> If you get a chance, read Columbine. If he was like Klebold and Harris - and it sounds like he probably was - he's a psychopath. The book does an excellent job of explaining who these people are, how little there is to explain or predict. Klebold and Harris weren't troubled outsiders, picked on by peers. They were mean, rotten kids, one of whom had repeated eliminationist fantasies in which their desire is for a world in which no one else exists. They don't like other people, they don't love them. They don't even understand them. They are manipulative and cold-blooded. They'd been planning to bomb Columbine high school for months, and had already been blowing up pipe bombs - were, in fact, arrested for it and seeing counselors.
>
> Fucked up family? little to do with anything in their case.
I have my doubts about this type of explanation. First of all, while the reductionist explanations about dysfunctional families or peer bullying aren't satisfactory, this type of approach isn't remotely less reductionist. Second, if we're told the perpetrators had eliminationist fantasies, that one was suicidally depressive, the other a sadist, that they didn't really love or understand other people, then that is not an explanation so much as something that demands explanation.
To call someone a 'psychopath' is as empty in this context as to call them 'evil' (or 'mean, rotten' etc). We are usually offered a pseudo-scientific apparatus of 'checklists' and a terminology of deficiency (affective) and deviancy (social) to provide some spurious integrity to the concept. In the case of Klebold and Harris, the diagnosis is offered based on comparing journals to the checklists. So, Harris is found to be a psychopath because, among other things, he lies a lot to keep out of trouble (who the fuck doesn't when they're teenagers?), he has contempt for other people (sounds familiar), he isn't truly sorry for the petty crimes he has committed (well, neither are most teenagers, because the people who expect them to be sorry are obvious hypocrites and frauds), etc etc. The checklist approach cannot but remind one of Eddington's net: whatever it can't catch isn't a fish. The problem is that Cullen is a writer, not a psychoanalyst, and the experts he relies on are - well, not hacks, but certainly people who have an extremely narrow and reductive frame of reference.
Worse is the underlying politics of it. Because the concept of 'psychopath' in the usual declination lacks any explanatory content, it ultimately has to refer to something else for its support - typically, some musings about the abnormal brain structure suffice here. This is the recrudescence of crude biological determinism. Hence, the complacent conclusion that there is 'little' to 'explain or predict'. There just are these weird brains out there, and sometimes they just, like, go off. And the political response entailed by this? Just lock em up. Lock up as many of them as possible. Eugenically iron them out of the race. Detect them early, confine them early. Sterilise them. All of this, until we can develop the technology to fix the brain structure.
No. There is something to explain here.
Such as: What role did the jocks, popular kids, minorities and others play in the killers' symbolic universe? What did the bullies, with their rigorous enforcement of masculinist norms, their so-called 'teasing', have in common with eg black students as far as this pair were concerned? No simple political reading would work here. If it was neo-fascism, they would just have annihilated the 'minority' students and functionaries deemed corrupt, and not anyone else. If it was pseudo-revolutionary, against the school authorities and dominant forces, they might have killed the popular students, the teachers, headteachers etc. and spared others. (One might add: if this was really about eliminationist fantasies, killing off the whole human race, etc., then any targeting at all which implicitly spares significant sections of the human race, is incomprehensible). Possibly what these targeted groups had in common was that they all were somehow seen as being complicit in symbolically 'castrating' the pair - they all 'had' something, some enjoyment that Klebold and Harris were deprived of. They got some sort of 'special treatment' that they believed was at their expense, the cause of their denigration/castration. And of course, one can't just be a 'loser', one can't be denied enjoyment - this is prohibited. The whole of social life is at a symbolic level governed by a competitive struggle to secure that enjoyment, to be the 'winner'. And, despite its inherent impossibility, everyone has to be a 'winner'. So, the killers were not doing something completely ex nihilo: they were in a sense playing the game as it already existed.
More generally, what did the perpetrators understand about their violence as an effective solution to their problems? Their masculinity and sexuality was questioned, for sure: this wasn't just paranoia, it was one of the reasons why they were 'teased'. This included violence but more importantly humiliation - pelting Klebold with tampons covered in ketchup, for example. And it's not exactly a secret in American society that masculinity is most directly regenerated through violence. Nor is it a secret that violence in the American imaginary has a socially useful, cleansing function. The rationale for the 'teasing' was just exactly this: if you want deviants, misfits and others to go away, you 'tease' them until they vanish. The killers were not rebelling against this so much as confirming their fidelity to it. Far from being carried out in cold indifference to society or other people, this crime looks as though it was passionately involved in and obedient to society's codes and its symbolic authority. An excess of authority, and obedience, has a notable tendency to produce aggression in its subjects, which is often directed into sustaining the obedience itself. From this perspective, it was precisely in order to assert their conformity that Klebold and Harris engaged in mass murder.
And indeed, their aspirations seem to have been perfectly conformist. Harris wanted to be a Marine. Klebold was passionately in love with another student in the period before the killing. They wanted to grow up, fly right, get the girl - but believed they were being obstructed. Even their petty criminality is not seen as a rebellion. Harris rants that this is supposed to be America, land of the free, and if he's free then he should be able to relieve a dumbshit of his possessions who just leaves them there for the asking. He adds "NATURAL SELECTION". He understands by American freedom the same thing that Newt Gingrich does: ruthless competition and social Darwinism.
Likewise, why did the pair kill themselves at the end? In a naive way, one could say that Harris was deemed suicidally depressive and leave it at that (leaving aside the role of SSRIs). But his diagnosis as a psychopath would be no use here. Presumably, he can be retrospectively designated whatever factors from the checklist will help explain his behaviour - some factors indicate a low suicide risk, some a high suicide risk, so you can take your pick. Certainly, both Harris and Klebold's journals show self-hating thoughts coinciding with grandiose delusions. But this won't explain anything. Obviously, their decision to kill themselves at the end was part of the pact, a long-standing plan. And the decision to 'go postal' in the first place is almost always accompanied by a decision to die - it is one instance where an unconscious drive ('death drive') coincides with a conscious decision, and is carried through to the end. But one obvious answer to the question is implied by Klebold in his basement tapes: "You've been giving us shit for years. You're fucking gonna pay for all the shit! We don't give a shit. Because we're gonna die doing it." It is a condition of being able to enact their obedience, to reclaim their masculinity, to stake a claim to their enjoyment as 'winners' - not just 'winners' but actually the ultimate, supreme winners, gods of the earth - that they be beyond capture or punishment, that there can be no way they can be symbolically denigrated again, no way their recovery of masculinity and enjoyment can be effaced.
Then there are other things. If Klebold held delusional beliefs about himself as a god, then there's a psychotic structure that would need to be investigated and could only be pieced together through a careful reading of interviews, and the recorded words of the dead perpetrators. For example, Cullen asserts that Klebold worshipped the Nazis. What role might this have played in his delusions? What was it specifically about the Nazis and Hitler that he admired? It doesn't seem to have been the politics and ethics of national socialism, except inasmuch as some of the racist, conspiracy theory thematics might have given Klebold a context for his fantasies of losing out to minorities. On the other hand, it seems that he was educated in some of his family's Jewish traditions, and that to admire something so prohibited, so utterly evil, was the prerogative of someone genuinely 'godlike', someone beyond the slave morality of the ordinary herd.
One could go on and on. The surface problem is that Dave Cullen is not interested in psychiatry or in criminology. He is just a writer who wants to be interesting, and has relied entirely on an FBI report, which in turn relies on some of the most reductionist criminology and psychiatry. This has given him the materiel with which to demolish flimsy straw 'myths' in what must seem a bracing manner. The underlying problem is that his sources have institutional reasons for preferring this type of analysis. The FBI doesn't really care about the social and psychoanalytic whys and hows, they just want a generic profile: a checklist if possible. They want to be refine their repertoire of profiles as much as possible, so that they can activate it in a given situation where there is a serial killer on the loose or what have you, and stand a better chance of capturing the culprit. But apart from all that, they don't give a shit about wider explanations. We on the Left should and usually do.