3min chapter

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Unlocked: Bonus Episode 31 - The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh pt. 1: Narrative Archetypes and the Study of Conspiracy Theory, feat. Wendy Painting

Programmed to Chill

CHAPTER

The Guilty Agent

I really took a shine to this concept of the wolf's heads. And then like, well, how does that work with all the co-conspirators? Oh, they're a pack of wolves. Or, you know, and then I just wanted to keep that consistent. That's where you get experimental wolf. Guilty agent came from a Nietzsche quote.

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Speaker 1
If I had thought about that back then, like, it's been a lot of, yeah, that is. So the wolf. But it also was like, how do we as the culture as society as this people, like, take an individual and make them into an animal, make them into, like, reduce them into an animal. And, you know, now they've got a wolf's head. They've been outlawed, they're banished from polite discussion. They become untouchable. And so, like, I'm like, oh, shoot, wolf. And so then I started to think about everything with wolf heads, which someone's going to make a meme on sure. I really took a shine to this concept of the wolf's heads. And then like, well, how does that work with all the co-conspirators? Oh, they're a pack of wolves. Or, you know, and then I just wanted to keep that consistent. That's where you get experimental wolf. Guilty agent kind of diver just from that. Guilty wolf sounds a little silly. I can say. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's like, yeah, like little red writing or something. But so guilty agent came from a Nietzsche quote. And he says, for every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, more exactly an agent, more specifically a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering. In short, some living thing upon which he can vent his effects for the venting of his effects represents the greatest attempt on the part of the suffering to win relief anesthesia. So I guess without getting too philosophical, everybody needs somebody to blame in this story. There's always going to have to be somebody to blame. And if McVey the guilty agent, that means the government needed somebody to blame. No, I like that though, because like basically where you choose to lay the blame probably says a lot about your worldview. Absolutely. I feel like for me, I'm inclined to place a lot of the blame on various institutions in society which directed McVey at various points, right? Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And in all of these variations of these narrative variations, there's heroes, well, I don't know if there's heroes, but there's villains and there's motives. And those can be wildly different depending on which story you're talking about. But yeah, let's say you're looking at a national sting operation that got like out of hand or something worse.

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