Self And World By Eli Siegel

According to Eli Siegel, author of the book “Self and World,” there are two things that can be linked into leading murderers to believe that their actions are excusable. In his book, Siegel explains that every human being relies on two sources of pleasure and power. First source is the pleasure of respect and comes from finding meaning, value, and beauty in the world. The other source of pleasure is contempt, when one is searching for contempt, they hope to see the world and others as beneath them. For example, people see others as inanimate objects and property, thus explaining why murderers believe that their actions are okay. The second source of pleasure allows a person to feel a sense of importance and/or power. In recent times we have

18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold were seniors in high school when they murdered 13 people and injured 24 of their peers and teachers, before turning the guns on themselves. Starting with Dylan, he was born on September 11, 1981 in Lakewood, Colorado to his two parents who at the time were a geophysicist and worked with the disabled population. His parents eventually started their own real estate management company, so Dylan lived a middle-class life and was enrolled in the gifted program in his elementary school. He grew up being known as a shy kid who was insanely interested in baseball. Eric Harris was born on April 9, 1981 in Wichita, Kansas. He was the son of an Air Force pilot, so Harris moved around the United States a lot and was played little league as a child. After his father retired from the Air Force, they moved to Littleton, Colorado and Eric slowly began to change. He didn’t seem to fit in with the social cliques so after becoming close friends with Dylan Klebold, who he met while working at the same pizza company, they decided to develop the outcast clique called the Trenchcoat Mafia. They hated school and wore dark clothing with long coats, they always looked unkempt and hung out on the outskirts of campus. Their group was often bullied for their weird behaviors and received many looks from other students. Both boys started studying German and fell in love with Hitler and worshipped his actions, they wore swastikas and gave the “Heil, Hitler” salute. Although the boys were similar, they were also very different. Harris was the more violent boy of the two, he would throw stuff, break things, and posted violent threats on his website towards people he didn’t like or people he thought had wronged him. Both boys were arrested after they stole out of a van together and after going to a program to right their wrongs they were released