“Don’t Get to Know Them” Principle

The “Don’t Get to Know Them” Principle is Burke Devore’s method of insulating himself from the people he intends to harm. He frames anonymity as a practical necessity: knowing a target would make the required act harder, perhaps impossible. Yet the rule is not a stable barrier. Its own terms are strained by Everett Dynes, whose familiarity makes Burke’s violence more painful and reveals the solidarity that his way of thinking has suppressed.

Purpose and Method

Burke recalls that he adopted the principle before beginning his campaign. Its logic is deliberately blunt: knowledge creates difficulty, and difficulty threatens his ability to do what he believes he must. The rule therefore asks him not merely to avoid friendship, but to resist the ordinary beginnings of acquaintance—the recognition of a person as more than a name or an obstacle.

At a diner counter, Burke applies that logic to the counterman serving him. He reduces the man to his job and insists inwardly that he does not know him, need not know him, and will not come to know him. The repetition sounds like a command meant to secure control. It also betrays the effort required: the counterman is present, speaking to Burke and attending to his needs, so the distinction between stranger and person cannot simply be assumed.

The Diner Encounter

The scene makes the principle concrete through a small, ordinary exchange. When the counterman first offers Burke time to decide, Burke stammers that he needs a minute. The man accepts this without pressure and moves along the counter to ask another customer about a refill. When he returns, he asks whether Burke has decided. Burke orders a BLT and french fries; the counterman explains that fries come with the meal, along with coleslaw and a slice of pickle.

Nothing in the exchange is threatening. The counterman’s work is routine, and his manner is friendly enough to include a grin and an assurance that the diner is top drawer. That everyday warmth is precisely what Burke’s mental rule has to exclude. By translating a person into a function, he tries to prevent an unremarkable act of service from becoming the start of reciprocal recognition. The scene’s modest scale matters: the rule operates not only in the dramatic presence of a target, but in Burke’s effort to police the smallest openings to human contact.

Everett Dynes and the Rule’s Failure

Burke’s account of Everett Dynes exposes the principle’s emotional and moral cost. After seeing the event on Nether Street, Burke lies awake and revisits the killings of Herbert Everly, Edward Ricks and Mrs. Ricks, and Dynes. He calls himself crazy and questions how he could have done these things. In particular, Dynes does not remain an interchangeable competitor in Burke’s recollection: Burke thinks that Dynes was like him, should have been his friend and ally, and that they ought to have resisted their common enemies together.

That imagined alliance stands against Burke’s picture of people like them clawing at one another for scraps while those above them either laugh or fail to notice. His thought gives the principle a larger context: the separation it enforces is not simply between murderer and victim, but between people competing under conditions Burke experiences as degrading and those with power above them. Yet this explanation does not undo his responsibility. His recognition of Dynes as a possible ally arrives after the murder, when familiarity can sharpen remorse but cannot repair the harm.

Repetition, Restraint, and Significance

Later, Burke invokes the same experience while observing a man at work with his wife. He decides not to approach or start a conversation, recalling how doubly horrible it was to have talked with Dynes, come to know him, and like him. The rule thus persists as a means of managing future encounters: avoid conversation, avoid attachment, and preserve the distance that Burke believes will make violence possible. His decision not to act while the man’s wife is present also marks a limit on what he will do in that particular circumstance, though it does not amount to abandoning his intentions.

The Principle is consequently both a tactic and an indictment. Burke uses it to make people easier to treat as targets, but his reflections show that he cannot make them entirely anonymous to himself. The diner counterman’s ordinary kindness tests the rule at its most mundane; Dynes’s remembered possibility of friendship breaks through it at its most consequential. Burke’s effort to know no one becomes evidence of what the effort costs—and of the human connection his own actions have destroyed.