The tragedy in Minneapolis feels like a wound that spreads wider than the schoolyard fence. A child with a gun becomes a headline, the dead become numbers, and the living become soundbites. We are told about motive, about ideology, about the usual suspects that hover like smoke over these events. In this case the smoke has a name: the Order of Nine Angles. A cult of violence dressed up as mysticism, a group that confuses extremity with depth, brutality with meaning. They call their murders “cullings,” as if stripping the sacred from language could sanctify the act. But at the core of it all, what we see is a misunderstanding of power.
The O9A teaches that power is destruction. That to hold a weapon, to rape, to kill, is to express a godlike agency over another. It is a worldview rooted in an external theater, where domination and collapse are mistaken for transcendence. But nothing about this power is real. It is shadow play, a pantomime of force, an adolescent intoxication with control. It forgets the obvious: that to kill is easy. Any hand can pull a trigger. The act requires no wisdom, no transformation, no becoming. To claim transcendence through murder is to mistake entropy for alchemy.
Determinism sharpens this picture rather than dulling it. When we see human beings not as demons but as emergent inevitabilities of biology, psychology, and circumstance, the moral theater dissolves. A shooter is not an inexplicable evil, but a predictable equation. I know this framing will feel unbearable to some, as if understanding were an insult to grief. But empathy and explanation do not erase horror—they are the only ways to prevent its repetition. And so we look at the variables: the isolation of a culture that mistakes connection for clicks, the trauma loops that fester without ritual or repair, the echo chambers where despair feeds on its own reflection, the lack of language for inner alchemy so that pain hardens into spectacle instead of transformation. These are the forces that made of one child a shooter and might make of another a saint. Not choice, not free will—only the necessity of what was given, and what was missing. And yet, this does not excuse the act. Pragmatic judgment remains necessary to prevent further tragedy. But condemnation—the final branding of a human as monster—shuts the door on empathy, shuts the door on understanding, shuts the door on seeing the system that created them. And without that, nothing changes.
What fascinates me is the mirror here. These cults, these killers, they claim to seek power, but what they enact is its opposite: collapse. The O9A is extreme, but it is not separate. It is a grotesque outgrowth of the same soil we all share. And in this distorted mirror we see not only their misunderstanding but our own. For the O9A is not an alien growth—it is an exaggeration of tendencies already present in the broader culture. We too mistake spectacle for meaning, outrage for depth, followers for influence, and influence for power. We too build shrines to theater rather than transformation, reward the theatrical anger that draws attention over the slow, invisible work of change. We too often confuse collapse with transcendence—whether in politics, in entertainment, or in the private destructiveness of our own lives. The cult is only the grotesque reflection of the same delusion we polish daily.
And then comes the spiritual irony. To seek godhood in an act of murder is to miss that nothing could be more animal, more banal, more human. To believe in free will while acting out the inevitable consequence of necessity is to mistake the script for improvisation. And the final irony: that in a deterministic universe, intervention still matters, judgment still matters, because only by altering the conditions—the forces themselves—can the trajectory be shifted. It is the paradox at the heart of Zen Absurdism: the recognition that life is necessity, and yet we are called to act as though choice exists, to laugh at the contradiction, and to create meaning from the cracks where control has already failed.
What fascinates me is that true power, the only power, was never theirs. The only real power is the alchemy of transformation, the turning inward, the shaping of self. The work that takes years, not seconds. The power to refine one’s chaos, to endure one’s necessity, to carry one’s own shadow without spilling it into the world. That is the alchemy they never found. They stood at the edge of a crucible but mistook it for a stage. They confused the slow burn of becoming with the quick flash of destruction. They wanted to be gods but settled for being executioners.
The children are gone, and nothing we write can make that loss less brutal. Their names belong in silence more than in essays. But perhaps in that silence, in what can’t be said, we might still glimpse the conditions that produced the one who took them. And perhaps in witnessing this act we can glimpse the mirror it holds up to all of us: a distorted image of our own collective misunderstanding of power. To condemn is easy. To understand is harder. To change is hardest of all. But it is the only power that endures.