Break on through to the other side
In 2002, a 19-year-old in an affluent part of central Stockholm planned to murder his best friend and almost succeeded. He was, of course, mentally ill. But his madness had an interesting method to it.
The kid's psychosis had taken the shape of a full-fledged Gnostic worldview. He believed, basically, that he lived in the Truman Show. The world was just a stage set. The people around him were just actors. And he decided he wanted to meet the director, the Demiurge himself.
I played with the same thought myself as a high school nerd. But I find what follows kind of touching. To meet the director, our friend the psychotic teen figured that he would have to do something that wasn't in the script. Something that could never be accepted as part of the script. Something so heinous that the real powers behind all this illusion would be forced to step in, yell "Cut!", and talk to him. Something like trying to murder your best friend, who suspects nothing.
So what the murder attempt tells us about the kid's world view is that he really believed in good -- and evil. He really believed that there are crimes so evil that it is impossible to commit them. I'm sorry that he was wrong.
[More blog entries about gnosticism, trumanshow, psychosis, crime, murder, Stockholm, Sweden; gnosticism, psykos, brott, mord, trumanshow.]
The kid's psychosis had taken the shape of a full-fledged Gnostic worldview. He believed, basically, that he lived in the Truman Show. The world was just a stage set. The people around him were just actors. And he decided he wanted to meet the director, the Demiurge himself.
I played with the same thought myself as a high school nerd. But I find what follows kind of touching. To meet the director, our friend the psychotic teen figured that he would have to do something that wasn't in the script. Something that could never be accepted as part of the script. Something so heinous that the real powers behind all this illusion would be forced to step in, yell "Cut!", and talk to him. Something like trying to murder your best friend, who suspects nothing.
So what the murder attempt tells us about the kid's world view is that he really believed in good -- and evil. He really believed that there are crimes so evil that it is impossible to commit them. I'm sorry that he was wrong.
[More blog entries about gnosticism, trumanshow, psychosis, crime, murder, Stockholm, Sweden; gnosticism, psykos, brott, mord, trumanshow.]
posted by Martin at 14:37
3 Comments:
Hmm... jag kommer ihåg det där fallet, och om det är den kille jag tror att det är så jobbade jag ihop med honom, strax före den där händelsen. Läskigt...
You worked with him!? Tell us about him! What was he like? How do you recognise a Gnostic psychotic?
Well, first of all, I cant be 100% sure it's the right guy, but the newspapers said he'd worked there, and there was only one person in that place who went to the school where this guy was supposed to go, and he was about the same age.
But if it is him, he was very nice and interesting to talk to. At that time he was doing a school project about role play, so he and I had a lot to talk about.
As far as I know, he never came back to work after that, and I left at about the same time, but I never heard about him coming back, so it must have been him... As I said, scary...
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