DEFEAT FASCISM

 Reading “Murder Among Friends” by Candace Fleming. It’s the latest recounting of the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. All lived in Chicago near one another and the murder shocked the world, created new standards in criminal law, and caused generations of concern about mental capabilities.

The two murderers were from wealthy families and well educated. They lived under the Nietzschean idea that some individuals were superhuman and marched to a different moral drum than mere mortals. They chose their victim because he was walking home from school. They simply wanted to experience the thrill of murder.

Disclaimer. I’m no psychiatrist. Nor am I a psychologist. I’m not overly educated. Both degrees originated from state-supported public universities. I do claim the right, however, to be fascinated. I am.
Some analysts suggest that two people acting together will participate in horrific actions that neither would consider when acting alone.

Some increasingly accepted scholarship suggests that interactions with peer groups largely determine our adult proclivities and that parental upbringing contributes little. See “The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do” by the psychologist Judith Rich Harris. (Don’t yell at me.)

What fascinates me is this: In a younger life, I joined thousands of youth, some as young as 17 years, who learned from respected authority figures that it was perfectly acceptable to do what Loeb and Leopold did, i.e. murder a randomly selected youth from another tribe. The burden posited that it was not only okay, but our duty, to murder on demand, whether by hand, pistol, rifle, knife, artillery, or (for the more timid at heart) with bombs dropped from thousands of feet in the air. Almost all of my peer group would have complied if ordered to.

Now we ask ourselves why millions of Americans blindly follow a command to murder the American dream.

Further reading: The Milgram Experiment On Obedience to Authority.

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