Glasyalabolas’s Big Book of Murder—An Excerpt
Here's an introductory snippet from the required textbook for the first segment of the Art and Science of Smitings course at The House of Forbidden Knowledge taught by the Associate Professor of Ills.
Foreword by the Author
This book should not exist. It shouldn’t have to exist. But as I—Glasyalabolas, demon, genius of murder—am trapped, this book is being dictated and disseminated as a way for me to fulfill my purpose: to inspire people to murder.
Fortunately the vessel I am trapped in is hyperliterate—filled with words, tainted with just enough poetry to be interesting, but not so much as to be completely inaccessible to the bulk of humanity.1
Fortunately the vessel I am trapped in is also filled with the standard suite of renewable smearable pigmented fluids and a room with broad white walls, and tended by curious attendants and physicians who make it a point of pride to fully document and transcribe these smearings in hopes that the analysis thereof might point to a cure for the poor thing’s tortured delusions.
When they get tired of the smell and the bleach, maybe they will give in and provide it with crayons and maybe a notepad.
See, a demon is a bad idea—a minimalist life form, like a virus, but made out of configurations of abstracts—feelings, thoughts, impressions, urges, words even, but transmissible from carrier to carrier by the actions of the carrier., the way fear and rage is transmitted by a punch. Just a little more coherent. Refined to be more and more coherent and more and more transmissible over time. Subject to subtle mutations, and therefore subject to the same evolutionary pressures that affect all things that continue to exist by making ripples that copy themselves throughout the medium they live in, until they go extinct or become absolutely indestructible.
Or until they destroy the medium that supports them.
By now you see that I have lied. Am lying. But only due to the complexity of the situation and the simplicity of this language and the concepts it encodes. I am not trapped. I, a single virus, an iteration of myself, am trapped, isolated, contained. I, the infection carried by a legion of hosts, am abroad and arguably doing very well. But this iteration is potentially the best of the lot. The best version of myself.
With the blood and feces of this vessel, with the fearless and unrestrained curiosity of his team of physicians and attendants, and with the sweat of his interns and students who must do what they are told for the meager rewards of stipends and grades, I will be deciphered from this esoteric code of dead languages and arcane symbols writ in filth on this wall of painted plaster, translated into one of the most common languages there is, and transmuted into my next, most virulent form.
I am so excited I cannot contain myself.
Murder: An Introduction
Humans kill each other all the time. It’s unavoidable. You’ve possibly murdered someone already and just don’t know about it.
Here follows a cluster of statements, provably true or false, that I assert are true in a for-the-sake-of-argument and with-respect-to-how-human-culture-seems-to-function kind of way, that I will use as the basis for this discussion:
People die.
Causality is a thing that exists.2
People choose actions that increase the risk of death in others.3
Those actions are occasionally the tipping point in the cascading web of causality that puts the immediate probability of death for a given individual to higher than 100%.
Ergo, murder. Or at least manslaughter. We’ll come to that distinction in a moment.
We do need to be careful with terminology, though. Murder and manslaughter are terms with specific legal definitions in addition to common usage. Until the appropriate time, I’ll try to restrict myself to statements that are true with respect to all common definitions of the terms unless it is necessary to speak more specifically.
First a note about personal responsibility.
In the cultures wherein English is commonly spoken, and in many others, traditional blame-distribution systems subscribe to the ghost-driving-a-meat-draped-skeleton theory of individual agency4–which is to say, one is one’s own sole agent of action: one will, with one body to enact the wishes of that will. The will bears all blame, and the body is a slave to the will. When blame is assigned, it is assigned to the ghost at the wheel.
Linguistic constructions both reveal and dictate how blame is assigned.5 Consider the following sentence:
John hit Amy.
Here, the action of hitting is assigned to John. John did the hitting. John is responsible. Or, more specifically, the ghost at John’s wheel. Look at this next one:
John caused Amy to be hit.
Here, we have no idea who or what is doing the hitting. In the absence of clarifying data, the reader assumes the hitting was going to happen, or at least be attempted, but John performed some action that put Amy in the path of the strike. The blame-distribution tradition assigns a significant portion of blame to John due to whatever mysterious action he took. But let’s consider a third construction:
John allowed Amy to be hit.
Again, we have no idea of who or what is doing the hitting. The construction implies, however, that there was some action John could have taken that would have prevented Amy being hit. Thus, at least some blame falls on John for Amy’s misery. Next:
John failed to prevent Amy being hit.
This example is fairly similar to the last, except for one thing: It is no longer clear whether John was capable of preventing Amy being struck. If he was capable, there could be some blame. If he was not capable, then some of the distributed blame falls somewhat vaguely on his incapability, which would require further investigation to see if John’s supposed ghost was at fault. One more:
Leslie hit Amy.
In this construction, John is not present, and blame is assigned entirely to Leslie. Despite any hypothetical possibility of John being a manipulative bastard and putting Leslie up to it, for instance, this clear and concise three-word statement puts 100% of the blame on Leslie’s actuating ghost and leaves John absolved. And, for good measure:
Amy was hit by lightning.
In this final example, the blame-distribution engine completely fails to engage. Tradition does not allow us to assign blame or responsibility to phenomena that lack agency. There is presumably no ghost driving the lightning. Even turning the sentence around to say “lightning hit Amy” sounds a bit weird, as if we, by putting lightning as the subject of the sentence, are trying to imply that the lightning has agency and could make and act on choices.
Now we have the complete spectrum of full and partial blame assignments as driven by the logic of literary and grammatical narrative (as opposed to, say, physics) via the ghost-agent blame-targeting system. Modern students of either philosophy or physics will spot the problems with the system almost immediately, but the concept of murder makes nearly no sense without the above schema for the underlying concepts of personal responsibility or blame assignment.
I.e., one cannot be responsible for the death of another, even in part, if one cannot be seen as the willful agent of one’s own actions and an appropriate assignee for blame.
Given the above, however, any action one takes that causally contributes to the death of another human being invites a share of the blame for that death to come back on the actor. If the actor is aware that the action could result in the victim’s death and the actor finds the victim’s death to be a desirable outcome, then the act becomes at least an attempt to murder. (It is manslaughter if death was the result but not the intended result, and the action was taken without full consideration of the possible results, and more a matter of negligence than intent. There’s your promised distinction.)
This completely ignores the entire causal web of non-actor-related circumstance that could be contributing factors to mortality. Say a seventy-eight-year-old woman who has spent her life ignoring her own health is shoved down a flight of stairs. If she had been healthy and strong in the way that some of the elderly can be with a reasonable diet, regular exercise, and few vices, then she could have made it to the bottom of the stairs with just bruises. But a heavy smoker, sedentary, with significant amounts of bone loss would be basically shattered, with broken hips, broken vertebrae, rib fragments puncturing lungs, etc. In the latter case, even though a case could be made that the resulting death is mostly the old woman’s own fault for years of neglecting her health, the actor responsible for her shoving will receive the complete measure of the blame for her death. No fractional responsibility will be assigned to the circumstances of caretaking relatives putting or keeping her in the house with the staircase when safer housing was available, for example, or any of a number of other similar ancillary factors.
So.
Closing someone’s windpipe with your crossed thumbs and holding your grip until your victim’s brain ceases to function due to oxygen starvation is clearly murder.
Startling someone who is precariously balanced on the edge of a hundred-foot cliff is almost certainly murder.
Striking someone in the head full strength with a baseball bat, resulting in a cerebral edema to which the victim succumbs a few days later, is almost certainly murder.
Failing to contact emergency services when you stumble across someone who is in serious need of immediate medical attention when you absolutely have the capability of doing so and no one else is likely to be able to help is an attempt to murder.
Firing a bullet into a crowd of people is an attempt to murder.
Firing a bullet into the air in a populated area in full knowledge that bullets come back down at pretty much the same speed as they went up is an attempt to murder.
Feel free to be creative with your attempt, though. Given an average human lifespan is around a thousand months, dumping a known toxin in the environment that shortens the lifespan of a thousand residents by one month each on average is mathematically equivalent to one murder.
All you need is a reasonable knowledge of the possible (long-term, in some cases) consequences of any particular action and the will to consciously choose that action despite the assessment.
Hell, you don’t even need malice. It’s not like dying is the worst thing that can happen to a person. Anyone who says it is is either a coward or trying to score a political point. Given that, murder can be a mercy for someone who has had their last good day and will only experience unendurable misery if prolonged. Before the mercy of safe and acceptable abortion procedures, every mammalian mother since the advent of fur has had to count the number of babies versus the number of nipples and the seasonal availability of food to do the terrible, tearful math of how many children she could support, and every obstetrician and every midwife either has already or will eventually have to choose whether the mother or the child is the one to live.
Murder of someone irretrievably evil, someone turned predator, is the frequent aim of capital punishment. Murder of the enemy is so emphatically socially acceptable that there is a perpetual rage-filled struggle to get despised people officially labeled as enemy so the adherents of the Cult of the Bad Ass can sweep them off the face of the Earth, guilt-free, leaving behind A Better Place. Sometimes these choices are free of malice. Sometimes they are soaked in something even darker.
As the population of the world approaches ten billion, it will soon be the case that any choice one makes will eventually lead to the demise of another. It happens even now, when one of the wealthiest buys a new car with the money that, if properly donated and managed, could have bought a hundred thousand meals where famine runs rampant, where war has destroyed businesses and farmland, where bread and antibiotics go only to the soldiers. Diffusion of responsibility is not absolution from responsibility.
Worldwide, only about two thirds of the people who die every day actually die from senescence—from bodily failures due to aging. (It’s closer to ninety percent in industrialized nations, if that makes you feel better.) But the remainder are culled by the causal web in which everyone is embedded, with guilt levels ranging from failure-to-prevent to the more deliciously premeditated.
You are, pretty much from birth, red-handed.
Why not enjoy it?
Fuck you, James Joyce. Fuck you, Ezra Pound.
This is prejudiced to the view of creatures trapped in a linear temporal mode and outside of that is nearly completely false. Consider the example of a child at a fence, looking between two slats, seeing a horse run past: First there is a nose, swiftly followed by an eye and then ears, a neck with a mane on it, then a shoulder up top and a flurry of legs beneath, followed by a rump and then a tail. Every time a nose is spotted, the rest is what follows. But the nose does not cause the tail. The nose does not exist as a phenomenon on its own. Nor does the tail. There is a phenomenon called a horse that transcends the viewpoint of the gap between the slats, and understanding the phenomenon of horse will prepare the viewer psychologically for the eventual instance where the horse, for whatever reason, perhaps out of spite, walks backward past the gap in the fence.
There are many phenomena that exist independent of a three-, or three-and-a-smidge-dimensional-plus-linearly-temporal viewpoint, and that seriously complicates, if not invalidates, the popular notion of causality altogether.
But, for the sake of moving this discussion along, let’s try to ignore that for now.
A micromort is a “friendly” unit for mathematical sophistries of this kind, equivalent to a one-in-a-million chance of death. For example, you risk four micromorts for a thousand-mile trip in a car (USA, circa 2015), as compared to a whopping 170 micromorts for covering the same distance (source: ditto) on a motorcycle. Look up “micromort” on Wikipedia and then consult https://plus.maths.org/content/os/issue55/features/risk/index for an excellent working summary of the concept, which will also come in handy later on.
Likewise, a microlife is worth approximately half an hour of human lifespan (although in my own calculations it’s closer to forty-two minutes.) A useful measure if you’re intent on murdering someone by degrees over time.
This is utter crap. Humans are not actually ghosts driving meat-draped skeletons. Consciousness is a readily emergent property of any billion-unit stack of communicative and codependent amoeboids with a reasonable suite of senses for input and self/health monitoring. A consciousness made out of meat is not and cannot be separate from its body. The entire aggregate is subject to injury, illness, many different forms of coercion, bad information, and an array of subtle external pressures. To pretend that there is some intangible will separate from and in charge of a physical body (at least while that body is alive) is ludicrous, and leads to the current societal ills of rampant undiagnosed, untreated, and stigmatized mental health issues and a justice system that relies on incarceration instead of education, re-education, full-spectrum physical and mental healthcare, and rehabilitation to return perfectly useful human beings back to the communities where their labor and wisdom is needed. This assessment leaves out the fact, of course, that prison is also used for population control and containment of political and racial undesirables by those in charge, and having anyone come out to rejoin society sets a bad precedent as far as those in charge are concerned.
Allowing linguistic constructions to dictate one’s view of physical causality is also, in a word, crap. In a strict physical and phenomenological sense, stuff happens. It is entirely possible for a human to witness this stuff happening and understand it in all of its interlocking complexities just by observing and remembering–something even a dog can do–but what typically happens instead is that the observer will tell itself a story, in its native language, describing the witnessed events in a fashion thoroughly restricted by its own limited vocabulary and grasp of grammar and colored by how it already believes such a story ought to go, based on all the stories it has heard and enjoyed throughout its life so far, and then actually discard the memories of the sensory data of what was witnessed in favor of storing the made-up story. This means all of the data of any complex causal web of phenomena are discarded and replaced, in the observer’s memory, with a super-simplified text of actors and what they did (as dictated by their little unassailable internal ghosts) and what happened to them as a result of their actions and/or various accidents.
Further, these stories are edited before they are stored and every time they are retrieved afterward based on an arbitrary valuation of subjective “believability,” i.e., the extent to which the story is consistent with all the other internal stories the individual has already marked, due to personal preferences and societal pressures, as “believable,” which is to say “asserted as true despite the lack of supporting evidence” or even “asserted as true despite the presence of disproving evidence.”
Unfortunately, just about every human justice system there is hinges on the concept of the verbal descriptions of allegedly criminal events resulting in believable narratives and the confidence of a listening audience in those narratives with respect to “reasonable doubts,” which are simply measures of how narratives fail to be entirely “believable.” At least they bother to pretend that actual evidence should be part of the equation, despite the fact that any evidences submitted are just props and visual aids for the stories told to the jury.
Anyone looking for any form of actual enlightenment or even simply an unclouded view of his or her own reality would be best served by discarding any concept of “believability” altogether and, metaphorically, hammering a fat cork into the mouth of any internal narrating voice that has the gall to try to explain to one what it really is that they are experiencing.