The price of sin

About a century ago, there was a genius young German-Jewish boy in the United States, named Nathan Leopold. He had what you could consider an aristocratic personality. He fluently spoke five languages at 19 and had achieved national recognition as an ornithologist. His best friend was Richard Loeb, son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He was very intelligent too and the two were so close to each other, the relationship seemed of a homosexual nature to some.

The two were avid readers of Nietzsche and became persuaded of his idea that inherently superior people are not bound by the morals of society. They began to violate laws and social norms, by engaging in petty acts of theft and vandalism, but this did not draw the attention they yearned for, so they eventually settled on a murder. They chose Bobby Franks, the cousin of Loeb and the 14 year old son of a Jewish watchmaker, as their victim.

They were sure this would get them the attention they yearned for and they were right. After their alibi fell apart, the trial was dubbed as the “trial of the century”. I have always found this case somewhat interesting, for a number of reasons. It’s a case of nerds becoming persuaded through philosophy, of behavior that just doesn’t come naturally to them. You could think of it as an example of “nice Jewish boys” revolting against their niceness.

You need to have a really well-ordered society, for smart nerdy boys to be able to accept that they’re smart and nerdy, as they can look around and realize that thuggish behavior is now just generally rewarded. We spend vast fortunes to police neighborhoods and defeat terrorist movements, among tribal societies that would have been reduced to a footnote in history in previous eras.

The other thing I find interesting about it is the strange stupidity of the act, by two intelligent individuals. If you just want to see if you can get away with murder, rather than being driven to murder by a grievance with a particular individual, why pick a guy in your own neighborhood? Why not test the waters a bit first?

My favorite true crime case of course is the Dahmer case. It’s cruel towards the family members of the victims, how their deaths have been reduced to a spectacle for the masses. But it’s very hard to avoid being intrigued by Dahmer’s motivation and life history. Cruelty didn’t come naturally to Dahmer. Rather, he suffered from loneliness and a need to pursue increasingly transgressive and morbid interests.

Sexual sadism is the main motive of serial killers and easy to understand, but with Dahmer, you continually feel as if you discover new angles that you didn’t realize before. There was an entire idiosyncratic occult-spiritual dimension to his actions that has gone somewhat underemphasized. Frankly, I wish it wasn’t so easy to find out so much about Dahmer.

What I find most interesting about the Leopold-Loeb case, is what Leopold found after completing the murder: He felt the same as ever. There was no transcendent experience, just a vast nothingness. This is important to understand. It’s a kind of secret about how our world functions. Emotions, sensations, raw qualia, are felt by the virtuous ones in our world. The world doesn’t reward you for good behavior by making you happy. It rewards you by letting you feel something.

If you would look inside the heads of any of the evil and cruel people you’ve met in your life, the only thing you would find is a surprising lack of anything. There is a kind of profound banality there, an impoverishment. There are no profound thoughts, no strong emotions, not even pain. They don’t fall deeply in love, they don’t get suicidal, music doesn’t do much for them, the cuteness of an animal means nothing for them, their orgasms are like a minor spasm, they don’t notice how the colors in the landscape change from dawn to dusk.

Virtue, results over time in the entirety of heaven and hell being incarnated into your mental universe. But for bad people, life turns over time into a profound banality.

19 Comments

  1. Leopold left or lost his precious eyeglasses near the body of his murder victim? Not smart, to say the least.

    And their defense lawyer was the legendary Clarence Darrow, who told the jury “It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.” HAHAHA That sounds like a current legal defense.

  2. Quote: “The two were avid readers of Nietzsche and became persuaded of his idea that inherently superior people are not bound by the morals of society.”

    If inherently superior people really exist, they know about the dilemma between idealism and rationalism. What this two did, was simply switch off any idealism and let themselves dominating from pure rationalism.

  3. “The blond beast understands the unexhausted procreative will to power that is the driving force behind all life; breaking away from Lernaean narratives (In the Hydraian sense). The blond beast penetrates through the Lernaean, immune to its poison. The slave morality of Hydra bouncing off his scales of will. The aristocrat of willpower, the apex predator of slave Hydra sub-men, the dragon of history, the determinator of the festival.”

    – Frederich Nietzsche, medium status white male maniac.

    “Wow that is so deep. I felt something. I don’t know what, but I really did. I think. I’m going to go kill people now so I can be the blonde beast. That sounds ebic.”

    – Nathan Leopold, medium status white male maniac.

    “We have to become blonde beast dragons of powers and show our superiority to the hydra peasants. We have will to power, we are the festival. It all makes sense. Burn them all!”

    – Richard Loeb, medium status white male maniac.

    “Those aren’t medium status white males! Those are jews! It’s all jews! Nietzsche was a jew too. Fucking jews. They created Nazi Germany! WW2 was a CLEANSING OF THE GOYIM! Don’t you see how they SLAUGHTER the GOY like CATTLE!? PALESTINE FOREVER!”

    – Billy Bob the low status white male maniac.

    • There were a lot of intimidating, strong blonde warriors in Nietzsche’s day and they made an impression on him; not so much anymore.
      They got eliminated from the gene pool in stupid wars that cost millions of lives.

  4. Quote: “The other thing I find interesting about it is the strange stupidity of the act, by two intelligent individuals.”

    If “stupidity” is your answer, then you have a problem with your model. Stupid people don’t read Nietzsche.

    You can suppress your idealism, but you can’t kill it. Doesn’t it sound more logical they were sabotaged by their suppressed idealistic side?

  5. None of this is interesting or unusual. Sociopaths have no morals or empathy. They fake emotions in order to fit in. It doesn’t work, as anyone with a brain can tell they’re weirdly acting. Homosexuals are much more likely to be mentally ill and violent.

    • Quote: “Homosexuals are much more likely to be (…) violent.

      Even if that’s true (what I don’t believe can be prooved) it could be a result from way more stress they get from society than a hetero.

  6. This bootleg Sacco and Vanzetti were wannabe Leo Franks.

    The battle between God and the Devil or good and evil was settled by Jesus he’s us Christ. See he knew in his infinite wisdom that one day he would incarnate as Rene Girard and give us a peek at the source code of humanity with mimetic theory.

    We could keep copying each other in this insatiable pursuit of conspicuous consumption while listening to the lord of lies. Or we could follow Lord Jesus Christ and in a few incarnations there would be heaven on earth.

    Give a read of the parable of the long spoons Rad 🙂

  7. Kudos on noting the centenary of this case; I haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere. I first learned of it in connection with the Alfred Hitchcock film “Rope,” which is a highly fictionalized retelling of the killing.

  8. Some technical thoughts about Nietzsche’s Ubermensch:

    I have read only small parts of Nietzsche’s work, but in short it sounds to me like this:
    He can strip away all cultural influences and can then be what he want.

    But he can’t strip away the everywhere present dualism, he still has to deal with the dilemma between idealism and rationalism. I could write “between good and bad” too, but that’s an oversimplication which leads to an oversimplified view on the world.

    So three kinds of Ubermenschen are possible: The pure idealistic Ubermensch, like the Messiah, the pure rationalistic Ubermensch, like the Nazis, and the well balanced Ubermensch, who knows that he has to avoid the extremes.

    Ask yourself which kind of Ubermensch is really uber.

  9. I think there are levels of intelligence which are able to grasp some of what nietzsche had to say, but are not able to process ideas without integrating them.

  10. Everyone I know is tired right now. Even young people. Now that we know that covid can spread insanely rapidly, it is hard not to think that other things are being spread. I wonder what Leopold and Loeb would have spread if they had the technology.

  11. Dostoyevsky’s book Crime and Punishment has a similar plot, where the main hero asks, am I a fearful creature or do I have the right. A YouTube psychologist explained that he was a perfect depiction of a schizophrenic.

    • Isn’t it strange that most doctors/psycholgists say that we are all basically a bit schizophrenic, but schizophrenia is still seen as an illness?

      • If you want to see schizophrenics congregate and see how they write, you can visit the /r/GangStalking subreddit. That’s where the schizophrenics who think that are stalked by gangs gather and socialize.

        • Quote Igor: “the schizophrenics who think that are stalked by gangs …”

          I’m not a psychologist, but I think they just haven’t realized, the “gang” is their other side.

          With a mind-model of only personality so many oddities can’t be solved, but easily solved with a multiple-personality mind-model.

          Until they can’t realize this, there will always be a “gang” stalking you.

  12. For me it looks like as if there is an unspoken demand from the society:
    “You have to decide if you want to be idealistic or rationalistic, and then you have to show appropriate behaviour. If you decide to be idealistic, then show idealistic nehaviour. If you decide to be rationalistic, then show rationalistic behaviour. If you deny and try to be both, then we declare you as mental ill.”

    They demand from everybody to switch off half of the brain.

  13. Some technical thoughts about mind-models:

    OK, I’m repeating me, but in this context with ubermenschen, schizophrenics and humans with half switched-off brains it fits in good.

    There is this thing in the centre(!) of our brain, called Corpus Callosum, which means hardened(!) body, and it has the highest(!) neuronal density in the brain.

    Doesn’t this scream: “I am the core, like a CPU, I’m in the centre, I’m protected with hard a shell, and I process all data”?. Why do the neurologists don’t see this? Maybe they can’t see the wood for the trees, I don’t know. For me as technician this is totally clear.

    This all can only lead to the conclusion our single-personality mind-model must be wrong. There are at least three sub-personalities, the central one, and our two sides. I think there are two more, our animalic fight-or-flight personalities, but that’s another thing.

    We are stuck with the single-personality mind-model. I even think it’s the main reason, why our society is in a such bad shape.

Leave a Reply

Comments should be automatically approved again. People who misbehave will be banned.

Your email address will not be published.


*


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.