ShrinkWrapped

Anders Behring Breivik, Naser Jason Abdo, and the Nature of Evil: Part I

This should be a very short post.  It is really not that difficult to define Breivik's actions and Abdo's plans as evil, and all civilized people, and all those who evince pretensions to being numbered among the civilized, should be able to agree on the fundamentals.  Unfortunately, we neither have a decent theory of action which can explain Breivik and Abdo, nor do we have a common moral compass which allows us to understand their behavior in useful ways. 

In the last week we have been treated to a variety of shop worn memes purporting to explain Breivik's actions and, in a typical MSM contrast, we have been treated to the relative absence of the obvious memes which could be used to explain Abdo's behavior. 

(Consider the "paper of record's" description of Abdo:  Two reporters and the usual army of editors manage to describe Abdo as a Soldier Arrested in Suspected Bomb Plot (who) Had Series of Disputes With Army; despite acknowledging a religious element to his disagreements with the army [and one is left to wonder how child porn and murder fit into his Islamic beliefs] the Times does not even once venture into any explorations of what those beliefs might be!  The New York Times is remarkable for its fastidious adherence to the highest standards of modesty when discussing Islamic terrorists; they showed no such diffidence in discussing, and smearing, those who allegedly fueled Breivik's terrorism.)

Since I attempt on my blog to "Understand Our World" the first order of business would be to explain the limits of our understanding of action, to wit:

None of our Neurosciences, ranging from the most behavioral (Psychoanalysis) to the most biological (Neuro-psychiatry) have an adequate theory of action.

In other words, while we can often create post-hoc explanations that are convincing and superficially compelling, we have no theories that can predict future behavior, except in the most limited, mundane sense.  This leaves us with a major lacuna in the center of our understanding of aberrant acts.  Consider this from Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of Anthony Daniels, who worked for many years as a Forensic Psychiatrist in England and was quoted in the WSJ Saturday:

Unraveling the Mystery of Murderous Minds

Your garden-variety convicts, he contends, are much simpler subjects than a man like Breivik. To ask them why they steal, he says, "is like asking you why you have lunch." They want something, so they take it. "And since in Britain," he adds with a smirk, "the state does very little to discourage [thieves]," or to incarcerate them when they are caught, "the question is not why there are so many burglars, but why there are so few."

A Breivik is a deeper mystery. Of him, "you can say, 'This man is highly narcissistic, paranoid and grandiose,'" and this may lead you to seek reasons for that in his past—"his father disappeared at the age of 15 and so on and so forth." But uncovering such facts doesn't solve the mystery because "whatever you find, you would also find among hundreds or thousands or even millions of people who didn't do what he did." There is, he says, "always a gap between what is to be explained and your alleged explanation. So there's always a mystery, and I think that's going to remain."

[Dr. Dalrymple has some most interesting comments on our need to explain, and our self-deceptive belief that such explanations are possible but that is beyond the scope of this post.]

[As for a predictive science of individual behavior, I am indebted to, and  retain a deep sense of satisfaction and humility with, Roger Penrose's explanation that consciousness may not be computable; he uses math and information science to show that a predictive science of consciousness may well require more computing power and time than the universe allows, a subset of the incompleteness theorem.  If he is correct, and I do not doubt that he is, considering the complexity of the human brain and mind, we may someday improve in our ability to predict the behavior of large groups, where irrationalities sum, but will never be able to perfectly model or predict an individual's behavior at all times; the antecedents and interconnections in the mind/brain are simply too complex to ever decipher in less time and computational ability that is available in the known universe.]

What this means is that we will never be able to predict with certainty which person who complains that _____ (fill in the blanks with your own choice) is unfair will take violent action to redress his grievances and who among them (the vast majority who may agree) will either remain passive or work within the accepted bounds of social and political decency.  That does not, however, argue for taking a passive stance when confronting those with grievances.  We do, in fact, know that there are a number of factors that make violence more likely.  Note that this is, as suggested above, a consideration of group dynamics from which violent individuals emerge.

1) In the face of societal regression, less mature modes of thinking and acting become more likely.  In other words as a society is stressed, and as individuals are stressed, the ability to take appropriate actions (hard work, debate, organizing and voting to redress political grievances) becomes more friable; on the fringes, violence can come to be seen as the only alternative for those who experience themselves as weak and disenfranchised.  Nonetheless, even at times of great stress and regression, the majority of people do not resort to violence unless directly threatened themselves; perhaps this is the greater mystery than why the few become dangerously violent.

2) In circumstances where one's culture, or sub-culture, explicitly sanctions or glorifies violence as a response to real and imagined slights, the risk of violence increases dramatically.  Even here, it is remarkable that though close to 100% of Palestinians hate Jews and wish they would be destroyed, it is, despite the efforts of the entire society to mobilize to destroy their enemies, a small fraction who actually engage in murderous acts toward their neighbors.  Here, the distinction between Breivik and Abdo is most stark.  Breivik comes from a culture that finds violence anathema; he has been universally condemned, even by those who he and the Left-leaning MSM cite as inspiring his ideological posture.  Abdo, although living within a culture that abjures the use of violence for resolving political disputes, identified himself as a member of a culture that celebrates the use of violence for expanding its writ.  It is thus no coincidence that there are far more Abdos than Breiviks.

3) In addition to the societal factors, there is broadly speaking, one additional factor related to the individual's transition from passive to (violently) active, best explained by the Poet:

On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert
I pick up my money and head back into town
Driving cross the Waynesboro county line
I got the radio on and I'm just killing time
Working all day in my daddy's garage
Driving all night chasing some mirage
Pretty soon little girl I'm gonna take charge

CHORUS
The dogs on Main Street howl
'cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a man
And I believe in a promised land

I've done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to start

- The Promised Land

When you have done all the "right things" and you still cannot succeed to your specifications, if you still don't "get the girl", the rage at frustrated desires can be overwhelming.  One can start off as a loser or become a loser, ie one who loses in the competition for success and status in a modern economy; either way, for those will limited internal resources, there are only two options: the resulting rage can be turned inward (depression and suicide) or outward (externalized onto others in violence.)

Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode

In the early 21st century, the old orders are failing across the board.  Societies are under great stress: the Blue, welfare state model is failing; Communism has failed; Islam has failed, and we are careening toward a modern world that looks more and more as if it is regressing to a Hobbseian state of nature.  During times of extreme dislocation, the possibility that we are finally (once again?) approaching Apocalyptic times, becomes prominent and man's usual tendency for hyperbole escalates; exaggeration is de riguer at such times.

[See Richard Landes' new book, Heaven on Earth, for an explication of Millennialism in its various forms; sadly, it is likely to be a more useful discussion as time goes on.]

At this point I would only add one more element that distinguishes Breivik from Abdo:  Breivik is no more evil than Abdo, but he was far more competent, a sad commentary on the much greater ability of Western Culture to cultivate competence even in its least able.  Further, he was aided and abetted by the incompetence of those who the Norwegian innocents relied on for protection.  A healthy, self correcting society would immediately recognize that there is never going to be a guarantee that a lone loser will not take up arms against his own feelings of inferiority and weakness and direct his inchoate rage at his surround.  That hypothetical healthy society would recognize that a citizenry must be able to protect themselves (either by demanding competency from their police and military or arming themselves) or they will have forfeited the right to be free men and women.

Although I have not cited the Neuropsychiatric research or the Psychoanalytic investigations which support my contention that we currently lack anything approaching an adequate theory of action, the evidence is available for anyone who wants to devote the time and energy.  The next step is to establish that Breivik's actions, just as Abdo (and Major Hasan, and Timothy McVeigh, and a host of other terrorists) were not psychotic, but were rather  behaviors that occurred at the extreme limits of a continuum from normal behavior to pathological behavior without ever crossing the boundaries of psychotic behavior; to wit, neither Breivik nor Abdo are "crazy" either in the Psychiatric or the forensic sense.

To be continued...

The New Millennial Mania

Recent conceptions of Mania have likened it to a Seizure Disorder.  In this construct, an unstable groups of cells in the Cerebral Cortex become highly excitable and begin to fire with an increased frequency and intensity.  As they stimulate all of the neurons with which they have synaptic connections, these neurons are recruited into an ever widening network of neurons firing at elevated rates and intensities.  In a Seizure disorder, the network rather quickly becomes disorganized and the neural functioning becomes grossly impaired.  The result is a disorganized firing of neurons leading to loss of consciousness and uncontrolled stimulation of the end organs (muscles) which results in the typical spasmodic twitching of the Seizure victim.  In Mania, such elevated firing rates and intensities overwhelms the baseline neural activity which causes disturbances in sleep, appetite, and energy level/expenditure, as well as impairing the higher cognitive functioning of the brain.  As a result the manic patient loses his ability to accurate perceive and test reality.  In other words, he misunderstands reality in ways which are characteristically pathological.  The Manic patient, whose antic behavior brings him into conflict with his loved ones and often with authorities, perceives the efforts of others to control his behavior as persecutory.  He is typically quite irritable and irrational, in the worst case ready to fight at a moment's notice, and often becomes overtly paranoid and delusional.  At that point the person has usually become a danger to himself and/or others and must be hospitalized for the protection of himself and the greater society.  No amount of reasoned and rational debate can convince the patient that his psychotic weltanschauung is disordered.

On occasion, large groups of people exhibit behaviors that, if found in an individual, would be understood as Manic and Paranoid.  Throughout human history there have been periods marked by seemingly psychotic and bizarre actions sweeping through entire populations.  These Millennial movements usually take place during times of severe societal stress but are only predictable in retrospect. [HT: Richard Landes]

A World Gone Mad

I  hesitate to go as far as Melanie Phillips, who labels the growing, frenzied international vilification of Israel "a global pogrom in the making." No, it seems to me more like widespread loss of sanity. The general hysteria, not just in the Islamic world but in Europe and the Americas too, brings to mind the words of the late British historian Norman Cohn, written more than a decade ago:

There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."

We now seem to be witnessing such a period of insanity, and it may well change the course of history. While the trend has been gaining momentum for some time, it took a grotesque distortion of Israel's operation against the Gaza flotilla to reveal the level to which much of the international community has sunk. One of the pinnacles of lunacy came from Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who, without blinking an eye, told reporters over breakfast in Washington that Israel's action was Turkey's 9/11.

...

None of this [exculpatory evidence- SW] makes any difference to the raving hordes that are storming the Israeli embassies, drowning out Israel's voice in the universities and flooding the airwaves and thousands of opinion columns in the press with their delirious portrayal of Israel. To them, facts seem to be a nothing but a distraction, and no evidence from Israel will change their mind. At the moment, even friends appear to have been bitten by this bug.

In a world gone mad, to be right is not good enough - we need to be smart. Israel needs to immediately establish its own independent commission of inquiry. In fact that should have been Prime Minister Netanyahu's first public announcement after the flotilla operation. By delaying the announcement, Israel has lost valuable points once again.

There are going to be very difficult times ahead for Israel. We need to reduce our conflicts with the international community to the ones that are most critical for our survival, and stick to them.

What is happening in the Muslim World is nothing less than a Millennialist movement in Islam.   Shia Islam has always been a Millennialist sect; the extremist group in charge of Iran, followers of the Twelfth Imam, believe that by precipitating the final clash between Good and Evil they will set in motion events leading to the emergence of the Twelfth Imam from the well in which he has been hiding for 1000 years and the Caliphate will be restored.  One plausible explanation for Turkey's recent moves presenting themselves as an authentic protector of the besieged Palestinian victims, is that by so doing Turkey will be able to wrest the leadership of the Muslim world from the Shia Persians, with whom the Turks have been at odds for several hundred years.  At the same time, by enabling the Iranian nuclear program while demonizing the Israelis, the Turks support Muslim solidarity while creating conditions that rationalize their need for their own nuclear program, in public to protect against the hated Jews, in private to offset the hated Persians.  However, there is a problem with riding the tiger of Millennialism:  [My comments are in parentheses.]

Millenarianism

Fourth, millenarian ideas have qualities which makes them tend to form the nuclei of narrative communities. The believers in the millenarian story have a role to play in the story, and so to accept the story is to feel that one is, or should be, part of the community of believers. Non-believers are not part of the community. But, in such situations, there is a natural tendency to think that everyone who is not part of the community is an enemy of the community, and since the real enemy is the Adversary, they are (at least) the Adversary's tools. [Community=The Ummah] ...

Fifth, there is an element of positive feedback at work. [Millennial movements must grow, ie recruit new members, or begin to die out, extinguish.  Since the movement si sustained by a manic passionate intensity, it cannot last indefinitely.] ...

Sixth, millenarian movements are not sustainable, for the simple reason that the millennium is not now at hand, and never has been. [Emphasis added- SW] When this becomes apparent --- and the human capacity for wishful thinking is not so great that it won't, eventually, become apparent --- something has to give. Either the movement ceases to be millenarian, or it collapses qua movement, leaving behind, perhaps, a few die-hard followers who keep finding reasons why the glorious day should be just a little more remote than they thought.... (Logically speaking, the failure of all previous millenarian expectations doesn't mean that they will necessarily be disappointed in the future. By definition, however, at most one of them could succeed.) The first five considerations apply, mutatis mutandis, to many other kinds of movement, like novel political ideologies; this one does not.

Taking these things together, we reach the conclusion that, in order to become large, a millenarian movement must grow very rapidly, if it is not to be killed off by disillusionment, but that this is hard, because many mechanisms work against rapid growth, particularly the rapid growth of a small movement. But under what circumstances will those inhibitory mechanisms not apply?

Read the rest of Cosma Rohilla Shalizi's post for some further discussion of Millenarianism, including its roots and the conditions that foster its spread.  Consider that the current conditions are ripe for such a movement.  Modernism has brought the failure of the Muslim world into unmistakable focus.  The presence of a Jewish state, run by dhimmis, in land once formerly part of the Dar al Islam, is a constant reminder, a constant irritant, to the Muslims whose pride and honor are damaged more everyday by the insult of Israel's continued existence.  The passions being aroused in the Middle East are not amenable to reason or reality.

Further, and more chilling, the wild fire of anti-Semitic Millenial rage flowing through the Umma, cannot be quenched as long as Israel continues to exist.  This means that the existence of Israel represents an existential threat, on many different levels, to the versions of Islam being promulgated by the Shia and Sunni Millennialists in the Middle East.  The pressure must intensify against Israel.  Iran is certainly playing their part, as their genocidal, eliminationist rhetoric escalates.  If Israel cannot be destroyed by the Iranians, and soon, the spasms of passion and rage will either dissipate or need to be re-directed against a more available opponent. 

Israel's best hope is to hunker down and play defense.  They may well be forced into making the terrible decision to protect themselves from an existential, nuclear attack (though so far, it appears that Iran does not yet have the capacity to attack Israel with nuclear weapons.)  Israel must not be drawn into another War it cannot win.  The more time that passes without an Iranian nuclear attack, the more likely it is that Israel will weather the storm.  The more time that passes, the more likely it becomes that the Millennial passions now at play will burn out; the manic episode will pass, and all will be able to breathe a sigh of relief.  Israel must work on its defensive missile screen, Iron Dome and derivatives, protect itself as best it can, and wait.

For the Umma, the lessons of Psychiatry and Neurology should be understood and recognized: The aftermath of a Seizure is a period of confusion and enervation; the aftermath of a Manic episode is a Depression.