A Lone Nut in Norway

[kernelbogey]

If we think honestly about our own behaviours we can see that we sometimes make a choice for evil.

Thinking about this a bit more since my earlier post, above, 'good' and 'evil' actions could usefully be paraphrased as 'social' and 'anti-social'.

'Do unto others as you would be done by' is an injunction common to all the great religions, and I believe was first propounded by Confucius.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thinking about this a bit more since my earlier post, above, 'good' and 'evil' actions could usefully be paraphrased as 'social' and 'anti-social'.

'Do unto others as you would be done by' is an injunction common to all the great religions, and I believe was first propounded by Confucius.

Precisely!

[scottycelt]

What anything is is more often a matter of labelling than inherency, I would say. Evil is a descriptive term - destructive behaviour would do just as well. It's the connotation of evilness, as much used by those seeing it as some kind of force or infection, that I find disturbing, with its mediaeval resonances of goblins and djinns. Specifics are more helpful.

S-A

Well, we often talk about 'a force for good' so presumably there must also be 'a force(s) for evil' ..?

'Destructive behaviour' sounds like the occasional enthusiastic pastime of the average toddler !

I would certainly describe the actions of the Norwegian mass murderer as 'evil' and I'm somewhat surprised that you apparently find that in any way 'disturbing' ...

[Serial_Apologist]

Well, we often talk about 'a force for good' so presumably there must also be 'a force(s) for evil' ..?

'Destructive behaviour' sounds like the occasional enthusiastic pastime of the average toddler !

I would certainly describe the actions of the Norwegian mass murderer as 'evil' and I'm somewhat surprised that you apparently find that in any way 'disturbing' ...

I cannot think of a better cliche to demonstrate metaphor than "a force for good". At least "destructive behaviour", for all its inadequacies, leaves the, er, door open to further enquiry?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

Robert White [a noted scholar in life span development research] it was i think who gave five life portraits to clinical psychologists and psychiatrists for evaluation; the expert panellists gave uniformly pathological accounts of the supplied information .... alas the information described five successful individuals who had led lives of achievement and healthy long term relationships ....

the terms 'evil', 'insane' and other more technical terms such as 'paranoid' are actually pretty empty of substance ... they serve to diminish or resolve our inability to comprehend or tolerate the acts of others ... what precisely would be meant by 'evil' or 'insane' ... what theory of personality or neural substrates are we pointing to in using them .... they do have relevance when we wish to justify the disposition of a troublesome individual, but there is precious little science in it ... and the reliability and accuracy of professionals in using such terminology is hardly creditable ...

btw the term 'normal' is equally problematic .... even assessing how 'dangerous' an individual might be is not straightforward

many individuals can be persuaded very readily to commit acts of violence on unprotected others [Milgram, Zimbardo] ... one could discover many similar attitudes to Breivik's manifesto in the general population since they are a version of 'our group' good 'their group' bad, a very powerful determination in human affairs .... he clearly sought out others of similar general views and in his musings constructed a heroic narrative of self martyrdom to save 'our group' from 'theirs' ... quotations indicate that he was well aware how terrible what he was planning to do was, that it would be difficult and that he might well not survive ... if he did, he planned to use his example and trial proceedings as a platform to recruit others .... in his abrogation of the power to use violence and kill from the state he has an explicit view of the state as corrupted by diametrically opposed views on multicultural society .... not a loner then since he sought external validation and recruitment, not a 'nut' he prepared meticulously over a long period and carried it off ..... such politically motivated murder reminds me more of the IRA or al-Qaeda with additional disturbing features, especially the hint of very loosely coupled networks of similarly minded individuals ...


in my years working in the mental health field i met many highly psychotic individuals, what was most striking was how incapable of such actions or any other actions they were, at most an impulsive attack under the control of voices, or the terror of thought disorder and delusions [and sometimes appropriate rage at their treatment by the mental health system] Breivik executed a worked through plan that was the determination of his own life, its purpose and meaning [hence the heroic] .... that he committed a crime against humanity i have no doubt, but then so did the IRA and we seem to have forgotten their culpability

[Frances_iom]

... but then so did the IRA and we seem to have forgotten their culpability

no we made their leaders first or second ministers - they murdered innocents in the name of an oppressed people at the same time as many ran protection or worse operations on their own people - catch is that they were not just a small number and had equally pyschotic killers opposing them with the then government totally unwilling to see any diminution of their power by sharing it with the minority.
The English at least disinterred Cromwell and stuck his head on a pole but not for what he and his troops did in Ireland but for leading a revolt against an incompetent King

[Lateralthinking1]

I agree with absolutely everything in Calum's excellent last post except the final few words. I'm not sure that we can say yet whether he did not have more conventional, reactive-type, psychotic episodes as well.

We know that he didn't have a police record. We haven't been told about his medical history. We don't know whether he was on prescription or illegal drugs. We haven't had any information from family of friends.

Furthermore, while I find it hard to disagree that it was, in any case, a crime against humanity, to look at this icily - not my forte! - I feel slightly uneasy about the political slant that is required to accept this.

For example, supposing the book had been a rambling account of the need for democracy, the explosion had happened outside a Gaddafi building of administrators and the gun had been used at a park full of everyday citizens who were Gaddafi's supporters?

[Serial_Apologist]

For example, supposing the book had been a rambling account of the need for democracy, the explosion had happened outside a Gaddafi building of administrators and the gun had been used at a park full of everyday citizens who were Gaddafi's supporters?

Bit of a long shot, if you'll excuse the pun...

[Lateralthinking1]

Yes, well, now we have some more. It is reported that:

His parents divorced when he was 1 and he lived with his mother
He rarely saw his father again
Both parents were members of the Labour Party and his mother liked foreigners
His mother is frail and dying from the end stages of a venereal disease
He blames the stepfather for having infected her
He considers that both the divorce and her illness are the result of the permissive society
He hates the permissive society and the feminist movement
He feels feminine and has never had a girlfriend
His weapons are phallic representations of sexual insecurity
His background is privileged but he was never professionally successful
He had £70,000 recently deposited and could afford not to work
He was in the army for a brief spell
He was a member of a right wing party for ten years
He had an encounter with a Pakistani gang at age 15 which made him scared
He turned on his own kind - not foreigners

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/what-turned-anders-breivik-into-norways-worst-nightmare-2327214.html

[Lateralthinking1]

For what it is worth, my unqualified assessment is as follows -

This blonde, blue eyed, guy looks unquestionably Norwegian. From the word go, his appearance requires him to be Norwegian more than if he were to look less conventionally so. If the parents are typically Norwegian, then to some extent they are representative of the country as a whole symbolically. As political parents, they are even more so. Their divorce when he was such a tender age would have been deeply troubling in many respects. Later, it would have been fairly natural for him to politicise it. So his problems become then a problem of the country, so to speak, and specifically the policies of his parents' party. Their divorce weakened him and so that country and their party weakened him. But he is Norwegian and he looks like a Norwegian so what is he to do?

The answer is to strengthen his own sense of adequacy and his sense of national identity by joining the army. At the same time, he joins a party that says "we are Norwegian and against everything else". Consequently, the anger and indeed hatred - which seems ostensibly felt towards the two fathers - is turned onto Muslims. Both fathers are effectively strangers to him and damaging. There is though another strand. It is that the fault while it is not Norway but rather rests with foreigners is also what Norway has become. There is a fantasy of something better that he could identify with more closely, a purer Norway- less liberal, more religious and so on, in other words the solid and more conservatively regular parental background he lacked.

Anyhow, 9/11 occurs and this changes a lot of very ordinary people. It is confusing as well as upsetting. Within months, he starts writing his book and predictably it is very anti-Muslim. There is, though, a dilemma. If Norway isn't changing - if it continues to be liberal and so any other version of it is a fantasy - then actually he shares much in common with these Muslims. They too are very anti-liberal. There would have been a time perhaps further along the way when actually he hated them more than ever. That would have been the moment when he saw that he was similar to them and the book really got going. It would have made him very afraid with a greater need for boosting bravado and anti-foreigner sentiment. It becomes increasingly heartfelt but also fake.

Predictably, around this time, the right wing party becomes "too establishment" for him. And then when the mother is infected and becomes increasingly frail, that, I think, is the straw that breaks the camel's back. He cannot like Norway at all as these developments occur. He therefore ultimately displays the actions of Muslim extremists and becomes the one thing he claims to despise, less "feminised" but only and devastatingly as a strange, estranged, "man". Is he then a Muslim sympathiser? No. This is not someone I feel who is actually pro-Muslim or anti-Muslim, nor is he a right-winger in the traditional sense. He is a person who has attempted to integrate by being accommodated into disgruntled right-wing movements and then he has found out he is truly an outsider as he sees it, almost a foreigner in his own country, with huge amounts of turmoil linked to the first year of his life and now an ailing mother.

At the end of the day, impotence comes in many guises but it frequently needs a trigger. A one year old is impotent in an extraordinary way when the parents divorce. This could have lifelong personal impacts. Muslim fundamentalists feel economically impotent because of western ways so there is the minimal overlap but clearly it has a large and worrying dimension in his life. To summarise, arguably, all the anti-Muslim sentiment in this guy's book, which appears to represent a systematic trail to these monstrous acts, is probably a red herring. In fact, the process of writing the book could be essentially a power that prevented him doing what he did earlier - the studious insistence against it in contrast to the stated objective - that ultimately sadly for all concerned he himself finally could not believe from his perspective of being a foreigner in his own land.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

points well made LAt but you are not establishing 'causality' with this potted biography [and how reliable is the information?] ... many individuals will undergo similar experiences, some will become Prime Minister while others are relatively undistinguishable individuals [a remarkable proportion of British PM's lost parents in their childhood] .... it is not just that psychologising the case is questionable on evidential and inferential grounds ... it is that this is also a political and a criminal act ... a combination encountered with an increasing frequency in our times [perhaps?] ... and to understand and respond to it we need to see it in those terms .... there is an ominous portent in the case, this type of extreme action often motivates and attracts others to the cause and i think that Breivik was explicitly attempting to do this [have you seen the commentary in Italy from the right wing politicians?]

the cunning of Breivik was to target his own group, not the other group [i.e not a tit for tat attack on Muslim people]; this is a deeply intended remonstrance that his own group is failing itself ... as such it will resonate deeply with the xenophobic right despite the cognitive difficulties entailed by the number and nature of the victims .... [btw he was just plain lucky from his perspective in the amount of time he had in which to shoot people, i think he was expecting to be stopped much sooner than he was]

i post all this because we do not face a new 'psychological' crisis, but a political and social one .... and given that Norway is a relatively prosperous society which values both democracy and welfare it can not be posited that this is driven by economic deprivation ... it is an accusation of betrayal of the soul and identity of 'our group' and as such will resonate with every ideologue of the right, where the roots of the values are in the purity and sacredness of the 'our group' ... as such it is an extremely dangerous event and will resonate in our politics for decades [not to mention the powerful lure of repeating the act]

this man has committed an awful crime against humanity of which he was fully aware ... and it is simply tragic that so many people were murdered in such terrifying a manner .... [and one can say this of the many IRA (of whatever ilk) bombings too] ...what scares me is that i think it is one of the most devastating acts of political warfare from inside we may experience [9/11 was external] ... there will be silence in the wake of the event ... but this will resonate deeply in the coming years ... it speaks to a wide discontent and anger and a deep instinct in all of us to hold to the 'our group'

[Lateralthinking1]

No, I can't prove it. I can't say that these were the causes. I'm not sure that anyone could. It is an outline sketch of how I think it probably developed approximately. In making it sound more understandable, it helps to remove the devil symbol that is naturally seen from his actions. This brings it more down to earth. It cuts a bit through the blindness of hysteria but in doing so, if anything, it makes the act even more worrying, ie what does it say about now and what could it say about the future?

Just to stick with the causality first, yes, those who lose parents - particularly one parent - early on are often very successful. You hear this on, say, Desert Island Discs. I have also noticed this among family and friends in the case of one parent dying and the child feeling a heightened need to be supportive to the remaining one. By contrast, friends in cases of parental divorce have often been more self-defeating and admit to strong feelings of betrayal. This seems particularly true when the parent of the same gender walks out. I'm not saying that this is true in every divorce case. Of course not. But I think the younger the age it happens, the more likely it is that the impact will be significant. It was a split at the age of one here!

As for the wider messages, to my mind, there is a problem with liberalism now. It is a problem it has with itself and it cannot really blame right wing nutters, who will always exist, for its ills. The Norwegian response here is indicative and entirely wrong. While I can see that it would be inappropriate to be seen to adapt on account of what has happened, a steadfast continuation of everything it stands for is unhelpful. Liberalism has always been the better way but only if rights are accompanied with responsibilities. Socially and culturally, it hasn't got it sorted on the responsibilities side.

This failure seemed to many tolerable while there were steady economics and when the mixed economy and/or free markets were seen in a somewhat separate light. The economic instability of recent years is now seen by many as the fault of irresponsible liberalism and that casts a dark shadow over liberalism as a whole. We now have a situation in which the social, the cultural and the economic are seen more as one, there is greater read-across in the relationships in each area, and it doesn't feel good at all. While this was not the apparent concern of the Norwegian gunman it is the unease that his actions tap into elsewhere.

What I think liberals and indeed conservatives hate are situations where either/or questions, with a holier-than-thou answer and an alternative answer, become redundant or changed. The legalisation of drugs is a case in point. By its very nature, the debate can be tolerated and left unresoved for ever more in a country of free speech. Emotional health is very close to that axis, as indeed it is where there is a need to balance freedoms and responsibilities in relationships. There too all the enabling, while fine, has ceased to get to grips with the issues of healthy self-constraints.

So it is in a way with immigration. There is a decent view on people from other cultures and a deeply unpleasant one. But as soon as many say genuinely that they are all for human dignity, even multiculturalism, but large population movement is unsustainable and damaging for all, there is a sense of panic. What this hate crime, with all of its immaturity reveals, is a complacency and lack of mature reflection and development in liberal western systems. It is this that could lead to their downfall.