[United States / Vermont] - The Tribal Self Shoots the Other's Body to Erase a Phantom Enemy, and the Legal Self Demands Pure Madness to Avoid Seeing Conditioning

Event Baseline: A US jury convicts Jason Eaton for the 2023 shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont; his insanity defense is rejected.

The shooter saw three bodies and fired. He did not see individuals. He saw symbols of an enemy tribe. His brain was running a program that divides the world into us and them, inherited from a culture that has normalized dehumanization of Palestinians. The legal self then demanded a binary: either he was insane or evil. Neither explanation addresses the conditioning that produced the act. The trial becomes a screen onto which society projects its need for a clean verdict. It is a mechanical response to a mechanical violence. The cycle continues.