Since the dawn evil has been determined, but there is no determined evil. This is why attempts to justify the horrible crimes committed by Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, particularly those crimes of repeated assault, battery, and torture of his pregnant ex-girlfriend, Geneva Ayala, are weak and void. Injustice cannot be justified: evil is not determined from other evil.

In the lyrics of "Jocelyn Flores" :

At the same time, memory surfaced through the grapevine
'Bout my uncle playing with a slipknot
Post traumatic stress got me fucked up

There is no doubt that X suffered trauma, perhaps which manifests itself vicariously through generations. But as an encounter with evil does not determine its reproduction, there is also no doubt that his suffering did not lift himself away from the culpability of his actions.

No one is above or below, but exactly at center with the world. We are the center of all joy, all hope, fear, pain, and the deepest evil.

This is my defense of X: not of his actions but the true value of his musical work. It was monstrous, and in that vein, refreshingly real. In our culture (I am a young man in his twenties writing from within America), anything "negative" is readily disassociated and repressed from our identities as persons. We seek ourselves as kind, caring, knowledgeable, and just persons, pitted against a world where evil in its forms are only external. Validating our goodness brings feelings of security to us through our personas, public images, and conscious conceptions of ourselves which never veer from net-positive or "good."

Yet, this suppression of negative qualities is also a suppression of ourselves, and it leaves us hollow. This hollowness is birth to the suicidal, depressed, and manic themes in X's music, laid out in an increasingly palatable tone.

When we listen to X's music and relate, we accept its reality. We acknowledge that the damaged and abusive person is also fundamentally ourselves. This damaged person is the same as the one who creates, brings joy, life, and happiness. While most of us, by no means, would ever consciously conceive of ourselves committing the crimes we know X to have committed, we acknowledge the fact that there is no determined evil, but only that the evil X held is also determined within us.

True catastrophe comes about in blindness to this harsh reality. We will not be solved by our own superiority --for no one is truly superior. Only from sober acceptance, we may be compelled to justice by the humble goodness of men.