Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Herostratic Fame and the #UCCShooting

All Episodes

Previous Next

Oct. 2, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

09:44

Herostratic Fame and the #UCCShooting

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	So to nobody's great surprise there has been another mass shooting in the United States, this time at a college in Oregon.
	The shooting appears to have followed a fairly standard pattern for these types of events, with the shooter winding up dead at the end of it, so we then have to try and piece together their motivations from their various social media postings.
	The shooter apparently targeted Christians specifically, according to the father of a wounded student, who was an eyewitness to the event.
	From what I understood, what she said is, is he shot the professor point blank, right?
	One shot, killed him, took him right out of it.
	And others had been injured.
	And then he, he, this man had enough time.
	I don't know how much time elapsed before he was able to stand there and start asking people one by one what their religion was.
	Are you a Christian?
	He would ask them.
	And if you're a Christian, stand up.
	And they would stand up and he said, good, because you're a Christian, you're going to see God in just about one second.
	And then he shot and killed them.
	And he kept going down the line doing this to people.
	And how much time do you need?
	You know, and she said he had a handgun.
	It wasn't a big rifle, assault rifle, or anything like this.
	This was a single handgun that he had enough ammunition and enough time to drop the magazine out of it, put another one in, and continue his thing.
	The information we have at the moment suggests that 10 people were killed and seven other people were injured.
	And the shooter has been confirmed dead by Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlon.
	Authorities credited a quick response by law enforcement for keeping the death toll from climbing higher.
	A law enforcement official said that the shooter had body armour with him and was heavily armed, with a large amount of ammunition enough for a prolonged gunfight.
	But as witnesses said, he only appeared to have a handgun.
	I think it's very interesting that Sheriff Hanlon commented, I will not name the shooter.
	I will not give him the credit he probably sought.
	This of course is not the first time that damnatio memoriae has been attempted against a particularly heinous or vain criminal, and it's not the first time that it's failed.
	The alleged shooter is apparently a one Chris Harper Mercer, a mixed race individual who was apparently born in England before moving to the United States when he was a young boy.
	He apparently still lived with his mother in an apartment only a few miles from the college and was a prolific user of the file sharing system BitTorrent.
	An email address is found to be associated with his name and it's from his use of torrent sites that it was discovered that the username lithium underscore love was one he used online.
	His torrenting activities appear to have been fairly mundane.
	Various PDFs of occult magazine Phenomena and conspiratard documentaries and soft porn.
	With the last upload from his account being a documentary called Surviving Sandy Hook by the BBC about the school shooting in Connecticut in 2012 perpetrated by Adam Lanzer.
	He apparently had a profile on dating website Spiritual Passions where he says he was not religious but spiritual, a teetotaler living with his parents and a conservative Republican.
	Mercer also had a MySpace page on which he described himself as a conservative Republican whose hobbies are internet, killing zombies, movies, music and reading.
	In the profile the personality type he is looking for is an intellectual punk introvert loner lover geek nerd with an individuality of piercings psychic tattoos vampire.
	His preferred religious views are pagan, wiccan, not religious, but spiritual as well.
	The edgiest thing about this guy is that on his MySpace page he seems to have been lionising the Irish Republican Army, which, if you're not aware, is a Catholic terrorist group dedicated to driving the British out of Ireland.
	So as you can see, the profile of the person that we're building up here is someone who is particularly mundane, someone who doesn't really have anything particularly exceptional about themselves to showcase, someone who is probably quite familiar with internet culture and seems to want to be a bit of an edge lord.
	So the day before the shooting, someone posted on 4chan's R9K board, Some of you guys are alright.
	Don't go to school tomorrow if you're in the northwest.
	Happening thread will be posted tomorrow morning.
	So long space robots.
	With a particularly rare Pepe.
	After being declared fake and gay, it's been widely assumed that this was Mercer himself posting this, presumably for attention.
	Of course, we don't know that Mercer posted this, and it could be entirely coincidental.
	But it would line up with something he posted on his blog about the Vesta Flanagan shooting.
	Mercer says that anyone who knew Flanagan could have seen this coming.
	People like him have nothing left to live for, and the only thing left to do is lash out at a society that has abandoned them.
	He also says, On an interesting note, I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are.
	A man who was known by no one is now known by everyone.
	His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day.
	It seems the more people you kill, the more you're in the limelight.
	What he's saying there is that a great crime will make you infamous.
	And this is not something new.
	This is a reconstruction of the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, that's located in Ephesus, which is in modern-day Turkey.
	This temple began construction in around 550 BC, and took about 10 years to complete.
	The list of the seven wonders of the ancient world was compiled by Antipater of Sidon, who had this to say about the Temple of Artemis.
	I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon, on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alphaeus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus.
	But when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, lo, apart from Olympus, the sun never looked on aught so grand.
	The Temple of Artemis was the jewel of Ephesus, a fact well known by a local Ephesian named Herostratus, who in 356 BC decided that, by cover of night, he was going to burn it down.
	Sneaking past the temple guards, Herostratus placed the rags in key places inside the Neos, the inner sanctuary.
	He then lit each one, probably using the small flame from the olive oil lamp he would have carried.
	Soon fire was raging and flames climbing up the wooden beams to engulf the wooden ceiling.
	Even the cult statue of Artemis, made of ebony or grapewood, was burning.
	By morning, all that remained was a smoldering ruin.
	Instead of fleeing the scene, Herostratus was boastful about his deed.
	He surrendered to the temple authorities and was imprisoned.
	Ephesian officials, to discourage similar acts in future, quickly executed Herostratus and attempted to remove his name from memory by forbidding its mention under penalty of death.
	Why would they do this?
	Well, the entire reason that Herostratus decided to burn down the Temple of Artemis was to ensure that his name would go down in history.
	The destruction of the Temple of Artemis led to the coining of the phrase Herostratic fame, meaning someone who commits a criminal act in order to receive the notoriety that follows.
	Herostratus' name was recorded by Theopompus in his book Hellenics, and if it wasn't for him we wouldn't know who burned down the Temple of Artemis.
	I don't know if Chris Harper Mercer went on a killing spree in order to gain Herostratic fame, but I do think that there is evidence to indicate that this might have been a possibility, or at least maybe one factor among many.
	And I really don't blame Sheriff Hanlon for not wanting to give him the infamy that he may well have desired.
	However, because of the way the modern media works, and because of the internet, I doubt it will ever actually be possible to expunge the names of people who commit terrible crimes just to become infamous.
	I don't really know if there's anything one can actually do about that.
	It's obviously in the interests of the media to provide as much information as possible, as quickly as possible.
	The incentives that they work under reward this kind of behaviour, and that's no bad thing.
	People want as much information about a situation as they can get.
	But I think it is worth keeping in mind that when we make these people world famous, we also demonstrate to disturbed individuals that you can become famous by doing something terrible.
	And I think there is always going to be a certain kind of person who is going to respond to that.
	As I think that Chris Harper Mercer shows.
	At least in part.

▲