Dear Poirot,

Indeed.

There is much we do not know about what happened nor can we ever know what exactly was going on in Carnell's mind. Yet it is evident from his letter and his actions that he recognised his capacity to do great harm and that he needed to be stopped before that harm was realised.

His is a story of the human condition. We are never comfortable about recognising the capacity for evil within our selves.

Take the My Lai massacre. The hive mind that was the couple of hundred men making up Charlie company murdered close to 500 unarmed civilians, a large proportion of whom were women and children.

There were three men who attempted to intervene and likely saved numerous lives. Much later they were recognised for their bravery but initially they were derided and even called traitorous, notably by a congressman.

We now rightly see them as heroic.

My point is that we are all capable of great evil given the right circumstances. The voice inside Carnell's head can be thought of as Second Lieutenant William Calley. Very few resisted his orders at My Lai. We have all heard of the horrendous toll in innocent lives the mass shootings in the US have exacted. To me Carnell represents the first instance that I can recall where someone was that close to the brink and yet decided to kill himself in order to spare others. I see the part of Carnell Moore that did this in a similar frame to those three at My Lai.

Dear Antiseptic,

I am happy to acknowledge I may well be reading too much into the story but when you say “The initial shots were attention-grabbers, so that he would be seen when he took his final action.” I think you are wrongly dismissing the fact that he took three loaded weapons to the scene when surely one would have done. Secondly to write this off as a depressed man committing suicide glosses over the fact that he felt he had a monster within that was capable of killing others. I'm not convinced we should do that.

Be that as it may I reiterate that with the limited information available our respective takes on Carnell are ultimately personal assessments. Mine is just different to yours, nothing more.

The pseudo-intellectualized argument behind this “hero” is a classical attribute of those who try to “socialize” everything. This is just another example of academic “narrative theory”.

For good or ill, the major intellectual and social events of recent centuries, has been the progress of science and education in the transformation of the world. This has produced much anxiety and possibly some vocational envy amongst the humanities academia and the products of their doctrine, the political elites.

Humanities academia, political elites and today’s pseudo intelligentsia (copy cat wannabe’s) are naturally unhappy to recognize the centrality of these developments to our culture, to be constantly reminded of the importance of the unattainably different level of rigor and sophistication prevailing in subjects they don’t understand.

The socialization of our culture and our perceptions requires the assumption that these are a part of our life that must be re-interpreted or criticized by humanities as part of the view that their educated minds may inspect on our behalf and pontificate for the benefit of lesser minds and humanity itself.

The process of socializing adopts a strategy of “narrative theory” which treats philosophy, sociology, science, history and literature, as simply a different mode of story telling and therefore opened these topics up by rhetoric to “interpretation” or the creation of objective truth. Just like our “hero”.

“Like the eunuch at the orgy who was always first with the gossip, but being forced to realize that he doesn’t really know what’s going on, his knowledge is not real and that far from being the centre of things, he is forever on the margin”.

The Eunuch at The Orgy, Raymond Tallis.

Nope. He didn't play Rugby League.

Dear Houellebecq,

Correct, but it seems a year ago when Spindoc last used the reference he did;

“So you end up just like the Gordon Tallis “eunuch at the orgy” who was always first with the gossip, but being forced to realize that he doesn’t really know what’s going on, his knowledge is not real and that far from being the centre of things, he is forever on the margin.”
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=13662#236414

Kinda hoisted by his own petard one would have thought.

csteele,

Interesting that you spent time searching for the previous references I’ve made on this topic rather than actually engaging with it. Pity about that, predictable but still a pity.