How crazy was Manson?

In all seriousness, I don’t know much about the guy, but it seems to me that he was pretending to be nuts (in an attempt to get away with what he did)… even if he was really nuts. I guess that my question is… is there any evidence that tells us if he was just a bit crazy and pretending he was totally out of his mind… of if perhaps he was totally bonkers, just as he looks (and probably wanted to look)?

To me, he really epitomized the ending of the counterculture. So much of the hippy culture was top down. Dadist Frank Zappa, elites such as the Folgers, Sebring, etc., Harvard profs such as Leary, etc. When scumbags such as Manson influenced upper middle class girls into his so-called Family, all that love, peace, and counterculture, went out the window, and security became paramount. Overnight LA changed.:face_with_monocle:

The part about Manson that was so scary to me is how he could convince people to do evil things. Like Jim Jones convincing people to move to “Jonestown”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

Just saying.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J2AzO39Qs1E

One of them doesn’t have a swastika on his forehead though so you can always tell them apart.

How crazy? He was the Michael Jordan of “crazy.” He was the GOAT of craziness. I mean at a certain point the word loses its’ meaning, because he was so far off the scale he made just garden-variety crazy people seem like sober, boring, rational individuals.

But how much was faked?

Probably a lot was faked. He just seemed like a wannabe nihilist who hyped up the part.

What do you mean by “faked”? Self awareness, calculation for extra attention, or perhaps sheer showmanship? He exhibited a degree of all of those and as an immoral sociopath was skilled at manipulating his followers and the press. But all these characteristics still stemmed from lifelong held delusions about his role as a messiah, which I believe is something he honestly believed in until his dying day.

He didn’t get away with it in the legal sense. He was found guilty and sentenced to death, and what saved him was a general decision to stop carrying out the death penalty.

However, he still had ladies fawning over him even in recent years, and the media never stopped loving him, so I guess in that sense he succeeded.

But you have a point where you question whether it was all an act. It certainly looks like it when you observe his behavior. But if a person lies constantly for five decades while living in a 8x12 cell, at some point that person might start to believe his own bullshit. I would vote that he was crazy as a bat turd towards the end.

With that level of personal magnetism he probably could have done a bunch of things, but he used it to launch an insane, impossible, and personally damaging crusade of murder. So I vote crazy.

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Maybe he was that magnetic because he was crazy, or because his crazy ideas were appealing.

Yeah, I meant he wanted to avoid responsabilties, even if he was caught and so. He kinda avoid reality, I guess.

By faked I mean that he was purposefully doing things that made him look crazy, so he would be treated as crazy.

Usually crazy is not so appealing!

Speak for yourself! I’ve been attracted to many girls who were crazy in one way or another :stuck_out_tongue:

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Instead of launching Helter Skelter and causing the deaths of seven innocent men, women and children he might have used his personal magnetism to launch Shock and Awe instead and cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children So I vote not so crazy.

Then explain why so many people end up with psycho xiaojies.

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But then after that, explain why they’re so desperate to escape them once they’re with them. :smirk:

Once they go psycho they dump them.

Yeah I’m not getting the math on that.