“Know Thyself”… My Response to Atomou on the ‘evil madman’, Breivik

G’day Ato… and my apologies for taking so long to get back to this… Anyway, here’s my response to your post:

When I said he’s neither, I really should have said he’s both and neither… What I was really trying to get across is that it is unhelpful to think in such terms because these concepts, as I have already said, do not explain anything about what he did; rather it ‘explains it away’; once we have either of these ‘explanations’, we think we know all that is necessary to know about him and so no longer need to think anymore about him or what he did; most especially we don’t need to look at the social causes of his actions and thus ‘we’ (ie. ‘society’) let ourselves off the hook.

Madness, virtue and evil are all culturally defined, Ato, and they are thus largely a matter of consensus (though this is also to some extent dependent on context); the consensus in this case may well be that he’s mad and evil, but as I’ve said, these concepts actually help the real underlying causes of this kind of phenomenon to disappear and thus are not helpful; indeed in analytical terms, these concepts are counter-productive.

I agree that we mortals are both good and evil; mad and sane and much more… yet this too does not help us understand why people do such things. When I was writing my honors thesis, I had originally intended it to be about mass murder and so I did a lot of reading on that subject before I decided to use more traditional cultures as my ethnography (I’d changed tutors and my new tutor was more into ‘traditional’ (ie. ‘tribal’) societies than modern ones and I thought it a good move to try to please him. However, from the reading I did prior to this, I discovered that there is a very strong connection between a history of childhood abuse and mass murder; most, if not all mass murderers had a history of the most appalling kinds of abuse during their childhoods and adolescences… It would therefore seem to me to be imperative that we study this connection between abuse and murder (especially mass-murder).

I also understand the difficulty, not to say the near-impossibility, of maintaining high ethical standards, but don’t see what relevance this problem has to the matter under discussion: ethics are also relative to the social groups which respectively hold them… to the group of followers (if he really had any) or to the so-called ‘knights templar’ (small letters to denote that they’re not the original ones!) it could well be that they think such actions are ethically justified (fighting the good fight against the ‘common enemy’, and so forth). Racists with a taste for violence might well agree with this proposition… (no, I don’t!)

I feel the same way about the death sentence as you do, ato, and I understand, too, that I may well feel just as moved to violence had I been the father of any of the victims, male or female… and I really don’t know what I might do in such a circumstance; yet, as I’ve also said elsewhere, perhaps this is the real test of our humanity: whether or not in such circumstances, we revert to the most ancient of all laws, the Law of Revenge, the logical operation of which destroyed the House of Atreus so thoroughly… and inevitably; or if we allow legal processes which have been specifically designed to render the ‘Law of Revenge’ redundant and render society livable! It is not insignificant that the stories we both love so much about the evolution of social laws and ethics took place in an historical period in which living in cities was a relatively new phenomenon; the development of laws follows the development of cities… Just imagine what it would be like living in a city like modern Rome or Athens or London or New York if the sole form of ‘justice’ was personal revenge… Happy places, do you think?

Perhaps it’s also unhelpful to blame the gods or fate, too, ato… especially since we tend to make both of these ourselves… What you are obliquely suggesting is that ‘anyone of us’ could possibly have done such a thing… given the right circumstances… Now, while I don’t entirely disagree with this proposition, it should also be pointed out that most of us don’t! And we must ask why not… the answer of course, lies in the ‘circumstances’, which led to Breivik doing what he did; and these ‘circumstances’, if we are to be thorough in our analysis, must include a survey of the whole process of socialisation which Breivik experienced… including the ‘normal’ socialisation processes for Norway and whether or not there was any significant differences or aberrations in Breivik’s socialisation. Needless to say, this means that we must also look very closely at his personal epistemology.

I don’t think your metaphor regarding Philoktetes works at all in this situation either; his injury was most definitely not socially caused (snakes are not part of human society). And the poison of a snake, though it may make a metaphor for a poisoned mind, is qualitatively different from the latter kind of poison, simply because the latter most certainly is a social phenomenon. If we allow ourselves to assume that gods are real and actually interact with humans, then in answer to your question about Hera punishing Philoktetes for being Herakles’ friend, of course it is a social phenomenon, ato; how could it be otherwise?

The same is true of your other examples of the mother who beat her son to death and the father who threw his daughter off the bridge and even the Indonesian abbatoirs; these are all social phenomena, like it or not… Whether we allow free reign to our ‘darker angels’, or bow to the normal (social) judicial processes is perhaps determined by the relative success of our ‘process of socialization’… you see, most of us don’t do such things, regardless of how frustrated we might become…

“Our deeds vary so much and they vary from circumstance to circumstance, not from man to man, from woman to woman, so that to use any appellation on them, on these different and varying deeds, appellations that narrow, particularly in a dogmatic sense, the breadth and depth of its source is to do an injustice to the complexity of our character.”

Now, it’s funny you should say this, because it is precisely because the concepts of ‘madness’ and ‘evil’ narrow, in a most dogmatic sense, the ‘breadth and depth of its (ie. the act of mass-murder’s) source’ and thus does an injustice not only to the ‘complexity of our character’, but to the whole of society insofar as it does nothing to solve the problem and prevent further attacks in future; and even if some hatred is ‘justified’ (Ghandi would most certainly disagree…) acting on that hatred may not be… unless we act in a ‘justified’ fashion according to the laws and use legal processes to obtain ‘justice’ for ourselves, however that is defined.

I must say that I sympathize with Kazantzakis, but fail to see its relevance here except, perhaps, as a form of wishful thinking… a desire for a state in which such things simply could not happen. As for Freddy Nietzsche… this social-darwinist, who called himself a philosopher, was not a sociologist or anthropologist, and even before his so-called ‘philosophies’ became the inspiration for Adolf Hitler, they were severely critiqued (I found some interesting critiques dated 1932…) As I’ve already mentioned, his ‘struggle of all against all’, not only ignores the ‘cooperation’ side of human nature and over-emphasises the ‘competition’ side… and if properly applied would inevitably lead to either anarchy, or the kind of insane power struggle which Hitler found himself engaged in. It’s a pity he’s still so popular… but popularity is not necessarily a reflection of merit!

Your highly emotional descriptions of what it is to be a human being, though interesting and highly poetic, are less than useful for our analysis, I’m afraid, for that very reason; because they are so highly emotional. That you should mention the quote from above the doorway of the Delphic Oracle is quite ironic, because the form of analysis I advocate (ie. ‘social analysis’) which derives from the science of anthropology (yes, I know it’s an ‘arts’ degree; but one of my tutors was highly insistent that it was most definitely a science! And as you know these concepts are only artificially separated for the sake of intellectual convenience of characterization) is indeed all about ‘knowing thyself’… I’m sure I needn’t explain to you the origin of the word ‘anthropology’, but for the sake of any non-Greek speakers who may read this, it derives from two words, ‘anthropos’ (Man) and ‘logos’ (in this case meaning ‘study’ or ‘science’ of…) And it does so much more thoroughly and more appropriately than the pseudo-science of ‘psychology’, simply because this latter (as I’ve already indicated) has only relatively recently begun to recognize the social origins of (non-physical) mental aberrations.

Sadly, I must admit that I haven’t the slightest notion as to how one might ‘fix these problems’… first one would have to do the appropriate studies… although I have at least attempted to indicate where such studies might begin, and indeed, I have, I sincerely believe, made a significant contribution towards any such studies with my book, Aesthetics of Violence, which outlines a paradigm for understanding violence as a form of human self-expression. It’s a pity that it is unlikely to be accepted academically, however, as a result, ironically, of my own scapegoating by the members of the department I was working in…

I do agree, however that the best one can do is to work on oneself, since one cannot change the world… though I find your final reference to Cain and Abel somewhat puzzling: if we are ‘our brother’s keepers’ does it not make it incumbent upon us all to first of all understand our ‘brother’, before we go making his decisions for him? And how will we do this without social analysis?

Such as it is, m’lud, I rest my case…

😉