Young Writers Society

Warning before you begin: This contains mention of suicide and violence. It is not graphic, but it is said.

To look upon trauma is to look upon its relation. We, as the collective whole of the world, its thriving machinations that run it to the ground that is dead space, are killers. Killers raising killers to become better killers, faster killers, stronger killers, smarter killers. When I look upon my life, I think of my father. He was not a very good man. The most terrible lie that a traumatized person can tell you is that you will forget. You will not. No matter how small, trauma makes a human. So, in this case, we must locate the base origin of trauma. We could consider the Greek myth, of Kronos or Cronus, in the swallowing of his children. As I’m sure most of you know, Kronos was defeated by his own son Zeus after devouring his previous children. Zeus had escaped and went on to free his siblings from the cage of their father's stomach, but what I’m sure most of you don’t know, is that Kronos himself would castrate his father, urged by his mother to do so as punishment for his father’s hatred of his children. Now, we don’t even have to consider Greek myth to understand the point I am trying to make.

Take a look at Steinbeck’s East of Eden. The obvious parallels to Abel and Cain, the suicide caused by the mother, a father’s forgiveness, et cetera et cetera. The pattern begins to build again. Now, take a glance at something not so respected as myth or a famous novel. Take for instance, the blockbuster superhero book series Michael Vey. For those who have not heard of the series, it’s about a boy with electricity powers. He soon meets others with similar powers to him, under the control of a mad scientist who had birthed the powers in these children through experiments. His father is supposedly dead, his mother is overworked. Michael Vey temporarily accepts the scientist as a surrogate father figure before discovering his evil intent for the super–powered children. He runs away with his new friends and finds that his father is in fact, not dead. He defeats the scientist, reunites with his mother, and keeps his friends alive. All of this is well and good, but the series intends a happy ending with Vey’s parents returned to each other and able to parent him.

One could say that this is so much “unlike” the classics, or indeed real life, in which the parent is a cause, or a downfall to a character, through either a lack of presence or too much of it. Freud proposed the Oedipus Complex with the idea that the man would be attracted to his mother and want to eliminate his father from the family dynamic. The human killer mentality fits within this scope, but we can also understand the basis of what makes the “family”. Why is the son in this case, or the Oedipus Rex, so pitted against the parent. The same with Jung’s Electra Complex too. What drives the child? The birth of the child's mind rooted in these 3 facts:

• I am born controlled.
• I am born a flawed and unnatural killer.
• I am born without the ability to protest.

Freud (and Jung in tandem) subconsciously understood the nature of man, though it was not so expressed in his works otherwise. The birth of a killer, to be raised by killers, is inherently the human flaw. There is no perfect parenting. Even the slightest mishap in raising the child, a mishap unavoidable, leads down the path. Killers cannot raise killers. Just as the world will eventually become a toiling ball of mass incest, the instinct to kill in unnatural and flawed ways is emphasized through the genes. Man will find a way to kill, either physically or through metaphor. It is in his nature to disobey the moral clauses proposed by other killers, for a killer is independent, unresponsive, and downright petulant.

It is then impertinent to look forward into the future. Our birth rates are declining, our living is made of diminishing conditions, the wars explode across the faces of countries, the people retreat from learning and instead find solace in the collection of facts. The smartest of our nation are not “intelligent”, but simply the best at memorization. They are the ones who have spent the most time on the observation deck of humanity, isolated from “real” interaction through their goal of imitation. They can create the most exact portrait of a man without ever becoming him. They are, however, the most flawed of any killer, because they cannot change. They will tell themselves “Do not be so high and mighty, do not be so high and mighty”, yet their recesses will still see them as high and mighty. So, to many of those who memorize, there are two options.

The first: Death

The second: Guilt

You may choose to live the rest of your life as a human doll, stricken with agony and eager to give little hints of your true nature which no one will ever discover, because no one will ever conceive to think that “The person next to me is fake.” These are the people who decline our birth rates, who ruin our world. They are the people who don’t think too hard or too little. They will not do the grunt work, but they are unwilling to sacrifice for the challenges and hardships that will send our race forward. They refuse to have children out of fear, fear that they will become the killer that raised them. So, the parent is the origin of traumata, a source that no writer is willing to detach themselves from because their ability to write originates in the trauma, a rollicking ball of self-imposed doubt, misery, and misunderstanding.

Both like and unlike cancer, trauma is so ingrained in our knowledge of instinct, it evades every chance of eradication. To remove this tumor, we must begin to write outside of the “creative” norm. In theory it is possible to disconnect from this creative nature and thus from the traumatic event, but it has never been seen through by any field of science. Thus, we can only predict the general outcome. The first piece of human disconnection will be forgotten, there is no doubt. Surely it will be rediscovered, but the most important part of any work is the obscurity it will suffer through. Luckily, the author would be so distanced from any related trauma of abandonment that it will not reverse the process. One will read, and become inspired, they will write or pass on the mantra, and so on until there is a select set of around 100,000 to 600,000 people across the world who will continue the disconnect, a cascading effect leading to a new age of creativity. Of course, this is simply one hypothetical, and a best-case scenario one at that. There are numerous possibilities of the movement dying due to world events.

Extinction is a dream that humanity knows well. Every living being has dreamed of their own death, and their family's death. It is inherent in the mind of a killer. We have seen the power of the atomic bombs, the small-scale assaults and serial murderers, the scarred skin of arson victims, the bombings in Oklahoma City, the massacres in Tulsa, all mass catastrophe events that incur waves of memetic mutation within large populations. As we process the build-up to our extinction, consider the cycle. A species grows, evolves in sense of mind, dies to a mass catastrophe, and spirals on. Humanity has the unique perspective of being the first full consciousness to escape the cycle. We decide if we mean to escape and unravel, or continue further down, and hope to see what lies at the bottom in our next form.

We continue downwards.

Love is not a foreign concept to the killer. The lonely are most likely to become the murderer. If you ask anyone who has ever been in love, the descriptions are endless. The concept of being in love, possibly true love, is received from media. Loving to some is knowing completely. To others it is endless tolerance. A true killer feels none of these, but there is no true killer in our society. Ask any normal man or woman about a murderer, and they will respond with something along the lines of “Smart people don’t kill” or “Smart people aren’t dumb enough to be murderers, because they know they’d get caught.” Sure, this is true, but what defines smart in our world? What differs it from the words intelligent, or brilliant? What differs smart from clarified, or transparent? What do we interpret of a living being when we hear the word smart? Smart is a currency. It quantifies our existence in meaningless specks of advice. You choose your field, and you are smart in it. A small enough field, you’re the smartest. Keep people out of the field, stay that way. Hide the resources of improvement. In Fahrenheit 451, the outcasts memorize books. They do not write it down or keep the books. They memorize and burn, burn, burn. They eliminate the need for reliance, while excluding others from knowledge on the grounds of preservation.

Like school children on a playground, humanity exorcises the spirit of change, keeping the other kids out, holding your own little secret group, hundreds of thousands, millions, billions of secret groups spread across the world, the constituents of a greater sense of exclusion. Smart is a currency like any other, only there is no deflation. It continually devalues itself, thanks to the smug ambition we hold. All this to say that a murderer is indeed, “stupid”. Not for being willing to fight against the “smart” of society or attempting to make change. A murderer memorizes. A murderer spends his smartness, whatever he holds. But a murderer will never, ever possess the sheer paranoia of the smart, and the smart will never hold any sense of moral risk that a murderer or a “stupid” person may have.

While these terms may seem interchangeable or in opposition to each other, they’re extremely important to understanding the next few points. A murderer generally becomes “stupid” from a series of specific traumas, less so related to the idea of abandonment and more connected to the use of free will. A mass catastrophe forms a certain type of killer, one who believes in human goodness. A man marries a woman, has a child. They instill these ideals onto their child, granting a sense of choice. These ideals break the fundamental rules of a killer. They cannot be amused by choice, by the option to cry or be satisfied with their living. A killer is born controlled. A killer cannot protest. Of all things, a killer is born flawed. Man is a shattered being, waiting to be remade. The child makes his choices, destined to be “stupid”. He is now familiar with risk. Life runs through him, not the other way around. Finally, loneliness sets in. Isolated now from the smart, a killer becomes a murderer.

Love is perhaps the only saving grace to a murderer. In any case of age, love is his final chance at routine life. In society, the idea of having love is championed. It is the end all be all at the youngest age. You earn affection or you lose, simple as that. It is a piece of our traditionalism, our inability to break true cultural norms and fashion change. The murderer, in its tradition of breaking tradition, receives too much or too little. It is drawn to the heat of love like moths to a flame. Not just parental, but romantic. It becomes public in our primary schools, deviancy and exposure. The masses of bodies crammed in hallways, classrooms. There is no chance of turning a murder away from his cause. As he finds himself involved or rejected, there is no other pathway but anger. He (or in rare cases, she) will find himself wrought with rage for complexities that don’t quite exist in any plane except his mind. He will see the little cracks and manipulations in the eyes of others and target them. It is in this way that the modern mass catastrophe event reoccurs, not quite on the physical scale of the atom bomb, but emotionally devastating all the same. Once again, in its many forms, the universe makes a monster.