Who Murdered Yannick Verdyck? On the difference between a conspiracy and a tyranny without a tyrant.

On September 28, 2022, Yannick Verdyck—an outspoken critic of corona measures and the government—was shot dead by a special police unit in his home in Antwerp (Belgium). I bring this story back to the surface for two reasons. First, it fits within my series of articles on the usefulness and harm of conspiracy theories. It shows that analyzing this tragic event as a conspiracy might seem the simplest and most logical explanation, but it might still be wrong. Second, to this day, no satisfactory judicial verdict has been reached regarding Yannick’s death. We either sink as a society into indifference or keep the story alive and try to write it in such a way that the Real can truly find rest in it.

The story initially presented by the media went roughly as follows: Yannick was a corona skeptic, far-right conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, prepper, and anti-government thinker. He believed the end of the world was near, had illegal weapons at home, and was preparing a terrorist attack. When the police unit raided his house, he opened fire. The police responded in self-defense and shot Yannick dead. The coverage painted him as a thoroughly antisocial character, emphasizing this with fitting photos—Yannick with deep, dark eyes, demonstratively wearing a gas mask, and so forth.

Note: While the government and media portrayed Yannick Verdyck as a conspiracy theorist, they themselves produced a conspiracy theory: Yannick Verdyck was secretly preparing a terrorist attack with several accomplices. This shows once again how media and government, when push comes to shove, willingly become conspiracy theorists themselves. The remaining question here is: is their conspiracy theory true or false? We will return to that.

It is also somewhat ironic that a few years after his death, the government adopted Yannick’s “prepper discourse.” Europe now recommends urgently having a survival kit at home. Putin is secretly plotting to attack Brussels (another government conspiracy theory). A survival kit alone even won’t be enough. We must massively arm ourselves. Plans for new military infrastructure are mushrooming. Nature reserves have to give way; Putin is even more dangerous than climate change.

The Belgian prime minister—under normal conditions one of the smartest politicians, with excellent historical knowledge—shows he is willing to make great sacrifices. He posted on social media a photo of his son cleaning a terrace in military uniform; he can’t wait to join the reservists. The defense minister cannot stay behind. He established a division within the army where young people can get acquainted with drone technology and operations to spark their interest in the military. He also posted a drawing of himself as Rambo with a rocket launcher. Compared to this minister, Yannick Verdyck is a softy.

Of course, I understand that Yannick, unlike these ministers, expressed his discourse from an “anti-government sentiment.” In other words: Yannick’s great guilt was not in glorifying weaponry but in opposing the established order. The media explicitly mentioned this too: Yannick was an “anti-government thinker.” This has apparently become a new stigma systematically used in the media in recent years. Can someone explain to me: since when is it forbidden to be against the government? Isn’t a government that forbids opposition by definition a dictatorship, thus a government one must oppose?

A few days after Yannick’s death, the media more or less abandoned their conspiracy theory. Yannick was indeed a far-right conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, prepper, and anti-government thinker, but he probably did not have illegal weapons at home, was likely not preparing a terrorist attack, and probably did not shoot at the police.

In a way, the media deserve credit for making this correction, but it only makes it stranger that they do not fundamentally question how Yannick died. Do they really believe that anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, even if they have done nothing illegal, may be taken out by the police? Isn’t this simply legitimizing state terror against dissidents? Moreover, the correction came too late. The conspiracy theory’s toxic sting had already deeply embedded itself in the social fabric. It had already channeled the emotions and turmoil that every new event causes. Once the market stall of public emotions is sold out on a false theory, the truth goes home empty-handed.

***

It took me a few days to realize that the newspaper articles about the shot terrorist were about a young man I had met a few times myself. I remember the moment I shockingly realized this. At first, I had not psychologically connected the photos and horror stories in the papers with the man I had spoken to a few times at gatherings of “corona skeptics.”

Yannick held a master’s degree in mathematics and worked as a gold and silver trader. He was also chairman of a shooting club. Indeed, he did not see the future optimistically. Our society is heading into the abyss—social unrest and war are coming. You better prepare. Yannick, in other words, did not have an average profile. He did not hide this on social media either. He regularly posted photos of weapons and warned that soon we would have to take our fate into our own hands. You can still find his posts online if you want. In a society where the state increasingly monopolizes the right to violence and weaponry, Yannick’s self-cultivated public image did not exactly help him.

But how substantial is a public image? Doesn’t an image mostly hide something about a person rather than show their Real essence? A society that judges solely by image is a society living in appearance, a society discarding the essence of the human being, a society inevitably becoming dehumanizing.

Those who knew Yannick beyond the image knew a person easy to like. I challenge everyone to watch this podcast with Yannick. After watching, tell me if you can still remain indifferent to his death. You see Yannick as I knew him: a somewhat shy but pleasant conversationalist. He had opinions he passionately defended but, as far as I know, he always listened to others’ opinions as well. He also made a distinctly intelligent impression, among other things through his extraordinary knowledge of mathematics, history, and economics. Every question you asked him was a free lecture.

If Yannick wasn’t interesting, he was funny (often both at once). He mastered the art of making people laugh without offending or hurting anyone. Good humor shows nobility; it is a crystal formed in a person who has endured the harshness of existence yet remained human. I do not know enough about Yannick’s life path, but I read in the language of his eyes and body the kindness of someone who wrestled with life. If I took a hundred photos of Yannick, none would resemble the ones I saw in the newspapers.

Those who knew Yannick as a person can hardly believe he truly intended to carry out a terrorist attack. Maybe some tough talk—that could be. My humble opinion is that Yannick was neither dumb nor violent enough to plan an attack. That does not mean this line of inquiry shouldn’t be investigated. Humans have many faces and hidden sides. Some live a whole life with a serial killer without seeing the monster in him. We cannot exclude that Yannick, behind his shy, intelligent, and humorous style, also harbored a terrorist.

The problem is not so much that the terrorism hypothesis is being investigated. The problem is that it is currently not being investigated. It must be investigated. The public prosecutor decided in 2024, after a judicial investigation, that Yannick was indeed preparing a terrorist attack but didn’t provide any substantial evidence for it. Is this a trial or a sham trial?

The judicial process followed so far offers no answer to the question why Yannick died. People who sympathize with Yannick often look for the answer in a conspiracy theory: the government deliberately eliminated Yannick, wanted to set an example for the entire government-critical group, and so on. I understand why such ideas make sense to some extent, but they don’t seem plausible to me.

***

A few months ago, three years after Yannick’s death: a man who used to work in the military sphere asked me for a conversation. He wanted to talk about something of social importance. We met a few weeks later, with my assistant present. He told me about an issue within his professional environment that indeed interests someone who writes about totalitarianism. Suddenly, his discourse took a detour. The man claimed to know exactly how the murder of Yannick happened. His story goes as follows:

In an organization where Yannick was a member, there had been an informant for state security for years. A personal relationship developed with Yannick that at some point, due to an incident in the romantic sphere, turned into hostility and rivalry. The informant then sent a report to state security insisting on an investigation: "Yannick Verdyck has weapons at home; he distrusts the government; he is part of a network of conspiracy theorists."

State security did not investigate the report further but immediately classified Yannick as a state threat. According to my interlocutor, this is not exceptional. State security is funded based on the number of dangerous situations. Better one dangerous situation too many than too few. They immediately forwarded the informant’s report to the police, asking for a special intervention team to be sent: immediate action required, if not tonight, then this night. At that moment, no Dutch-speaking team was available. So they sent French-speaking agents. On September 28, 2022, at five in the morning, a French-speaking special intervention unit blew up Yannick’s door with explosives and stormed inside.

Put yourself in Yannick’s position: you’re lying in bed at night, with serious stocks of gold and silver at home. You hear your door being blown up, French-speaking men storm into your house. Indeed—you are convinced you are being attacked by gangsters. Whether Yannick reached for a weapon or not, I don’t know, but the possibility is not negligible. In any case, the police opened fire. When Yannick’s parents were finally allowed to see their son’s body days later, it was riddled with bullets.

This story is not a conspiracy theory. It frames Yannick’s death as an excess of what Hannah Arendt calls “tyranny without a tyrant,” an advanced bureaucratic system where everyone follows (absurd) rules and no one feels responsible:

“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” (Arendt, 1970, On Violence)

Was Yannick Verdyck primarily murdered by bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that in its extreme form always becomes absurd and murderous? Bureaucracy stems from the rationalist worldview. It arises from the illusion that human coexistence must be organized based on (pseudo)rational rules instead of a law that truly is law—that is, a law grounded in ethical awareness. In bureaucratic systems, ultimately every law and ethical awareness is lost.

If bureaucracy is Yannick’s murderer, does that mean no one consciously wanted to kill him and no one is responsible for his death? “You are responsible for your unconscious,” Sigmund Freud believed. I agree with Freud. But the question of guilt is more complicated than in the case of an intentional and planned murder. In this case, there is no single culprit but rather a cluster of semi-guilty parties, a temporarily lethal tumor that emerges in a bureaucratic body tissue that has completely lost its natural resistance to the death drive due to the absence of ethical awareness.

Intellectually and emotionally, this analysis is much more challenging than a conspiracy analysis. It requires us to view the great societal problems of our time in all their complexity and to dare to ask the more difficult questions: How exactly did this bureaucratic Leviathan rise during modernity? What is the connection with the pseudo-rationality (rationalism) of Enlightenment culture? This analysis demands that we mentally transcend our rationalistic worldview and experience our reality as a product of (metaphysical) processes that ultimately exceed all rational understanding. A conspiracy analysis makes all that unnecessary. The truth is simple: the problem is the malicious elite, no need for transcendence of rationalism or metaphysics to understand reality.

The greatest challenge, however, is not intellectual but emotional and human. A conspiracy theory also initially makes things seem simpler here. Once the great culprit is known, we can focus our rampant emotions on them. No need to see a reflection of ourselves in the bureaucrats and police; no need to acknowledge that under certain circumstances, we too are part of the malicious bureaucratic tumor that cost Yannick his life.

Conspiracy theories—from both the government and dissidents—are sometimes true and sometimes false. But they almost always tend to scapegoat and excessively simplify human intentions. For example, they ignore the fact that humans usually don’t fully know their own intentions and are divided among all kinds of desires and impulses. In that sense, an (incorrect) conspiracy theory does injustice to the scapegoat, dehumanizes them, while in reality, they are indeed a person, an astonishingly ordinary person.

That is the greatest challenge for people who now critically approach the dominant (mainstream) narrative: to leave behind psychologically simplistic interpretations. This path is intellectually and humanly much harder. Instead of feverishly hunting the malicious elite, the focus of awakening then lies in confronting and working through our own shadow sides.

This is more or less also the message Hannah Arendt conveyed with her “banality of evil”: evil is not committed by exceptionally monstrous people; it is committed by people who are strangely ordinary and everyday, people who believe they are doing good but unwittingly become instruments of destruction and dehumanization. This is by no means the privilege of the elite; you find it at all levels and, in a way, in every human being (I will return to this in future articles).

Principally seeing people in those involved in matters like Yannick’s death is difficult but is the most correct intellectually and ethically. It is the greatest tribute we can pay to Yannick, perhaps the only thing that can truly give meaning to his absurd death.