via Andy Baio, a Reddit user claims to have extracted the search history of the murderer in Pennsylvania. If it’s not a hoax, it’s a very selective excerpt that includes: age of consent laws, photos of a “public housing ghetto” and Peggy Morrison costumes.
this ongoing crowd-sourced exegetic shrink session is pleasurable for its participants in large part because it exploits the hope that our technology is now good enough to render a mind transparent.
it’s not.
our inability to make sense of bad deeds – or, even, perhaps, of madness – is not from a wont of materials. some of the most atrocious misdeeds in our history are very well documented. what stands in the way of knowing the “why” is not a technical limitation nor a lack of data. it’s impossible to make sense of a logic that we deem immoral because our reason is intimately tied to our morality. as it should be.
in other words: we can’t stop trying but we should also be certain that we can never succeed.
related: the guilty pleasures of this latest exegesis are discussed in this thread on MetaFilter. from 2008, an essay titled Suffering Souls in the New Yorker: “Dr. Kent Kiehl uses MRI technology to scan prison inmates for signs of pyschopathy in the hope of discovering a treatment.” In 1994, serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s brain was dissected after his execution – it was deemed normal. in 16th century Padua, the public dissection of criminals was entertainment, albeit not entirely for moralistic reasons.
finally, here are the Google searches I made to write this entry: exegesis, standard operation procedure movie, brain dissected to understand crime, dissection crime brain 19th century, public dissections as theater, dissection john wayne gacy. i guess those aren’t very damning. unless the crime of which i’m accused is being a geek. in which case: nolo contendere.