in ways which allow the maximum fulfillment of their subjective values. And morality is similar… not identical, but similar. Morality doesn’t exist and I don’t mean morality is subjective, I mean moral statements have no validity, they are completely incoherent. It’s… morality is basically just a cultural abstraction of subjective values, so people just select arbitrary values and then they say…and they duck-taped them together under the banner of moral language, they say ’my behavior is ethically or morally justified’ instead of saying ’my value is leading me to act in this way’ and that’s all there is to morality, there’s really nothing more.

– Adam Lanza, “Rambling vlogrant of a ruminative vagrant (Part 2/2)”

In another quote, Lanza made it clear that he didn’t believe in “evil” either. He thought that “evil” was as meaningless and non-existent as morality:

And I’m not saying… ’you’re evil’ as like to Gratex[22] I wouldn’t say to him, you’re evil for having a child. Although, well I wouldn’t say you’re evil for having a child even though I think that’s… it’s kind of cruel, heh. What I would say to Gratex[22] is, just be honest about what you’re doing, having a child… isn’t in the child’s interest, it’s in your interest.

– Adam Lanza, “On pedophiles and children (Part 8/8)”

Lanza understood that having children is good from the perspective of the parent, even though he strongly disagreed with the parent’s values. Unlike most people, he understood that values depend on perspective.

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 “SomethingSea Response (Part 1/2)”.

Lanza provided good evidence in favor of his view that culture imposes deprivations and thus 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.

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

Also see: Circles of Control and Freedom.

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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 feral values 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.

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

See: Adam Lanza’s Pedophilia Essay.

Adam’s obsession with pedophilia was merely a way to point out the cultural hypocrisy of the enculturation process. Children are treated as property to be integrated into the system and are subject to a plethora of involuntary measures such as bullying and corporal punishment, purely for subjective civilizational values that are collectively seen as good. Putting it within the broader framework of anarchism, it was a culturally defiant and sensitive way to argue that children should have the right to act on their own will, including the ability to voluntarily have a relationship with an adult. Any argument against consensual child-adult relationships is entirely due to systemic values.

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.

Linguistic relativity is a concept about how language influences thought and beliefs. There is no detailed conception of linguistic relativity that is explicitly part of Eulavism as conceived by Adam Lanza, since he never discussed it. However, language is part of culture and vice versa. So it should be obvious that most of what Lanza said about culture is applicable to language as well. Linguistic relativity is consistent with Eulavist philosophy, so it’s worthy of being mentioned in a dedicated section.

In “Rambling vlogrant of a ruminative vagrant (Part 2/2)”, Lanza said that he might talk more about language later, but he never did beyond this quote:

And I’m not saying that, um, we should encourage diversity and… not saying that we should segregate, because both integration and segregation are nonsensical. They’re just two systems under which culture prospers and we all lose. There’s really no difference between them. This goes into what I used to, sort of, my prior thinking, I used to address the issue of language being cultural. Oh man, I hate language so much, maybe I’ll talk about that later. But I used to address the problem of language being cultural, by just saying ’oh um, worldwide implementation of Esperanto should solve that problem’ it was such a trivial way to deal with that, because I wasn’t… all that, um, integration allows to happen is, all that it does is kill competing viruses to let one virus prosper. There’s really no difference between integration and segregation, it’s just the propagation of culture under different systems. And about language… oh man, I have a special place in my heart for language because it’s the primary method by which cultural values are coerced onto other people.

And you can’t, it’s like the wheezing of someone with tuberculosis. It’s a symptom of it, it’s also the method by which it propagates to other victims, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re forever stuck with this, language, all these abstractions… but here I’m going back into my, my anarcho-quasi- I should say quasi-anarcho-primitivist ideology when really it’s not culture that’s the problem, it’s value that’s the problem. It’s the structure of value itself, it’s not only cultural value, it’s feral value too. It’s all a part of the same nonsense…

To me, it feels like that everything that Lanza said and believed about culture is similar to what I’ve written about language. The main difference is that I wrote in depth about how language influences the mind. I also listed dozens of examples.

Read More: Linguistic Relativity.

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.

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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.

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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) CulturalPhilistine: The Movie (Part 6/6)”

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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; Life is suffering” video that’s linked below.

– Adam Lanza, “SomethingSea Response #2: A difference of perspectives?”

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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”

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.“

– 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, Pink Moon uploaded a video, women and antinatalism. 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 antinatalism, because it could mean the conventional perspective antinatalism 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) CulturalPhilistine: 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.

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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. Lanza knew that if he killed other people, then he would be stressed enough to kill himself before the police could potentially arrest him.
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 hated. Elementary schoolers are also easier to physically overpower, which probably enabled him to kill more people, compared to other targets.
6. There is some evidence that Lanza wanted to save the children from culture. This also helps explain why he targeted an elementary school specifically. However, it must be stressed that saving the children was definitively less important than saving himself (i.e. suicide).
7. The shootings were his final attempt at self-expression. His attack symbolized both a rejection of culture and an attack on culture.
8. He didn’t have any life goals, besides suicide. See the next paragraph for elaboration.

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Everybody already recognizes that Lanza became socially isolated in the last couple years of his life. However, fewer people recognize that he also lost the motivation to do things that he used to care about in the final years of his life:

• In 2009, he dropped out of community college.
• In 2010 or 2011, he lost the motivation to finish writing his pedophilia essay.
• He intended to make his last YouTube video and 2011 October 24, but then he really made his last videos in 2012 January 29 and officially abandoned his CulturalPhilistine account.
• By 2012, he only had a perfunctory interest in mass killers.
• He lost his only in-real-life friend in June 2012, which resulted in him not leaving his house for 3 months, even during and after Hurricane Sandy.

Lanza had no future plans of any kind. He had no plans for college or career, he had no ability to find a suitable partner, he wasn’t going to have children because he was antinatalist, and he had no goals of any kind, besides eventual suicide. Even then, the hobbies that he did have outside of work and education were focused on rebelling against culture and violence. If he were to have lived a satisfying life, then he would’ve had to find different pastimes.

One of the main reasons why he did not have any life goals (besides suicide) was that he was opposed to forming life goals.

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

Adam was eventually going to be evicted from his bedroom sanctuary where he had lived all his life for the past 14 years. 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.

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.

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In October 2010, Adam stated that he wanted to move to Washington on the Shocked Beyond Belief Forum:

Smiggles wrote:

On another tangent, what do you think about sunlight? Those drapes haven’t been opened in the last five years, and the drapes in the room I’m in right now have actually been taped shut (to block the gaps from allowing sunlight through) for the same amount of time. I absolutely hate sunlight, along with any artificial light which resembles it.

The few times I see an extremely bleak, dark, and dreary day outside during the morning or afternoon with thick gray clouds covering the entire sky, I get into a good mood and think about how wonderfully beautiful it is outside. Bright, sunny, “cheerful” days are depressing. Nearly every afternoon is miserable for me. Beyond just the normal animosity I have for sunlight, I get exhausted between noon and sunset when I’m in a room which allows the slightest amount of afternoon light in.

I hate having my skin exposed to sunlight, so I always wear a hooded sweatshirt and full-length pants, even in the hottest weather. The sunglasses I wear are gigantic and almost completely prevent me from seeing any direct sunlight when I’m looking in any direction. I would also wear a full balaclava if it wouldn’t get me profiled as a criminal. They need to make a fashion come-back…

I check this website often: http://www.epa.gov/sunwise/uvindex.html I intend on eventually living in northwest Washington (probably Seattle). It’s among the most consistently overcast regions in the mainland US http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/online/ccd/cldy.html. I always get disappointed when I check the UV index for the day and see how low it is compared to my state’s level.

The plans and ideas about Adam and Nancy moving had been going on for more than 2 years before Nancy got serious about them. By the time Nancy started to formulate real plans for moving in 2012, Adam was probably too committed to the shooting. At some point, Adam probably changed his mind and realized that he’d rather die than move. In that case, being forced to move probably became a potential deadline for when Adam had to kill himself.

There was probably some point in time where he had to ask himself which he wanted more: living in Washington or shooting up Sandy Hook. Life or death, and he chose to commit himself to death.

There have been multiple proposed ideas in the True Crime Community on why Adam killed his mother:

• Adam knew that Nancy was going to evict him from his bedroom.
• If she was alive, then she could have interfered with his homicidal plans. She could’ve reported that Adam and her guns were missing, she could’ve reported her car as stolen, etc.
• Adam wanted to prove to himself that he was capable of taking a life, before attempting to kill dozens.
• Killing his mother would slightly increase his total kill count.
• His mother gave birth to him and indoctrinated him with culture, so he hated her and wanted revenge.
• In some ways, Nancy knew more about Adam than anyone else. Perhaps Adam killed her to grant himself some privacy after his death. After all, he did destroy his hard drive and deleted many of his Internet posts.
• Perhaps he subconsciously didn’t want her to suffer from the consequences of his actions.
• He couldn’t function without her and may have really loved her, so he wanted to take her with him.

Most of these reasons were likely motives. The last 1-2 reasons are probably the least likely, although they may be possible. If Nancy had known that Adam was going to kill her and 26 other innocent people, then she definitely would’ve called the police to stop Adam from murdering innocent people. If she had lived, then she probably would’ve had the most power of anybody to prevent or stop the shooting.

Adam knew that he could not discuss his true beliefs on life with almost anyone, including his mother. Nancy was also the one who brought him into this world and indoctrinated him with culture and value. So Adam probably ultimately hated Nancy more than he loved her.

Also see:

• devilprobably on Adam & Nancy’s Relationship.
• sssc on Adam & Nancy’s Relationship.

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It’s notable that Adam only fired four bullets into his mother, whereas most of his victims at the school each received many more bullets than just four. When Lanza was shooting people at the school, he wanted to make sure that every person they shot was dead, dead, dead. This contrast suggests that he didn’t enjoy shooting his own mother as much as he enjoyed shooting strangers that he had never met before. Other reasons for the low bullet count at the house could’ve been to save ammunition for his main attack and to avoid creating too much noise that could’ve attracted attention from his neighbors. At least one of his neighbors heard the gunshots that killed Nancy Lanza.

The school was also a more stressful environment, so perhaps he shot each victim at the school more times because he was in a much more intense situation than when he was shooting at home. When he shot his mother at their house, she was asleep, unarmed, defenseless, and had no one to save her or stop him from death and murder. He was also living out his violent fantasies during the school moreso than in Nancy’s bedroom.

Peter Lanza suspects that “The reason he shot Nancy four times was one for each of us: one for Nancy; one for him; one for Ryan; one for me.” That could’ve been a reason, but I also think it’s a silly theory.

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According to the earliest news reports, Nancy allegedly worked at Sandy Hook Elementary. Some news outlets even said that Adam allegedly believed “she loved the kids more then me”. However, both of these ideas are demonstrably not true since Nancy was never employed at Sandy Hook Elementary. There is proof that Nancy had volunteered at Sandy Hook. But in actuality, Nancy was a stay-at-home mother who dedicated her life to taking care of Adam. Adam also didn’t seem to care much about love, as revealed from his YouTube videos. The “she loved the kids more then me” quote is blatantly false and made-up. The idea that Adam wanted to save Nancy from life is equally false. Once again, Adam didn’t believe that he had any obligations to save anyone from anything.

As for why some early news reports ever said that Nancy Lanza was a teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary, there’s not really any way to know unless the journalists who reported provide an explanation. But it’s not too hard to figure out a likely scenario. Here’s two:

1. The volume of information being passed back and forth between sources and news outlets in the hours after the shooting was so high that there was some overlap between “Nancy Lanza is dead” and “teachers are dead” and the reporters ran with unverified info in the race to report “facts” first.
2. Some sources legitimately believed Nancy was a teacher at the school, because she was at the school on a daily basis in Adam’s elementary school years, to help Adam. See this post.
3. There is a thank you card verifying that Nancy volunteered at Sandy Hook when Adam attended the school.

– Reed Coleman, Sandy Hook Lighthouse FAQs

Before the shooting, Nancy Lanza traveled to New Hampshire for two nights to take a break from the difficulties that came with caring for Adam. She 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 Thursday 2012 December 13 (the 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. DESPP book 7 report 00041832 describes a strange man who was on the premises of Sandy Hook on that day. 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.

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December 14 was also the last day when school would be in session before Christmas break. If Lanza didn’t do the shooting at the school by then, then he would’ve had to wait weeks before he could get another opportunity.

Coincidentally, 2012 December 14 was also the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Bard College at Simon’s Rock shooting in Massachusetts. Some people speculate that Lanza timed his shooting to line up with this anniversary. Personally, I think the timing was probably coincidental. There were probably bigger factors that led to the date that Lanza planned. Lanza was probably just mildly glad that the dates lined up so well.

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Timeline of events the week before Lanza committed the shooting:

• Adam sustained an injury to his head.
• Nancy left the house for New Hampshire.
• Adam sent an email to another user about a past shooting.
• Adam drove to Sandy Hook Elementary, was denied entry to the building, and drove home.
• Adam may have sent messages on a suicide forum.
• Nancy returned home from New Hampshire.
• Adam killed his mother.
• Adam drove to Sandy Hook.
• Adam committed mass murder.
• Adam died by suicide.

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A week after the shooting, there were some news stories reporting that Lanza had visited a gun shop or Dick’s Sporting Goods in Danbury, Connecticut on 2012 December 11. Example 1, Example 2. However, those allegations are probably false. The alleged visit by Adam to Dick’s Sporting Goods is rejected by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. It also doesn’t make sense that Lanza would want to buy a new gun(s), when there were already plenty of guns in his house. And if he did drive all the way to Danbury, Connecticut, then such a journey would be recorded on his car’s GPS. But no such trip is recorded. More information (requires registration to see).

Read More: The Sandy Hook Shooter’s GPS Data.

A few news articles suggest that Nancy planned to institutionalize Adam or get a conservatorship:

• EXCLUSIVE: Fear of being committed may have caused Connecticut gunman to snap – Fox News.
• Reports: Lanza may have been angry about mother’s plans – USA Today.

Every news article on the alleged institutionalization is based on quotes from Joshua Flashman. However, Joshua Flashman also stated:

I seriously doubt Flashman’s reliability as a source, since he believed that Nancy loved the schoolchildren more than Adam. Flashman may have a Newtown resident who allegedly knew the Lanza family. But he could not have known them well at all, given that he said something so blatantly false and erroneous.

The USA Today article also shows that Joshua Flashman’s father had some doubt on his son’s allegations:

Flashman’s father, Pastor Richard Flashman of Beacon Hill Evangelical Free Church in Monroe, Conn., said in a statement that “the information Josh spoke to them (Fox News) was hearsay and not confirmed…. I am perplexed why Fox News would run with it.”

An anecdote by boonergang on Democratic Underground suggests that Adam believed he would be institutionalized when Nancy came home. However, it’s entirely possible that the person that boonergang was speaking to was not Adam Lanza. The similarities between Lanza and who he/she was talking to could’ve just been a coincidence. Or maybe it really was Adam, and he was just exaggerating on how his mother was going to evict him from the house in order to get it sold.

In any case, the conservatorship and institutionalization allegations are false. DESPP book 8 report 00001409 confirms that no conservatorship petitions were filed by Nancy Lanza. There are also no testimonies from Nancy’s (close) friends that she was planning to institutionalize Adam or get a conservatorship. After the shooting happened, Nancy’s plans to sell the house and rent an RV for Adam to live in were probably editorialized into “she wanted to institutionalize him”. It is still nonetheless true that Nancy was eventually going to force Adam to move out of his bedroom.

Swiffle on the Columbine Forum gave a plausible theory on why Adam may have believed that he would be institutionalized, which could explain the DMs received by boonergang on the suicide forum:

I think Adam was overly paranoid about being institutionalized. His mother coddled him his whole life, and seemingly never spoke of involuntarily committing him besides a few scattered second-hand statements amidst this case which is already rife with misinformation.

He brings it up a few times in CulturalPhilistine: The Movie: “Isn’t it funny how if a psychiatrist were listening to me talking to myself right now, I would be committed for the rest of my life?” “I can’t release something like this. If I were to release something like this… I’d be involuntarily committed, imprisoned for the rest of my life. Life is a prison, but just saying that, that’s even risking being involuntarily committed.”

He was likely aware that the walls were closing in on him. A 20-year-old is expected to be self-sufficient in some way, whether it is in regards to a career, education, or living on your own. He did not do any of these things, did not want to do any of these things, and may have thought he was nigh incapable of doing so as a result of being a sperglord who completely lost any social skills he had by further isolating himself after graduation. Convincing himself that his mother who treated him like a prince would suddenly send him off to be institutionalized may have been a way to motivate him to commit suicide, regardless of how irrational that fear might have been.

There is some truth to the “saving the children” theory, but it’s insufficient to explain Lanza’s actions. The theory is partially validated by an online acquaintance who personally knew Lanza and told the FBI that Lanza felt pity for children. Lanza believed they were being improperly controlled by parents and teachers. The online acquaintance suspected Lanza may have viewed the killings as a way of saving or protecting them. She’s partially right, but she overlooks his amoralism. Lanza also cared more about saving himself (ending his own life) than saving anybody else.

Sukenick’s answer indicates to me that she has a level-1 understanding of Lanza’s philosophy.[5] Listeners who left with the impression that Lanza wanted to “save the children” tend to base their thinking on the following quote, among others:

You don’t care about children, I do care about children. You’re the one who wants to rape children, I’m the one who wants to save them from a life of suffering that you want to impose onto them. You’re the one who sees them as your property, I’m the one who wants to free them.

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

When people use this quote to explain Lanza’s mass murder, they’re taking the quote out of context. Lanza said that quote in response to YouTube commentators who were criticizing his views on pedophilia. Society essentially allows parents to treat their children as property, which Lanza opposed. Lanza believed in children’s rights, including the right for children to separate from their parents, if they desire. In this quote, he was saying that children would be free if they weren’t treated as the property of their parents. He was not suggesting that children would be free if they were dead or never born, at least not in that quote.

This really upsets me… if you care so much about the damage of children then why are you advocating that they live? And why are you advocating their enculturation? Culture is the harm, look at all of these problems and - they wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for culture.

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

This quote provides better evidence for the “saving the children” idea. However, it’s still not sufficient to validate that as of his motives. Other quotes show that Lanza didn’t believe that suffering mattered transcendentally. In this particular quote, Lanza implied that children cannot be damaged if they don’t live, or if they aren’t encultured. Lanza believed that people can live and be saved from life’s problems as long as they don’t have culture imposed on them.

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Lanza did not talk like a moralizer in his videos either. A moralizer is simply a self-righteous person who believes in morality. It would be erroneous to think that his motive(s) had anything to do with righteousness. If anything, he criticized his past self multiple times for talking like a moralizer:

I haven’t done anything to this in months. And I appeal to things like rights, and I sound like a complete moralizer so just try to excuse that and pay attention to what I’m actually saying.

– Adam Lanza, “On pedophiles and children (Part 1/8)”

And again:

Oh, here, heh, um, pedophile… if pedophilic relationships were condoned then it would be a recognition of the rights of children would serve a small step towards liberating them from the oppression of the adults that own them. Yes, I was such a moralizer back then, just ignore that.

– Adam Lanza, “On pedophiles and children (Part 6/8)”

He went from being a moralizer about ~6-12 months before the video to being amoral during his creation and publication of the videos. That suggests that his philosophy was still changing in the final years of his life before he dedicated his life to his murder-suicide plan.

Lanza does of course express values and preferences in his videos, which is fine. Everybody has values and preferences. The difference is that Lanza believed that all preferences are subjective (including his own). He was also careful to avoid saying that his preferences were definitively better than everyone else’s.

To summarize, the idea that Lanza wanted to “mercy kill” children is overly simplistic:

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”

Beyond desiring his own death, he didn’t believe he had any obligation to save anybody from anything.

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.

Read More: Adam Lanza’s Sexuality.

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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) CulturalPhilistine: The Movie (Part 6/6)”

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No, Eulavist philosophy by itself (the rejection of value and culture) was not sufficient to lead to the massacre. That’s a level-1 understanding of the philosophy. Rejecting value does not imply murder, not by itself. Additional values would be necessary in order to motivate murder and suicide.

Eulavism is definitely antinatalist. Lanza said himself that he was antinatalist in his first video. Whether or not it is promortalist depends on how promortalism is defined. If promortalism is defined as “the philosophical value judgment that death is always better than life”, then I would say that Eulavism is promortalist. If promortalism is defined as “agents have a moral obligation to end lives”, then I would say that Eulavism is not promortalist. Eulavism is amoral, so it doesn’t propose any moral obligations.

Eulavism is just value nihilism. That’s all it is. Nihilism is compatible with literally any set of actions:

“You might arrive at the philosophical position that life is meaningless, but you won’t act as if life is meaningless. The brain that generates philosophical skepticism also generates the will to live.”

– T. K. Van Allen, Lucifer’s Question

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Lanza never intended for the shooting to “teach the world a lesson”. If he wanted to teach the world anything, then that would’ve been the objective of his YouTube channel, not his murder-suicide. The main objectives of his shooting were to die by suicide and attack a symbol of culture, living 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.

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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.

• Close Yet Anonymous DDR Friend.
• Nextdoor Neighbor who posted on r/LetsNotMeet.
  This is likely the same witness from DESPP book 7 report 00235748.
• Tech Club Classmate, Alan Diaz.
• Latin Classmate, Kyle Kromberg.
• German Classmate, Tracy Dunn.
• Former Classmate, Maggie Donahue.
• Latin Teacher, Jennifer Huettner.
• Tech Club Supervisor, Richard Novia.
• Richard Novia Interview Transcript (separate interview).
• Neighbor, Jim McDade.
• Family Friend, Marvin LaFontaine.
• Aunt, Marsha Lanza.
• Barber, Bob Skuba.
• Raising Adam Lanza – PBS Documentary (2013).

Personally, I don’t think that the responses that Lanza said to the doctors and psychiatrist who evaluated him during his teen years are particularly insightful into his mind and way of thinking. Lanza really hated doctors,[6] so he did not have many incentives to be cooperative with them. To me, it seems like that most of his responses to doctors were intended to say as little as possible, confuse the doctors, and hopefully just get the doctors to leave them alone, so that he could be done with the sessions and appointment that he was forced to attend by his parents. Lanza also said in (Pointless) CulturalPhilistine: The Movie Parts 1, 2, 3, and 6 that he believes that he would’ve been involuntarily committed for the rest of life if he ever spoke his true beliefs on life, death, and philosophy. Thus, Lanza never revealed much of his true self to the doctors who evaluated him.

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.

We can never know for sure, but we can theorize. Some common hypotheses are that Lanza destroyed his Seagate hard drive to hide child pornography and/or to make himself more famous. Both of these are unlikely. Lanza made it very clear that he’s not attracted to children. It’s also dubious he destroyed his hard drive to make himself more famous. He was going to become famous regardless.

See: Adam Lanza Hard Drive FOIA Documents.

There are several computer files that were created by Lanza which are publicly available. But it’s not clear what drive they were retrieved from. Lanza had multiple drives in his house:

• “Seagate” Barracuda 500GB hard drive (item 1, damaged)
• “Transcend” Storjet 160GB external USB hard drive (item 24).
• “Ivarea” or “Iverea” USB device (item 31).
• “Western” Digital WD800 80GB IDE internal hard drive (item 44).

Note: I cannot find any reference to a company by the name “Ivarea” or “Iverea” online. The detectives could’ve mistyped the name (“Innovera”?, “Riviera”?), or it’s a really obscure type of USB device, whatever it is.

It’s unclear if investigators ever managed to recover data from the damaged Seagate hard drive. Most news reports on that hard drive were made between 2012 December 17 and 19th, saying that data may or may never be recovered from it. A news report commenting on over 1000 documents that were publicly released in 2018 states the following:

The documents released by the state police aren’t in chronological order and it’s unclear when Lanza wrote many of them. A number of them are unsigned, though several were downloaded from his computer where they had been stored on his desktop. Lanza removed the hard drives from his computer and smashed them to pieces. The FBI was tasked with trying to retrieve data.

– Dave Altimari, Josh Kovner – Courant, LA Times

External drives are generally used to store important files or for transferring data between devices. Lanza almost certainly knew he had external hard drives with data on them, but chose not to destroy them. Perhaps they only had things that he was okay with the police and public having access to, which he didn’t want erased.

The simplest and most likely explanation for why Adam damaged his Seagate hard drive is that Adam just didn’t want people to see the data on it. It would have revealed a lot more about his online activity, personality, and personal details that he evidently didn’t want to be publicized. Adam was also known to regularly delete his personal data anyway. For example, he deleted many of the comments that he made to the Shocked Beyond Belief Forum. Lanza liked his privacy.

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.

Adam was definitely not a genius, but he was probably somewhat smarter than average. Adam’s IQ seems highest when evaluating his monologues on CulturalPhilistine and reading/listening how most irl people described him. Adam’s IQ seems lower when reading the stuff posted by fuckcomments, Smiggles, his Tumblr accounts, and his other Internet accounts. I would estimate Adam Lanza’s IQ to have been between 110 and 115, which is the high end of the average range.

The few IQ tests that Lanza had taken during his life suggest 110-115 IQ overall:

• According to the Yale reports in 2006, Adam had an IQ in the average range.
• Adam’s 2007 scores on the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT) suggest lopsided cognitive abilities and average IQ overall.
• Lanza had a 3.89 GPA on his high school transcript and a 3.26 GPA on his college transcript. Grades can be a proxy for IQ tests and are often used as such. An IQ is basically a grade.

Lanza also took the PSAT in 2007, as indicated in DESPP book 4, report 00183916. SAT scores can be reliably converted into approximate IQ scores. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any way to access that information. I don’t think it’s ever been publicly published.

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The 3.89 GPA seems more impressive when considering that Lanza was in multiple honors classes and college classes when he was in high school. He graduated high school a year earlier than most people do (despite having more personal problems with school than most people would ever have). He often corrected mistakes on other people’s homework. Most of his classmates and teachers described him as “smart” or “intelligent”. Those descriptions suggest above average IQ.

However, Lanza also dropped out of a few college classes and eventually withdrew from college altogether. He struggled and/or was unable to take a full load of college courses. Near the end of his life, his main hobby was obsessing about mass shootings and suicide, which is not a high IQ activity. Trolling people on his fuckcomments account and encyclopedia dramatic aren’t intelligent activities either. He couldn’t open door handles without a tissue, couldn’t tie his shoes till age 17, and had whole shutdowns when going without internet. Those details suggest average IQ.

I don’t think The Sheltered Storm by Matthew Nolan is worth reading. But I think its analysis is essentially correct in this particular case. It said something along the lines of “Adam was really good at the things he liked, and mediocre at those he didn’t like”. If you get obsessed over something, you’ll inevitably learn a great deal about it. If Lanza seemed intelligent in his CulturalPhilistine videos, then that impression is mostly due to autistic obsession.

Yes. If anything, a rational debate with Adam Lanza would’ve been the best possible way to prevent the shooting. Adam’s above-average intelligence is a good indicator that rational persuasion would’ve been more effective with him than with most people. 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.

The earlier the debate, the better. A debate probably would not have persuaded him from the murder-suicide in the final months of his life. By that point, he became committed to suicide and he stopped being a philosopher.

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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.