By Conlan Salgado
Written by Conlan Salgado
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
An Essay on the Lindsay Clancy Case and Postmodern Victimhood
The state of the truth is rather like the state of California: more and more people are fleeing its borders.
It was with my typical belatedness to the most important matters of American civic life that I became aware of a woman named Lindsay Clancy, a serial child killer who strangled her three children with exercise bands in her home basement.
I, Victorian reactionary that I am, assumed that the jury must be deliberating on whether to hang the witch or burn her at the stake before I was unpleasantly reminded that in 2026, it is enormously difficult for a woman to be anything other than a victim, and certainly the murder of three (probably ill-behaved) children would certainly not suffice to alter her status.
Indeed, everywhere I looked—the headlines or the reels—a much different question was being posed: Whether Clancy ought to be considered guilty at all?
Waging vicious battle against my Victorian predilections, I feverishly searched the places where new definitions are coined and commonly passed around: social media. I had remembered “guilt” as that which belongs to a moral agent after the commission of some evil and which, in being recognized by a community of moral agents, identifies the wrongdoer as the author of evil and the proper subject of punishment. But apparently the whole matter of agency has been thrown in complete doubt.
| Before I proceed any further in the exoneration of victorian morality, allow me to observe how strange it is to me—Ms. Clancy’s desire to live at all. Why isn’t she writing to the state twice a day begging for death? Suppose she was psychotic? Has she emerged from it? Wouldn’t a mother of pure care and love embrace death as not only a justice, but a comfort, upon discovering the murderer of her children hiding away inside her very own body?
The fact that she has allowed a defense to be made on her behalf—that she and her legal team have embraced and agitated a sickening obfuscation of the depravity of her actions through appeals to “sympathy”—is sufficient indication to me of her general moral worthlessness. |
Returning to the question of agency, one, wriggling uncomfortably at the thought of his own sexism, cannot help but wonder whether Clancy’s womanhood isn’t an essential prerequisite to any further program of “explaining-away”, or “victim-mongering” which seeks to excuse her culpability?
I say this merely with an awareness of how useless the categories of good and evil are to a postmodern culture.
The world of moral agency is an augmentation of “the little world of man;” a rational, moral self-conscious singularity (a person) augments itself through moral and rational activity. Towards that end: commanding, forbidding and exhorting other moral agents augments fellow humanity; telling others wisely and well what they ought to do and oughtn’t to do increases the yield of one’s own being.
Beyond good and evil, there is only the universe of the lonely psychological ego who “wants to do, or not to do” or wants “others to do, or not to do.” Since the postmodern self, by definition, cannot augment its own being through moral activity, it primarily augments itself through volition or willfulness—i.e., by wanting and getting what it wants, by re-enacting its own private desires publicly once felt, and by self-expression.
As such, injustice for a postmodern culture is the stuffing or restraining of desire or self-expression. The reasoning here is very simple and proceeds to conclude that some groups are systematically thwarted in their desires and self-expressions (systemic injustice), ergo: there are discernible classes of social and historical victims and victimizers, which according to this psychologicalism, replace the old categories of good and evil.
A victim is a dissatisfied or violated ego; an evildoer, though, is the (relatively) free author of his own destruction or other people’s.
Women are victims, historically and still socially. Perhaps now the reader understands my question—could Lindsay Clancy be so grossly excused if she weren’t a woman?
Consider, for example, a well-kept phrase of her apologists: the system faileda!
A master scape-goater myself, I appreciate the tendency to blame large anonymities: THE SYSTEM!
What do they mean, that the system was responsible for preventing the murder of Clancy’s children? Was this responsibility direct or indirect? Should the system have sent out representatives each week—faceless ones, no doubt—to knock on the door and ask Ms. Clancy, “excuse me, but you haven’t yet murdered your children have you?”
Or perhaps the psychiatrists failed her? She was, after all, prescribed multiple rounds of medications with a multiplicity of side effects, although none of them is well-known to induce serial child-killing.
Or did the clinicians fail Lindsay Clancy? There is the little detail, not to be excluded, of her deceitfully and deliberately withholding the truth about thoughts of harming her children, which she worried would result in their confiscation.
Ah, but I know! The clinicians failed Lindsay because they did not divine her deceptively hidden thoughts!
What is certain, at least, is that after the responsibility is distributed to the psychiatrists and clinicians and anonymous systematizers, the health care professionals, her husband, and the general sexism of each free-floating atom, there isn’t any responsibility left to be attributed to the one person who did tighten the exercise bands around the little necks until they were lifeless.
Not only a master scapegoater, but a master ironist as well, I cannot help but realize that far from being an independent woman, Clancy’s squawking gaggle of female paracletes enthusiastically remind us that she couldn’t have been responsible because she was not independent, that she was, in point of fact, dependent on (and ought to have been) everybody and everything but herself for her actions.
The independent woman is dead; long live the independent woman!
One’s philosophy is the midwife for birthing one’s worldview: if there are only victims and victimizers, there are also only egos and systems built to exalt some egos at others’ expense.
Lindsay Clancy is a victim; she was a moody, dissatisfied, depressed, anxious, lonely, violated ego. She had a right to be a happy, comfortable, relaxed, satiated ego, but alas, “the system” failed her.
Why the dissatisfaction, depression or anxiety of her psychological ego would entirely do away with her freedom, her moral agency, or her ability to consciously orient herself to the destruction of her children (a crime which she obviously conspired to commit), thereby removing all her moral and legal culpability, I HAVEN’T THE FOGGIEST.
I don’t reckon her defenders do either. They are only playing a cynical game.
In truth, the ego is a pathetic and whiny metaphysical bitch. The ego essentially wants and complains. The ego only hinders the moral and rational substantiveness of the soul, the self.
The dichotomized world of the victim and the victimizer swirls around and around ego, and since the center of its worldview is so truly pathetic and small, its understanding of human flourishing and agency is equally pathetic and small. Indeed, agency is too large a burden for ego all together.
Egos cannot achieve, but because they want and fiend and lust, IF they are deprived of anything, it is counted an injustice, a form of assault and existential deprivation.
Egos express themselves; they do not accomplish. Responsibility crushes them because it makes itself apparent as the consequence of agency, which egos do not have.
The Ego cannot therefore be responsible for anything. All responsibility must be (here, a pure inconsistency manifests) redistributed to others, usually perceived under the aspect of victimizers, or—best of all—to a system, a thing large enough to support responsibility (though its diffused personality and its anonymity, of course, destroys this notion).
One might reasonably wonder why Clancy’s children have not been accorded the same status as their murderer, but then again, children per se are not a category of victim.
Children, on the contrary, are a distasteful reminder of responsibility, dependence, and obligation, all of which the ego flees from as heat from cold. Children are a constant burden and scourge to the ego.
An astute observer of the cultural scene cannot be blind to the various and perverse experiments conducted on children—their extreme sexualization, for instance—whose very point is to pretend that children really oughtn’t to remain children for long. They must become egos ASAP, self-creating, self-expressing egos. They must unburden other egos; if children are owed care and love and affection, to just such an extent is the adult ego unfairly encumbered.
To this extent, there is even an edge of celebration about the death of Clancy’s children in every buffoonish, dim-witted, or perverse attempt to excuse the woman herself.
Our common moral sensibility is now to perceive the triple murder of children as only a footnote to the psychological distress of their killer. RIP, us.
Lindsay Clancy, according to her defenders, was a psychological ego trapped between physiology and the architecture of “the system.” She had not an ounce of agency.
Without uselessly prolonging the argument, it is important to point out that from the Christian perspective, every act of grave evil is irrational. The commission of sin is by nature irrational and a tending towards self-destruction.
Lindsay Clancy did commit an act of immense irrationality, but it does not absolve her, nor wash away the freedom at the foundation of her soul.
But because every starving serpent eventually turns to consume its own tail, the postmodern, feminist, power-obsessed world has settled comfortably into a defense of a female serial killer on the grounds that she was a victim of hormonal inconsistencies and a fundamental inability to master herself.
The rational, independent woman is dead; long live the rational woman!
-Conlan Salgado
Sourced from PRICKLY PEAR
