The murder of actress Sharon Tate and four other people took place over the night of August 8-9th, 1969. Witnesses in the same neighborhood said they heard gunshots and screams through the night. I was seventeen at the time, concerned with meeting girls and going off to college, so that the deaths hardly registered with me. My World remained pretty small until I went off to college. I just didn't pay much attention to current events at that time.
Then, in 1976, CBS broadcast a television-movie, titled Helter Skelter, about the murder of Sharon Tate and the others, and first made me aware of Charles Manson and the members of his "Family", who carried out the murders. The Helter Skelter movie could not escape the stigma of television-movie production-values, but the performance of Steven Railsback, a relatively unknown actor in the role of Manson, made the movie compelling to watch.
Then, in 1977, I spent five months travelling in Europe and stayed in a succession of Youth Hostels in different countries. At the Youth Hostel in Amsterdam, Holland, I met an American who had just finished reading the book Helter Skelter, about the Manson murders, that had served as the basis for the movie. Since he planned to fly home in a few days, he gave his copy of the book to me. I still have it.
The author Vincent Bugliosi had spearheaded the prosecution of Manson and his Family with skill, tenacity, and an almost empathic insight about the defendants. Having studied them over the course of the trial, Bugliosi knew them as well as anyone. Besides his skill and courage in the courtroom, he proved his skill as a writer and historian—leaving behind a significant work.
Among other things, Bugliosi pondered how Manson had succeeded in getting his girls to commit brutal murders of complete strangers, even dissing the poor victims as they lay dying. The girls had a wish to "off the pigs" and held forth about the hypocrisy of bourgeois values.
More than that, Bugliosi noted how they maintained the "same expressions, patterned responses", and "same lack of distinct personality". One expert-witness stated in court that Manson used "LSD and unconventional sexual practices . . . to turn his followers into empty vessels that would accept anything he poured" into them. Basically, he made them experience ego-death. Another person said of Manson's intention, "Only by ceasing to exist as an individual ego could you become one with all things."
More than anything, Bugliosi writes, the girls' experiencing ego-death resulted in them acting like children. He had them in for interviews and could hardly believe the "little-girl quality in them, as if they hadn't aged but had been retarded . . . . Little-girls playing little-girl games. Including murder? I wondered." He had to bribe them to talk with candy.
Bugliosi died in 2015 at age 80. I wonder if he lived long enough to see some of the same little-girl mentality in the bloggers posting on Facebook. Below, I include a few examples of that mentality.
Note how the bloggers use figures from children's cartoons. By far, the strangest one shows a little girl cutting off the head of a little boy. Do these little-girl games include murder? Has something retarded the bloggers' spirits and intellect? The cartoons do not show a connection to time or place, a sense of personal forward movement, or individual consciousness.
Interestingly, one blogger identifies as nihilist, two others as anarchist. That jives with the Manson technique—to empty the girls' minds and replace it with a thirst for payback on the pigs. Have the bloggers bought into that ego-death thing? Eric Hoffer said that "A mass-movement appeals not to those . . . advancing a cherished 'self', but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self." All of the Manson girls had reasons to replace an unwanted self; the bloggers likewise.