Abstract
Political psychologist Barry Richards looks behind the anti-Muslim motive which appeared to drive Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. While agreeing with the court’s judgment that Breivik was responsible for his actions, he finds a deeply deluded and paranoid person for whom the massacre of young political activists (mainly non-Muslim) was a desperate attempt to defend his fragile masculinity.
In July of 2011, Anders Breivik detonated a bomb in an Oslo street adjacent to the office of the Norwegian Prime Minister. He then travelled about 40 kilometers to the small island of Utoya, where the ruling Norwegian Labour Party was holding its annual youth summer camp, and roamed for over an hour shooting people on sight. By the end of his rampage, he had killed 77 people.
Breivik is often seen as a fanatic who was driven by a hatred of Islam. In the sprawling 1,500-page document he refers to as his “compendium,” he devotes over 700 pages to attacking the Muslim religion. The title he gave that document, 2083, is a reference to the 1683 Battle of Vienna, in which the forces of European Christendom defeated the Ottoman Empire. Breivik believes that by 2083 the second defeat of Islam in Europe will be nearing completion.
Breivik’s extreme ethno-nationalism focuses on fears of Islamification—the belief that Muslims are gaining power and dominance over the Christian West. Indeed, a common view of Breivik is that he is the tip of an iceberg of anti-Islamic feeling, and that the murders he committed are an extension of the virulent Islamophobia that circulates today at the extremes of far right polemical speech in cyberspace.
But why would he murder 77 young people, few of whom were Muslims? To find out, I analyzed key documents relating to the Breivik case, including his writings and statements to court, and the psychiatric reports on him commissioned by the court. What I found is that explanations which focus on his hatred of Islam of do not go far enough. In Breivik’s case, two additional psychological factors play key roles: his fragile masculinity, and sense of grandiosity.
In order to understand the roots of extreme political violence, we need to understand its perpetrators in psychological as well as social terms. The case of Anders Breivik shows us that in addition to contextual factors, such as the circulation of hateful rhetoric, there is a deeper set of motives at work: a desire to counter a sense of humiliation and express rage. Through his violent acts, he tried to restore both his culture, as he saw it, and his manhood.
Islamophobic Fantasies
The document laying out his ideas, 2083, was vitally important to Breivik. He emailed it to over 1,000 addresses, a list he had previously spent considerable time compiling, just before he committed the murders—which he described as a “marketing operation” for the document.
To understand the roots of extreme political violence, we need to understand its perpetrators in psychological as well as social terms.
In 2083, Breivik argues that Norway and other European societies are under attack from within, from Islam and its sponsors. “We know that once the Muslims reach approximately 50 percent of the population there will be a conflict which is likely to result in enormous human suffering,” he wrote. Such beliefs are not unique to Breivik, of course; a large body of anti-Islam polemic says much the same. Where Breivik’s 2083 departs from this literature is in its preoccupation with grandiose delusions focused on military might, which speak of a fascination with the Crusades, love of military regalia and ritual, and fantasies about post-revolutionary scenarios.
Illustrations by Bridget Beorse
Breivik claims that he and eight others from different European countries attended a meeting in London in 2002 to re-establish the medieval military order of the Knights Templar, which had been part of Christendom’s crusade against Islam in the Middle East. The members of this newly revived order are Justiciar Knights, self-appointed warriors of various ranks who will bring justice to those who are tyrannizing the indigenous peoples of Europe.
His document contains 250 pages of detail on topics such as the armor and weapons a knight needs, and the decorations which can be given to members of the order. These include the Liberation of Southern Nigeria Service Medal, and the Distinguished Wielder of the Furious Scimitar Commendation—a hint, perhaps, of Breivik’s admiration for the traditions of violence that he associated with Muslim and Arabic cultures. He certainly admired what he saw as the vigor of Islam: in the decadent West, it offers “the only vibrant ideology available to those in search of meaning,” he believed.
Breivik’s fantasy document includes a Traitor Classification System, and an estimate of how many Class A and B traitors there are. There is a list of priority targets, most of which are governmental, media and academic organizations. Muslim targets come some way down the list, and even then partly because of their value in provoking Muslims into returning violence, which will strengthen the popular revolt against liberal governments. There are also detailed discussions of weapons of mass destruction and how they might be used.
In one example of his grandiosity, Breivik explains that a deadline of January 1, 2020 will be given to all Western European regimes to capitulate to the demands of the Knights Templar. If they do not surrender, “Operation Regime Ender” will be implemented: a nuclear attack on a nuclear reactor. He proceeds to calculate the financial and human casualties likely in the face of such an attack in the same obsessional way that he specifies the exact kind of paper on which a (non-existent) national right-wing newspaper should be printed, and lists the legislative changes necessary to recreate (“within 20-70 years”) traditional patriarchal family structures, beginning with a law guaranteeing paternal custody of children in the event of divorce.
While grandiose delusions are staples of all tiny extremist groups, these long sections of 2083 (all of which, it seems, were written by Breivik himself, unlike much of the document, which was cut and pasted from various sources) are remarkable for the depth of their cold omnipotence. But why would a man possessed with fear and hatred of Islam choose as his crowning act the murder of scores of young Norwegians at a summer camp?
While Breivik saw his victims as trainee members of the Marxist political elite that he holds responsible for “Islamic colonization,” that explanation is not itself convincing. In 2083, we see that there is more at stake— related to sexual politics.
Breivik is possessed by a fear of humiliating subjugation to a dominating force that has the power to destroy his masculinity and identity. Although some of his own pronouncements tend to foreground the belief that this threatening force is Islam, it appears from his text that the basic source of his fear is more diffuse. What terrifies him is the prospect of his brittle, besieged masculinity being engulfed in a society where sexuality and gender no longer take clear and predictable forms.
Fearing Emasculation
The introduction to 2083 was copied almost verbatim (and without acknowledgment) from a document called “’Political Correctness’: A Short History of an Ideology.” This collection of short essays, edited by William Lind and three others, was published by the Free Congress Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank, in 2004. Breivik’s choice of that 2004 publication as the introduction to his magnum opus means we should pay particular attention to it as a guide to his preoccupations.
Much of the material following the introduction focuses on the belief that there is an “ongoing ‘Islamic colonisation of Europe.’” However, the introduction says nothing about Islam. Rather, it is a polemic about “cultural Marxism,” which it argues is now the dominant ideology of the West. It is a history of ideas, comparable in quality to an ambitious but unsophisticated student dissertation. Its fundamental premise is that Western societies are now dominated by Marxist ideology.
This is not the Marxism of the Communist Manifesto or of Das Kapital. There is no theory of wage labour as exploitation, no other discussion of any core component of Marxist theory, and only a passing mention of the proletariat and class struggle. Rather, the fundamental thesis is that “Marxist” ideas have been deliberately introduced into Western European societies in order to undermine Western civilization.
The key actors in this story are the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School whom, we are told, sought to broaden the materialist, economic analysis of classical Marxism into analyses of culture and of individual personality. This “cultural turn” in Marxism was, it argues, a hugely successful strategy. Instead of violent class warfare, cultural Marxism marched through the institutions of society and culture, and Marxist ideology now stands “like a colossus” over Western Europe, imposing “political correctness” and “multiculturalism” everywhere, and destroying Western culture. The guilty culprits include thinkers as diverse as Theodor Adorno, Abraham Maslow, Erich Fromm and Jacques Derrida, all pictured as actors in a unified conspiracy that has achieved dominance.
The text conveys horror at the breakdown of male domination. “Ladies should be wives and homemakers, not cops or soldiers.… Glorification of homosexuality should be shunned.” (Breivik is ambivalent about homosexuality; elsewhere he describes his position as “pro-gay.”)
Breivik is reproducing here the view that Marxist cultural theories are responsible for “the deconstruction of gender in the European culture,” which predicts that “the distinction between masculinity and femininity will disappear,” to be replaced by androgyny. Feminism, which he claims is a branch of cultural Marxism, has sought to “destroy the hegemony of white males” and secure the “feminization of European culture,” he argues.
On this view, the Frankfurt School’s concept of the authoritarian personality is “a handbook for psychological warfare against the European male,” and has aided feminism in its denial of “the intrinsic worth of native Christian European, heterosexual males” and its pursuit of their emasculation.
What terrifies him is the prospect of his brittle, besieged masculinity being engulfed in a society where sexuality and gender no longer take clear and predictable forms.
In this polemic, the fusion of feminism, feminization, matriarchy, androgyny and homosexuality threatens to engulf the Christian European heterosexual male, the hero of history who is now an object of contempt and hatred. It is here that Breivik’s choice of Utoya as his target can be understood.
At the summer camp for Norwegian leftist youth he saw sexually free young people, brought together on an island to enjoy themselves, celebrate their permissive ideology and plan its continued success. Breivik arrived at the island in a homemade police uniform to put an end to their sexual free-for-all, and to reassert the heroic figure of the patriarchal male who offers exemplary resistance to the tide of soft, corrupting pleasure that is washing over his civilization and dissolving its core categories. The uncertainties of post-modern culture are the societal roots of Breivik’s rage—as much as (or more than) the religious dimension of multiculturalism.
For Breivik, a vision of Muslim culture, especially its traditional understandings of gender, paradoxically embodies the simplicity and rigidity he admires and craves. He knowingly imitates some of the characteristics of jihadism, as he struggles to create a military solution to his core problem. For him that problem lies in the rise of “matriarchy” and the annihilation of received identities, especially gendered identities. He sees the liberal state as the representation of these social changes. His victims on that fateful day in 2011 were the Norwegian state and the politically active young people who represent its future.
The idea that you are “bad” only if you are not “mad” is based on a false dichotomy; we are all both irrational and immoral to varying degrees.
Breivik believes that in the struggle to come, heroes like himself will carry out terror attacks in Europe using weapons of mass destruction on behalf of jihadist organisations, on the grounds that they have a common enemy in European governments. He does not explain why jihadists should be so hostile to governments who, as he sees it, are the agents of the Islamification of Europe. But logical consistency is rarely a feature of psychotic delusions.
Bad Man or Madman?
In 2012, the Norwegian court accepted a psychiatric report which concluded that Breivik did “not have a serious mental disorder with significantly impaired ability for realistic assessment of his relationship with the outside world,” and “was not psychotic at the time of the assessment.” In this view, he was not “mad.” Politically, it was desirable for Breivik to be judged sane and therefore responsible for his actions, or else even the forgiving Norwegian public might have felt that justice could not be done.
In the view of many observers, Breivik felt free to act as he did at least partly because of the wide currency of extreme anti-Islamic propaganda, nourished by extremist bloggers and others, some of which gains influence by addressing everyday working-class experiences of cultural disinheritance.
But what role did Breivik’s mental state play in his decision to commit the murders? His grandiosity seems psychotic; his intense fear of domination is perhaps what made him a mass murderer and not just another bitter keyboard warrior on the ethno-nationalist battlefield. He coped with his fear of annihilation by believing he could vanquish the socio-historical source of the threat to his besieged self. Yet in much of his writing, Breivik seems capable of conducting rational (or at least pseudo-rational) discussions, and large parts of his political outlook are shared by many other people.
We tend to think that if someone is insane then they are not responsible for their actions. The idea that you are “bad” only if you are not “mad” is based on a false dichotomy; we are all both irrational and immoral to varying degrees. But the dichotomy mad versus bad—crazy or immoral—is embedded in the criminal law of many countries, and reflected in the Norwegian court’s decision to declare Breivik sane, lest he escape responsibility for his actions.
While understanding the deep motives of terrorists is vital for the development of effective counter-terrorism, getting psychological issues onto the agenda can be difficult, as many people prefer to focus on well-known contextual factors. However, my analysis of Breivik suggests the need to look behind social realities to the anxieties which those realities can activate, and to factors which can amplify such anxieties to psychotic levels of potential murderousness.
We need a conception of the interweaving of mental health and morality which understands people like Breivik developmentally, and sees the roots of “badness” in early emotional damage and disturbance. While Breivik’s biography and early family life has been examined by the Norwegian writer Aage Borchgrevink, it is not my purpose here to find a direct causal path between early experience and later action, though Borchgrevink offers some clues. Whether or not we can trace such paths, we need a psychosocial analysis of terrorism that links perpetrators’ current state of mind to terrorist ideology.
Containing Extremist Violence
For many on the right today, fears of Islam are fused with the idea that government elites have failed to protect their citizens, and have even conspired to humiliate those who depend on them. Feeling humiliated, they direct their rage at the liberal-democratic governments they believe have abandoned them.
Behind Breivik’s contempt for Islam is an unconscious fantasy of masculinity under threat. Like all unconscious fantasies, this internal fear may bear little correspondence to any external reality, past or present. But it explains his abhorrence of contemporary sexual freedoms, with their threat, as he saw it, to the sovereignty of the patriarchal male, and his unmanageable hatred of the liberal state that he believes promotes these freedoms. To defend against his inner sense of weakness and vulnerability, he developed an extremely grandiose and omnipotent state of mind, complete with medals and world-historic missions.
Breivik combines a catastrophically fearful, humiliated masculine self with a capacity for unchecked grandiosity and omnipotence. (For psychoanalysts, this is no paradox: such narcissistic grandiosity is a defence against the fear of inner collapse.) This occurred in a person with the material resources and practical competence to execute a mass murder. While this tragic fusion of qualities may be relatively rare, there is no reason to believe that it will not recur elsewhere.
Breivik’s psychological development had been flagged by at least one professional as a matter of serious concern when he was five, though this was not followed up. While no mental health system can capture and intervene successfully in all cases of serious early disturbances, we should consider whether some kind of psychological intervention at that stage may have enabled him to manage his fears better later in life.
The Breivik case suggests, in short, that containing extremist violence is both a mental health problem and a political task. However, given that most people do not seek out mental health services, the quality of our civic culture is the main defence against the risk that inner disturbances may become mobilized in violent form. A universal refusal of all coercive fundamentalisms and a steady assertion of the liberal state’s role in protecting and nurturing its citizens are essential elements of that defence.