![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Philosophy Collides with Psychology
Thursday, February 3rd, 2022 12:50 amThey say the pen is mightier than the sword, but on Tuesday we learned that a mentally ill man was prevented from buying a gun a few months ago, then taken into custody with no injuries after sending a rambling document full of threats and insults. The document caused a lot of distress; a gun could've done a lot worse.
On Tuesday morning I saw an email on our office mailing list that Boulder police had issued a shelter in place order near the 900 block of Broadway, which is across the street from the University of Colorado. When someone responded a few hours later that the order had been lifted I checked the local news to discover footage of SWAT vehicles in front of my old elementary school. "I ran a three-legged race there" is an odd thing to say of a SWAT staging area.
I then learned that the police apprehended Matthew C. Harris, a philosopher, and that he'd emailed an 800-page manifesto threatening violence against the philosophy department at UCLA. I'd never expected my background as a Uni Hill Elementary student, a CU philosophy minor, and a hobbyist interest in trying to understand people's mental frameworks to collide all at once.
I spent several hours trying to learn more about this situation, reading parts of the "manifesto," the abstract and beginning of the intro of his dissertation at Duke, comments from students at UCLA who complained about his erratic and disturbing behavior as a postdoc lecturer, and eventually several of the couple hundred videos he posted to YouTube on Monday, copied to the Internet Archive before being removed for terms of service violation. (The "manifesto" and other materials are also in that archive.)
In my lexicon, "manifesto" implies a minimal level of narrative and logical structure. I would classify the document Matthew Harris wrote as a stream-of-consciousness rant. It shows clear signs of mental illness and may well have been written during one or several manic episodes. The videos make this mental state even clearer: talking to someone not physically present, sudden outbursts and volume changes, pauses mid-sentence with a blank look in his eyes. If I met someone talking that stream I would be worried about sudden outbursts of violence, but I wouldn't expect he'd have the executive function required to pull off a mass shooting. He declares that he'll kill specific individuals, particularly from the UCLA philosophy department, but also suggests burning down Boulder, eliminating entire races of people, and killing everyone in the world but himself.
Media reports characterize the "manifesto" as full of slurs against Jewish and Asian people; this isn't even the half of it. Despite his academic background on philosophy and race, his rants manage to denigrate Jews Catholics, Asians, "Efrikans" (which Urban Dictionary suggests might refer to people who emigrated from Africa), Germans, Irish, Italians, Spaniards, French, White men, Black women, women in general, homosexuals, Uncle Toms, and pretty much anyone who's not a black man (but particularly himself) or a blonde woman that he can have sex with. He brings up JonBonéet Ramsey about two dozen times; the fact that he was living a few blocks away from where she lived and died seems important to him. He also brings up the Olsen twins, Marcia Brady, and Madeline McCann, all in sexual ways; a Freudian would have a field day analyzing his Madonna-whore views. He's got a couple pages about porn actresses he likes, then quickly transitions to four pages of copy-pasted "bomb the airport at the gate" and then several dozen copies of the same page of all-caps lists of groups of people he wants to kill. Jimi Hendrix comes up four dozen times, and other musicians make appearances as he talks about the social role of black music, then descends back into litanies against groups of people he wants to kill.
Fascinating and disturbing, yes. Manifesto, not so much.
And if you meet someone with this level of "erratic behavior" please make sure they get the mental health support that they need.
Update, February 6th: Harris will be held without bail, unclear if he'll be receiving psychological treatment. The article provides more details about his life in the last year, including threats against his mom and her cat, involuntary psychiatric commitment, a schizophrenia diagnosis, and threats against a UC Irvine professor.
On Tuesday morning I saw an email on our office mailing list that Boulder police had issued a shelter in place order near the 900 block of Broadway, which is across the street from the University of Colorado. When someone responded a few hours later that the order had been lifted I checked the local news to discover footage of SWAT vehicles in front of my old elementary school. "I ran a three-legged race there" is an odd thing to say of a SWAT staging area.
I then learned that the police apprehended Matthew C. Harris, a philosopher, and that he'd emailed an 800-page manifesto threatening violence against the philosophy department at UCLA. I'd never expected my background as a Uni Hill Elementary student, a CU philosophy minor, and a hobbyist interest in trying to understand people's mental frameworks to collide all at once.
I spent several hours trying to learn more about this situation, reading parts of the "manifesto," the abstract and beginning of the intro of his dissertation at Duke, comments from students at UCLA who complained about his erratic and disturbing behavior as a postdoc lecturer, and eventually several of the couple hundred videos he posted to YouTube on Monday, copied to the Internet Archive before being removed for terms of service violation. (The "manifesto" and other materials are also in that archive.)
In my lexicon, "manifesto" implies a minimal level of narrative and logical structure. I would classify the document Matthew Harris wrote as a stream-of-consciousness rant. It shows clear signs of mental illness and may well have been written during one or several manic episodes. The videos make this mental state even clearer: talking to someone not physically present, sudden outbursts and volume changes, pauses mid-sentence with a blank look in his eyes. If I met someone talking that stream I would be worried about sudden outbursts of violence, but I wouldn't expect he'd have the executive function required to pull off a mass shooting. He declares that he'll kill specific individuals, particularly from the UCLA philosophy department, but also suggests burning down Boulder, eliminating entire races of people, and killing everyone in the world but himself.
Media reports characterize the "manifesto" as full of slurs against Jewish and Asian people; this isn't even the half of it. Despite his academic background on philosophy and race, his rants manage to denigrate Jews Catholics, Asians, "Efrikans" (which Urban Dictionary suggests might refer to people who emigrated from Africa), Germans, Irish, Italians, Spaniards, French, White men, Black women, women in general, homosexuals, Uncle Toms, and pretty much anyone who's not a black man (but particularly himself) or a blonde woman that he can have sex with. He brings up JonBonéet Ramsey about two dozen times; the fact that he was living a few blocks away from where she lived and died seems important to him. He also brings up the Olsen twins, Marcia Brady, and Madeline McCann, all in sexual ways; a Freudian would have a field day analyzing his Madonna-whore views. He's got a couple pages about porn actresses he likes, then quickly transitions to four pages of copy-pasted "bomb the airport at the gate" and then several dozen copies of the same page of all-caps lists of groups of people he wants to kill. Jimi Hendrix comes up four dozen times, and other musicians make appearances as he talks about the social role of black music, then descends back into litanies against groups of people he wants to kill.
Fascinating and disturbing, yes. Manifesto, not so much.
And if you meet someone with this level of "erratic behavior" please make sure they get the mental health support that they need.
Update, February 6th: Harris will be held without bail, unclear if he'll be receiving psychological treatment. The article provides more details about his life in the last year, including threats against his mom and her cat, involuntary psychiatric commitment, a schizophrenia diagnosis, and threats against a UC Irvine professor.
