Eric Harris' Journal

by Eric Harris

Writing belonging to Eric Harris, onr of Columbine High School shooters. It was found only a couple of days after the shootings in thorough searches of the boys' houses and lockers.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

16 pages, Paperback

First published April 20, 1999

Reviews

[Mark]

I cannot in good conscience give this book a rating, but it deserves an adequate review, which none of the others currently do justice. This journal is an important writing for so many reasons: its timing, its author's actions, and ultimately its warning about the hopeless worldview that postmodernity has bequeathed on all of us. We must struggle out from under the bolder of meaninglessness and frustration which Nietzsche attempted in vain to warn us about. Speaking of Nietzsche, this book is chock full of irony: Eric claims he hates nothing more than fake people and unoriginality (he's a member of the cult of novelty born in modernity), but his worldview is just what you would expect from an edgy teen reading Nietzsche. Its intensity is only bolstered by his unwavering scientism and darwinian outlook. Additionally, it posits to be his honest thoughts leading up to his attempted genocide, but he also admits that he's a chronic liar, which puts the entire writing under suspicion.

The journal starts off promisingly enough:

"I hate the fucking world, too much god damn fuckers in it. Too many thoughts and different societies all wrapped up together in this fucking place called AMERICA. ...I have something only me and V have, SELF AWARENESS."

In this opening salvo we see unbridled egotism and narcissism, as well as a disdain for multiculturalism and what Eric believes America has come to stand for. But somehow, the journal is almost hopeful in its very early entries, in other words he qualifies his statements and simply points out trends which he despises, instead of groups or people in general. One can actually empathize with Eric initially. Of course he is over the top from the start, but the fakeness he bemoans, the trends, conformity, and consumerism he noticed bother all thinking people today. But it was his conclusion that he drew which is the biggest problem. To him, "Only science and math are true, everything, and I mean everyfuckingthing else is Man made", including morality. He sees all authority as arbitrary and then equates arbitrariness with illegitimacy. This is a step I sometimes fall into, but after some thought it doesn't necessarily follow. Anyways, these observations (people do disagreeable things, Eric has to live with people, Eric doesn't want to live with them anymore, etc.) showed us the logical end result to fatalism/antinatalism/nihilism which was just slouching to be born in Bethlehem (to quote The Second Coming by Yeats).

Eric's problematic worldview and morality reveals one of the fundamental problems of Atheism. Eric realizes he is not God, yet wants God's power (to create and destroy life at will, decide morality, etc.). It's obvious that everyone has some sort of god in their life, something which they worship and submit to. In Eric's case, he, in a Nietzschean twist, made himself a wrathful god. He really stripped away everything (transvaluation of all values); he was utterly honest, and in that honesty, evaluated the world at nothing (since despite his posturing he didn't even value himself, the very god of his universe). His rage and his own overvaluation of his competency fed into his obsession with wanting another genocide. He drops little quips and phrases in german, hinting at you that he's a neonazi (which he ends up saying very explicitly). He doesn't even renounce Nazism despite its inability to deal with human nature, as he admits, but he extracts exactly the vilest portions from the movement. Earlier in the journal, he says he just would like to kill some groups, but eventually he decides that humanity itself needs to die. He wishes genocide on all humans, including himself. This self-destructive, "enlightened" man-god is the consummation of everything set in motion by modernity and accelerated by postmodernity.

Some of the saddest parts of the journal aren't when he is frothing with rage, but when he is bitterly describing things which might have given him real meaning, which might have kept him from this warpath. They include things like not being bullied, finding love, joining the marines, not being excluded from friend groups, etc. He almost always qualifies them and writes them off, but there seems to be an extremely dim and extremely faint flicker of something redeemable in him, something which was both ignored by others and stifled by his smoking rage.

Eric's Journals tick every box for right wing extremism, but that's too superficial of a look at the problem. More fundamentally, he misread Nietzsche as an instruction manual instead of a warning label. That last modernist looked into the abyss of postmodern nihilism and wept. The death of God was not a celebration, but a dirge. Eric didn't construct a new meaning or a new ubermensch, he instead abandoned meaning as conformist, and constructed a new gallows built upon that shortsighted teenage angst we all feel at some point. At the risk of courting cliche, this journal was a cry for help. Some part of him wanted deep down to have a meaning, to find some people who he thought were redeemable (he mentions several times 10 or 100 people he would spare). But all this is the logical outcome of postmodern thinking, of scientistic thinking, of social Darwinism, of fatalism, of anti-natalism, and of so many other ideas current today. The mere fact that these ideologies haven't yet been discredited as aberrations, that they haven't been buried as despicable and genocidal is almost too disappointing to bear. If it took two entire world wars to discredit progressivist thinking (in the old modernist formulation), perhaps it will take some tragedy of similar scope for us to mature intellectually and abandon the hedonistic nihilism we are swimming in. Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy.

[Pris López · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much anger.

[Leticia Morais]

A real frightening read, giving an insight into the mind of the main character of Columbine High School genocide.

[alejandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

insufrible pero m encanto leerlo

[Raven · Rating 5 out of 5]

ok poser

[Lvg23 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frightening. Every piece of media I've seen about this has forgotten he was a neonazi

[Lytkin Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

wrath

[Lanasita · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What category is this BS anyway? Shell-blowing-bone-wacking-tree-shaking jazz?" bro does NOT like jazz 🙏😭

[loserloserloser]

oh boy

[Luka Abuladze]

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