,
the perpetrator of last Friday’s attack, was raised in the same
environment as these “protestors” in Pakistan. Photo hat tip: (
I commented on this subject over at
Treppenwitz's post “Who is a
terrorist”.
Since this is such an important issue, I thought I’d post on it
too. Regarding the attack at the Jewish Federation on Friday, I
must first acknowledge that the perpetrator, Naveed Afzal Haq, is
evil. It’s as simple as that. Once you resign yourself to
that fact, everything else becomes commentary. The war on terror
becomes “the war on evil”. Terrorists become “evil”. Nazis,
Islamo-Nazis, and all other haters of life become “evil”. Clarity
is key: evil exists in this world.
But in order to understand the root of this evil, it is necessary to
delve into the minds of the deranged. What is the root cause of
terrorism? I see someone who holds human life to such a low
regard as having a mental defect. The natural "healthy" human
mind sees other humans as being very valuable - our social existence is
dependent on the fact.
I would argue that the ability to murder (or commit acts of terror)
should be seen as a social defect, stemming from a mental
psychosis. The very act of killing innocents requires one to view
a victim as less than human. Even though the 9/11 hijackers were
acting quite rationally according to their view of reality, one may be
psychotic and still exhibit logical and determined actions.
It seems that a large corner of the Psychiatric library has been
relegated to understanding the aetiology of murder. I even came
across a paper linking
hyperthyroidism to murder.
But in the many papers that I’ve examined, all mention various degrees
of sociological, psychiatric, psychological/developmental and
biological deficiencies. In one study, the authors found that
there were
two subgroups of murderers:
…one defined by high incidence of
psychosis and low level of psychopathy and one by low incidence of
psychosis and high level of psychopathy, each corresponding to distinct
neuropsychological differences in intellectual abilities, learning
disabilities, and social intelligence.
In a very interesting summary,
Dr. Sam Vaknin ties terrorism and anti-semitism to
pathological narcissism:
Terrorists can be phenomenologically
described as narcissists in a constant state of deficient narcissistic
supply. The "grandiosity gap" - the painful and narcissistically
injurious gap between their grandiose fantasies and their dreary and
humiliating reality - becomes emotionally insupportable. They
decompensate and act out. They bring "down to their level" (by
destroying it) the object of their pathological envy, the cause of
their seething frustration, the symbol of their dull achievements,
always incommensurate with their inflated self-image.
They seek omnipotence through murder, control (not least self control)
through violence, prestige, fame and celebrity by defying figures of
authorities, challenging them, and humbling them. Unbeknownst to them,
they seek self punishment. They are at heart suicidal. They aim to cast
themselves as victims by forcing others to punish them. This is called
"projective identification". They attribute evil and corruption to
their enemies and foes. These forms of paranoia are called projection
and splitting. These are all primitive, infantile, and often
persecutory, defense mechanisms.
When coupled with narcissism - the inability to empathize, the
exploitativeness, the sense of entitlement, the rages, the
dehumanization and devaluation of others - this mindset yields abysmal
contempt. The overriding emotion of terrorists and serial killers, the
amalgam and culmination of their tortured psyche - is deep seated
disdain for everything human, the flip side of envy. It is cognitive
dissonance gone amok. On the one hand the terrorist derides as "false",
"meaningless", "dangerous", and "corrupt" common values, institutions,
human intercourse, and society. On the other hand, he devotes his
entire life (and often risks it) to the elimination and pulverization
of these "insignificant" entities. To justify this apparent
contradiction, the terrorists casts himself as an altruistic saviour of
a group of people "endangered" by his foes. He is always self-appointed
and self-proclaimed, rarely elected. The serial killer rationalizes and
intellectualizes his murders similarly, by purporting to "liberate" or
"deliver" his victims from a fate worse than death.
It is my opinion that pathological narcissism is the most important
deficiency that leads to the evil of terrorism. But this
diagnosis does not change the fact that murderers and terrorists are
still "evil". Ultimately, there still exists the choice between
right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark. And those that
suffer from various mental difficiencies, although clouded in their
judgement, still hold the critical choice in their hands.
If one understands the sociological, psychiatric,
psychological/developmental and biological causes of true evil – it
makes it clearer what we must do. It is absolutely necessary, if
we wish our human civilization to continue, to flesh out and excise the
growing malignancy that is Islamofacism. The only cure is the war
on terror or, if you like, the "war on evil". The very survival
of humanity depends upon it.