Deep Thoughts: why individuals go berserko and do suicide-bombing and other horrorshow stuff

The radical loser
Hans Magnus Enzensberger looks at the kind of ideological trigger required to ignite the radical loser - whether amok killer, murderer or terrorist - and make him explode

I. The isolated individual

It is difficult to talk about the loser, and it is stupid not to. Stupid because there can be no definitive winner and because each of us, from the megalomaniac Bonaparte to the last beggar on the streets of Calcutta, will meet the same fate. Difficult because to content oneself with this metaphysical banality is to take an easy way out, as it ignores the truly explosive dimension of the problem, the political dimension.

Instead of actually looking into the thousand faces of the loser, sociologists keep to their statistics: median value, standard deviation, normal distribution. It rarely occurs to them that they themselves might be among the losers. Their definitions are like scratching a wound: as Samuel Butler says, the itching and the pain only get worse. One thing is certain: the way humanity has organized itself – "capitalism", "competition", "empire", "globalization" – not only does the number of losers increase every day, but as in any large group, fragmentation soon sets in. In a chaotic, unfathomable process, the cohorts of the inferior, the defeated, the victims separate out. The loser may accept his fate and resign himself; the victim may demand satisfaction; the defeated may begin preparing for the next round. But the radical loser isolates himself, becomes invisible, guards his delusion, saves his energy, and waits for his hour to come.

Those who content themselves with the objective, material criteria, the indices of the economists and the devastating findings of the empiricists, will understand nothing of the true drama of the radical loser. What others think of him – be they rivals or brothers, experts or neighbours, schoolmates, bosses, friends or foes – is not sufficient motivation. The radical loser himself must take an active part, he must tell himself: I am a loser and nothing but a loser. As long as he is not convinced of this, life may treat him badly, he may be poor and powerless, he may know misery and defeat, but he will not become a radical loser until he adopts the judgement of those who consider themselves winners as his own.

Since before the attack on the World Trade Center, political scientists, sociologists and psychologists have been searching in vain for a reliable pattern. Neither poverty nor the experience of political repression alone seem to provide a satisfactory explanation for why young people actively seek out death in a grand bloody finale and aim to take as many people with them as possible. Is there a phenotype that displays the same characteristics down the ages and across all classes and cultures?
No one pays any mind to the radical loser if they do not have to. And the feeling is mutual. As long as he is alone – and he is very much alone – he does not hit out. He appears unobtrusive, silent: a sleeper. But when he does draw attention to himself and enter the statistics, then he sparks consternation bordering on shock. For his very existence reminds the others of how little it would take to put them in his position. One might even assist the loser if only he would give just up. But he has no intention of doing so, and it does not look as if he would be partial to any assistance.

Many professions take the loser as the object of their studoes and as the basis for their existence. Social psychologists, social workers, social policy experts, criminologists, therapists and others who do not count themselves among the losers would be out of work without him. But with the best will in the world, the client remains obscure to them: their empathy knows clearly-defined professional bounds. One thing they do know is that the radical loser is hard to get through to and, ultimately, unpredictable. Identifying the one person among the hundreds passing through their offices and surgeries who is prepared to go all the way is more than they are capable of. Maybe they sense that this is not just a social issue that can be repaired by bureaucratic means. For the loser keeps his ideas to himself. That is the trouble. He keeps quiet and waits. He lets nothing show. Which is precisely why he is feared. In historical terms, this fear is very old, but today it is more justified than ever. Anyone with the smallest scrap of power within society will at times feel something of the huge destructive energy that lies within the radical loser and which no intervention can neutralize, however well-meaning or serious it might be.

He can explode at any moment. This is the only solution to his problem that he can imagine: a worsening of the evil conditions under which he suffers. The newspapers run stories on him every week: the father of two who killed his wife, his small children and finally himself. Unthinkable! A headline in the local section: A Family Tragedy. Or the man who suddenly barricades himself in his apartment, taking the landlord, who wanted money from him, as his hostage. When the police finally gets to the scene, he starts shooting. He is then said to have "run amok", a word borrowed from the Malayan. He kills an officer before collapsing in the shower of bullets. What triggered this explosion remains unclear. His wife's nagging perhaps, noisy neighbours, an argument at the pub, or the bank cancelling his loan. A disparaging remark from a superior is enough to make the man climb a tower and start firing at anything that moves outside the supermarket, not in spite of but precisely because of the fact that this massacre will accelerate his own end. Where on earth did he get that machine pistol from?

At last, this radical loser – he may be just fifteen and having a hard time with his spots – at last, he is master over life and death. Then, in the newsreader's words, he "dies at his own hands" and the investigators get down to work. They find a few videos, a few confused journal entries. The parents, neighbours, teachers noticed nothing unusual. A few bad grades, for sure, a certain reticence – the boy didn't talk much. But that is no reason to shoot dead a dozen of his schoolmates. The experts deliver their verdicts. Cultural critics bring forth their arguments. Inevitably, they speak of a "debate on values". The search for reasons comes to nothing. Politicians express their dismay. The conclusion is reached that it was an He can explode at any moment. This is the only solution to his problem that he can imagine: a worsening of the evil conditions under which he suffers.

The newspapers run stories on him every week: the father of two who killed his wife, his small children and finally himself. Unthinkable! A headline in the local section: A Family Tragedy. Or the man who suddenly barricades himself in his apartment, taking the landlord, who wanted money from him, as his hostage. When the police finally gets to the scene, he starts shooting. He is then said to have "run amok", a word borrowed from the Malayan. He kills an officer before collapsing in the shower of bullets. What triggered this explosion remains unclear. His wife's nagging perhaps, noisy neighbours, an argument at the pub, or the bank cancelling his loan. A disparaging remark from a superior is enough to make the man climb a tower and start firing at anything that moves outside the supermarket, not in spite of but precisely because of the fact that this massacre will accelerate his own end. Where on earth did he get that machine gunisolated case.

This is correct, since the culprits are always isolated individuals who have found no access to a collective. And it is incorrect, since isolated cases of this kind are becoming more and more frequent. This increase leads one to conclude that there are more and more radical losers. This is due to the so-called "state of things." This might refer equally to the world market or to an insurance company that refuses to pay.

But anyone wishing to understand the radical loser would be well advised to go a little further back. Progress has not put an end to human suffering, but it has changed it in no small way. Over the past two centuries, the more successful societies have fought for and established new rights, new expectations and new demands. They have done away with the notion of an inevitable fate. They have put concepts like human dignity and human rights on the agenda. The have democratized the struggle for recognition and awakened expectations of equality which they are unable to fulfil. And at the same time, they have made sure that inequality is constantly demonstrated to all of the planet's inhabitants round the clock on every television channel. As a result, with every stage of progress, people's capacity for disappointment has increased accordingly.

"Where cultural progress is genuinely successful and ills are cured, this progress is seldom received with enthusiasm," remarks the philosopher Odo Marquard (book): "Instead, they are taken for granted and attention focuses on those ills that remain. And these remaining ills are subject to the law of increasing annoyance. The more negative elements disappear from reality, the more annoying the remaining negative elements become, precisely because of this decrease in numbers."

This is an understatement. For what we are dealing with here is not annoyance, but murderous rage. What the loser is obsessed with is a comparison that never goes in his favour. Since the desire for recognition knows no limits, the pain threshold inevitably sinks and the affronts become more and more unbearable. The irritability of the loser increases with every improvement that he notices in the lot of others. The yardstick is never those who are worse off than himself. In his eyes, it is not they who are constantly being insulted, humbled and humiliated, but only ever him, the radical loser.

The question as to why this should be so only adds to his torment. Because it certainly cannot be his own fault. That is inconceivable. Which is why he must find the guilty ones who are responsible for his plight.

But who are these omnipotent, nameless aggressors? Thrown back entirely on his own resources, the answer to this nagging question is beyond the isolated individual. If no ideological program comes to his aid, then his search is unlikely to extend to the wider societal context, looking instead to his immediate surroundings and finding: the unjust superior, the unruly wife, the bad neighbour, the conniving co-worker, the inflexible public official, the doctor who refuses to give him a medical certificate.

But might he not also be facing the machinations of some invisible, anonymous enemy? Then the loser would not need to rely on his own experience: he could fall back on things he heard somewhere. Few people have the gift of inventing themselves a delusion that fits their needs. Consequently, the loser will most often stick to material that floats freely within society. The threatening powers that are out to get him are not hard to locate. The usual suspects are foreigners, secret services, Communists, Americans, big corporations, politicians, unbelievers. And, almost always, the Jews.

For a while, this kind of delusion may bring the loser relief, but it will not be able to actually pacify him. In the long term, it is hard to assert oneself in the face of a hostile world, and he can never entirely rid himself of the suspicion that there might be a simpler explanation, namely that he is responsible, that his humiliation is his own fault, that he does not merit the esteem he craves, and that his own life is worthless. Psychologists call this affliction "identifying with the aggressor". But what is that supposed to mean? It certainly has no meaning for the loser. But if his own life is worthless, why should he care about the lives of others?

"It's my fault." – "The others are responsible." These two claims are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they reinforce each other. The radical loser is unable to think his way out of this vicious circle, and it constitutes the source of his terrible power.

The only way out of the dilemma is to fuse destruction and self-destruction, aggression and auto-aggression. On the one hand, at the moment of his explosion, the loser for once experiences a feeling of true power. His act allows him to triumph over others by annihilating them. And on the other, he does justice to the reverse of this feeling of power, the suspicion that his own existence might be worthless, by putting an end to it.

As an additional bonus, from the moment he resorts to armed force, the outside world, which has never wanted to know anything about him, takes notice of him. The media make sure he is granted an enormous degree of publicity – even if it is for just 24 hours. Television spreads propaganda for his act, thus encouraging potential imitators. For minors, as shown by events in the United States in particular, the temptation this represents is hard to resist.

The logic of the radical loser cannot be grasped in terms of common sense. Common sense cites the instinct of self-preservation as if it were an unquestionable fact of nature, to be taken for granted. Whereas in fact, it is a fragile notion, quite young in historical terms. Self-preservation is referred to by the Greeks, by Hobbes and Spinoza, but it is not considered as a purely natural drive. Instead, according to Immanuel Kant, "the... first duty of the human individual towards himself in the quality of his animalness is self-preservation in his animal nature." Only in the nineteenth century did this duty become an inviolable fact of natural science. Few deviated from this view. Nietzsche objected that physiologists should avoid, "fixing the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being." But among those who would always rather survive, his words have always fallen on deaf ears.

The history of ideas aside, humanity never seems to have expected individual lives to be treated as the supreme good. All early religions set great store by human sacrifice. Later, martyrs were highly valued. (According to Blaise Pascal's fatal maxim, one should "only believe witnesses who allow themselves to be killed.") In most cultures, heroes acquired fame and honour for their fearlessness in the face of death. Until the mass slaughter of World War I, secondary school pupils had to learn the notorious verse from Horace according to which is sweet and honourable to die for one's fatherland. Others claimed that shipping was necessary, but not staying alive; during the Cold War there were those who shouted "Better dead than red!" And what, under perfectly civilian conditions, are we to think of tightrope walkers, extreme sports, motor racing, polar exploration and other forms of potential suicide?

Clearly, the instinct of self-preservation is not up to much. The remarkable fondness of the human species for suicide, down the ages and across all cultures, is proof enough of this. No taboo and no threat of punishment have been able keep people from taking their own lives. This tendency cannot be quantified. Any attempt to grasp it by means of statistics will fail due to the huge number of unrecorded cases.

Sigmund Freud tried to solve the problem theoretically, on an unstable empirical basis, by developing his concept of the death drive. Freud's hypothesis is expressed more clearly in the familiar old wisdom that situations may arise in which humans prefer a terrible end to (real or imagined) terror without end.


II. The collective

But what happens when the radical loser overcomes his isolation, when he becomes socialized, finds a loser-home, from which he can expect not only understanding but also recognition, a collective of people like himself who welcome him, who need him?

Then, the destructive energy that lies within him is multiplied – his unscrupulousness, his amalgam of death-wish and megalomania – and he is rescued from his powerlessness by a fatal sense of omnipotence.

For this to take place, however, a kind of ideological trigger is required to ignite the radical loser and make him explode. As history shows us, offers of this kind have never been in short supply. Their content is of the least importance. They may be religious or political doctrines, nationalist, communist or racist dogmas – any form of sectarianism, however bigoted, is capable of mobilizing the latent energy of the radical loser.

This applies not only to the rank and file but also to their commanders, whose attraction is based in turn on their own self-definition as obsessive losers. It is precisely the leader's deluded traits in which his followers recognize themselves. He is rightly accused of being cynical and calculating. It is only natural that he should despise his followers. He understands them all too well. He knows they are losers and, finally, he thus considers them worthless. And as Elias Canetti put it half a century ago, he therefore takes pleasure in the idea that if possible, everyone else, including his followers, should meet their death before he himself is hanged or consumed by fire in his bunker.

At this point, alongside many other examples from history, one cannot help being reminded of the National Socialist project in Germany. At the end of the Weimar Republic, large sections of the population saw themselves as losers. The objective data tell a clear story. But the economic crisis and mass unemployment would probably not have been enough to bring Hitler to power. For that to happen, it took propaganda aimed at the subjective factor: the blow dealt to people's pride by the defeat of 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles. Most Germans sought to blame others: the victorious powers, the "global Capitalist-Bolshevist conspiracy" and above all, of course, the eternal scapegoat, Judaism. The tormenting feeling of being in the position of the loser could only be compensated for by pursuing an offensive strategy, by seeking refuge in megalomania. From the outset, the Nazis entertained delusions of world domination. As such, their goals were boundless and non-negotiable. In this sense, they were not only unreal, but also non-political.

Consulting a map was never going to be enough to persuade Hitler and his followers that the struggle of one small European country against the rest of the world was hopeless. On the contrary. The radical loser has no notion of resolving conflicts, of compromise that might involve him in a normal network of interests and defuse his destructive energy. The more hopeless his project, the more fanatically he clings to it. There are grounds to suspect that Hitler and his followers were interested not in victory, but in radicalizing and eternalizing their own status as losers.

Their pent up anger discharged itself in a war of unprecedented destruction against all those others who they blamed for their own defeats. First and foremost, it was a matter of destroying the Jews and the opponents of 1919. But they certainly had no intention of sparing the Germans. Their actual objective was not victory, but elimination, downfall, collective suicide, the terrible end. There is no other explanation for the way the Germans fought on in World War II right to the last pile of rubble in Berlin. Hitler himself confirmed this diagnosis when he said that the German people did not deserve to survive. At a huge cost, he achieved what he wanted – he lost. But the Jews, the Poles, the Russians, the Germans and all the others are still around.

The radical loser has not disappeared either. He is still among us. This is inevitable. On every continent, there are leaders who welcome him with open arms. Except that today, they are very rarely associated with the state. In this field too, privatization has made considerable advances. Although it is governments which have at their disposal the greatest potential for extermination, state crime in the conventional sense is now on the defensive worldwide.

To date, few loser-collectives have operated on a global scale, even if they were able to count on international flows of cash and weapon supplies. But the world is teeming with local groupings whose leaders are referred to as warlords or guerrilla chiefs. Their self-appointed militias and paramilitary gangs like to adorn themselves with the title of a liberation organization or other revolutionary attributes. In some media, they are referred to as rebels, a euphemism that probably flatters them. Shining Path, MLC, RCD, SPLA, ELA, LTTE, LRA, FNL, IRA, LIT, KACH, DHKP, FSLN, UVF, JKLF, ELN, FARC, PLF, GSPC, MILF, NPA, PKK, MODEL, JI, NPA, AUC, CPNML, UDA, GIA, RUF, LVF, SNM, ETA, NLA, PFLP, SPM, LET, ONLF, SSDF, PIJ, JEM, SLA, ANO, SPLMA, RAF, AUM, PGA, ADF, IBDA, ULFA, PLFM, ULFBV, ISYF, LURD, KLO, UPDS, NLFT, ATTF ...

"Left" or "Right", it makes no odds. Each of these armed rabbles calls itself an army, boasts of brigades and commandos, self-importantly issuing bureaucratic communiqués and boastful claims of responsibility, acting as if they were the representatives of "the masses". Being convinced, as radical losers, of the worthlessness of their own lives, they do not care about the lives of anyone else either; any concern for survival is foreign to them. And this applies equally to their opponents, to their own followers, and to those with no involvement whatsoever. They have a penchant for kidnapping and murdering people who are trying to relieve the misery of the region they are terrorizing, shooting aid workers and doctors and burning down every last hospital in the area with a bed or a scalpel – for they have trouble distinguishing between mutilation and self-mutilation.

But none of these mobs has been able to keep up with globalization. In cases where their ideological exploitation focuses on national and ethnic conflicts, this is only natural. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, groups seeing themselves in the tradition of internationalism have forfeited the support of a superpower in terms of propaganda and logistics. Under the pressure of global capital, they have abandoned their fantasies of world domination and now claim only to represent the interests of their local clientele.

Since this cut-off point, only one violent movement has been capable of acting globally – Islamism. It is undertaking a large-scale attempt to siphon off the religious energy of a world faith with around 1.3 billion believers that is not only still very much alive, but which even in purely demographic terms is also expanding on every continent. Although this Umma is subject to much inner fragmentation and badly affected by national and social conflicts, the ideology of Islamism is an ideal means of mobilizing radical losers because of the way it amalgamates religious, political and social motives.

A further promise of success lies in the movement's organizational model. Turning its back on the strict centralism of earlier groupings, it has replaced the omniscient and omnipotent central committee with a flexible network: a highly original innovation that is entirely of its time.

Besides this, however, the Islamists are perfectly happy to plunder the arsenal of their predecessors. It is often overlooked that modern terrorism is a European invention of the nineteenth century. Its most important ancestors came from Czarist Russia, but it can also look back on a long history in Western Europe. In recent times, the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s has proved a source of inspiration, with Islamists borrowing many of its symbols and techniques. The style of their announcements, the use of video recordings, the emblematic significance of the Kalashnikov, even the gestures, body language and dress, all this shows how much they have learned from these western role models.

There is also no mistaking other similarities, such as the fixation with written authorities. The place of Marx and Lenin is taken by the Koran, references are made not to Gramsci but to Sayyid Qutb. Instead of the international proletariat, it takes as its revolutionary subject the Umma, and as its avant-garde and self-appointed representative of the masses it takes not The Party but the widely branching conspiratorial network of Islamist fighters. Although the movement can draw on older rhetorical forms which to outsiders may sound high-flown or big-mouthed, it owes many of its idées fixes to its Communist enemy: history obeys rigid laws, victory is inevitable, deviationists and traitors are to be exposed and then, in fine Leninist tradition, bombarded with ritual insults.

The movement's list of favourite foes is also short on surprises: America, the decadent West, international capital, Zionism. The list is completed by the unbelievers, that is to say the remaining 5.2 billion people on the planet. Not forgetting apostate Muslims who may be found among the Shiites, Ibadhis, Alawites, Zaidites, Ahmadiyyas, Wahhabis, Druze, Sufis, Kharijites, Ishmaelites or other religious communities.


III. The spectacle

In one respect, however, the Islamists are without doubt a twenty-first-century phenomenon: where their understanding of the media is concerned, they leave their predecessors far behind. Earlier disciples of terror also relied on "propaganda through action", but the kind of worldwide attention achieved today by a nebulous grouping like Al Qaida was not granted to them. Trained by television, computer technology, the Internet and advertising, Islamist terror now gets higher viewer ratings than any football World Cup. The all-important massacres are staged in Hollywood-inspired style, modelled on disaster films, splatter movies and science fiction thrillers. This too is evidence of a dependency on the hated West. In the media output of terrorism, the Society of the Spectacle as described by the Situationists comes into its own.

More momentous still, however, is the strategic use of suicide attacks, an invincible weapon that cannot be seen by surveillance satellites and which can be deployed practically anywhere. It is also extremely cheap. In addition to these advantages, this form of terror also exerts an irresistible attraction on the radical loser. It allows him to combine destruction and self-destruction at the same time as acting out both his megalomaniac fantasies and his self-hate. Cowardice is the last thing he can be accused of. The courage that is his hallmark is the courage of despair. His triumph consists in the fact that he can be neither fought nor punished, since he takes care of that himself.

Contrary to what the West appears to believe, the destructive energy of Islamist actions is directed mainly against Muslims. This is not a tactical error, not a case of "collateral damage". In Algeria alone, Islamist terror has cost the lives of at least 50,000 fellow Algerians. Other sources speak of as many as 150,000 murders, although the military and the secret services were also involved. In Iraq and Afghanistan, too, the number of Muslim victims far outstrips the death toll among foreigners. Furthermore, terrorism has been highly detrimental not only to the image of Islam but also to the living conditions of Muslims around the world.

The Islamists are as unconcerned about this as the Nazis were about the downfall of Germany. As the avant-garde of death, they have no regard for the lives of their fellow believers. In the eyes of the Islamists, the fact that most Muslims have no desire to blow themselves and others sky high only goes to show that they deserve no better than to be liquidated themselves. After all, the aim of the radical loser is to make as many other people into losers as possible. As the Islamists see it, the fact that they are in the minority can only be because they are the chosen few.

Experts around the world are not the only ones wondering how the Islamist movement has been able to recruit so many activists with its promises, far outdoing its secular rivals. No clear answer is in sight. All that is clear is that there must be explanations in the history of the Arab civilization that brought forth the world religion of Islam. This civilization reached its apogee at the time of the Caliphate. At this time, it was far superior to Europe in military, economic and cultural terms. The Arab world views this period with misty-eyed nostalgia; even today, 800 years later, it plays a central role in the consciousness of the region. In the intervening period, the power, the prestige, the cultural and economic weight of the Arab world has been in continual decline. Such an unparalleled demise is a puzzle and a sore point, generating an acute sense of loss. The Indian-born Muslim poet Hussain Hali (1837-1914) expressed this in his epic poem The Ebb and Flow of Islam:

"The historians doing research today
whose scientific methods are magnificent,
who plumb the archives of the world
and explore the surface of the earth –
the Arabs fuelled the fire in their hearts,
their rapid gait was learned from the Arabs."

Looking down from this high ground, Hali describes the decline over time, in several stanzas, the last of which reads:

"We are neither trustworthy government officials
nor proud towards courtiers,
we do not earn respect in the sciences,
nor do we excel in crafts and industry."

It is not easy to put oneself in the position of a collective that has experienced such a downfall extending over a period of hundreds of years. No wonder the blame is put on a hostile outside world in the form of the Spaniards, the Crusaders, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the European colonial powers and the American empire. But other societies such as India, China and Korea have suffered no less under the rule of invaders and from the attacks and raids of foreign powers. But in spite of this, they have successfully faced the challenges of modernity and risen to become important players on a global scale. The question therefore inevitably poses itself as to the endogenous causes of the downfall of the Arab world. As long as this question remains unanswered, the Arab world's enormous scientific, technical and industrial deficit will remain unexplained and inexplicable.

The Arab world's sense of pride is hurt not only by military inferiority to the West. Far worse is the impact of intellectual and material dependency. In the last 400 years, not a single noteworthy invention was made by the Arabs. Rudolph Chimelli quotes one Iraqi author as saying: "If an Arab had invented the steam engine in the 18th century, it would not have been built." No historian would contradict him. This means that for any Arab who cares to think about it, the very objects on which everyday life in the Maghreb and the Middle East depends represent an unspoken humiliation – every fridge, every telephone, every power socket, every screwdriver, not to mention hi-tech products. Even the parasitic oil states, frittering away their future security, are obliged to import the technology from abroad; without Western geologists, drilling experts and civil engineers, fleets of tankers and refineries they would not even be capable of exploiting their own resources. In this light, even their wealth is a curse that constantly reminds them of their dependency. Not including the revenue from crude oil, the economic performance of the entire Arab world today counts for less than that of a single Finnish telecommunications company.

The Arab world has proved similarly unproductive where its political institutions are concerned. Imported forms of nationalism and socialism have failed everywhere, and democratic stirrings are routinely nipped in the bud. Of course, blanket statements of this kind can only aim to say something about the state of the whole. They tell us nothing about individual capabilities, that are subject the world over to the genetic normal distribution. But in many Arab countries, anyone who expresses independent ideas puts their own life at risk. Which is why many of the best scientists, engineers, writers and political thinkers live in exile, a brain drain that can certainly be compared with the exodus of Jewish elites from Germany in the 1930s, and which is likely to have similarly far-reaching consequences.

Although the methods of repression that are customary in Arab countries refer back to the traditions of oriental despotism, in this field too, the unbelievers have proved indispensable as teachers. From machine pistols through to poison gas, they invented and exported all of the weapons that have been used in the Arab-Islamic world. Arab rulers also studied and adopted the methods of the GPU and the Gestapo. And of course, Islamist terrorism is also unable to do without such borrowings. Its entire technical arsenal, from explosives to satellite telephones, from aircraft to television cameras, comes from the hated West.

That such an all-encompassing dependency should be experienced as unbearable makes perfect sense. Especially among displaced migrants, regardless of their economic situation, the confrontation with Western civilisation leads to a lasting culture shock. The apparent superabundance of products, opinions, economic and sexual options leads to a double bind of attraction and revulsion, and the abiding memory of the backwardness of one's own culture becomes intolerable. The consequences for one's own sense of self-esteem are clear, as is the urge to compensate by means of conspiracy theories and acts of vengeance. In this situation, many people cannot resist the temptation of the Islamists' offer to punish others for their own failings.

Solutions to the dilemma of the Arab world are of no interest to Islamism, which does not go beyond negation. Strictly speaking, it is a non-political movement, since it makes no negotiable demands. Put bluntly, it would like the majority of the planet's inhabitants, all the unbelievers and apostates, to capitulate or be killed.

This burning desire cannot be fulfilled. The destructive energy of the radical losers is doubtless sufficient to kill thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and to cause lasting damage to the civilization on which they have declared war. One indication of the potential impact of a few dozen human bombs is the level of day-to-day controls that has come to be the norm.

But this is actually the least of the losses to civilization resulting from terrorism. It can create a general atmosphere of fear and trigger counter-reactions based on panic. It boosts the power and influence of the political police, of the secret services, of the arms industry and of private security operatives; it encourages the passing of increasingly repressive laws and leads to the loss of hard-won freedoms. No conspiracy theories are required to understand that there are people who welcome these consequences of terror. There is nothing better than an external enemy with which to justify surveillance and repression. Where this leads is shown by the example of Russian domestic policy.

The Islamists can consider all this a success. But it makes no difference to the actual power relations. Even the spectacular attack on the World Trade Center was not able to shake the supremacy of the United States. The New York Stock Exchange reopened the Monday after the attacks, and the long-term impact on the international financial system and world trade was minimal.

The consequences for Arab societies, on the other hand, are fatal. For the most devastating long-term effects will be born not by the West, but by the religion in whose name the Islamists act. Not just refugees, asylum seekers and migrants will suffer as a result. Beyond any sense of justice, entire peoples will have to pay a huge price for the actions of their self-appointed representatives. The idea that their prospects, which are bad enough as it is, could be improved through terrorism is absurd. History offers no example of a regressive society that stifled its own productive potential being capable of survival in the long term.

The project of the radical loser, as currently seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, consists of organizing the suicide of an entire civilisation. But the likelihood of their succeeding in an unlimited generalization of their death cult is negligible. Their attacks represent a permanent background risk, like ordinary everyday deaths by accident on the streets, to which we have become accustomed.

In a global society that constantly produces new losers, this is something we will have to live with.


2. A Killing Concept -- by Scott McLemee

Inspired less by Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s impressive turn in Capote than by the condition of my checking account, I have been considering the idea of turning out a true-crime book — a lurid potboiler, but one fortified with a little cultural history, albeit of an eccentric kind. The idea has been stewing for a couple of months now. My working title is BTK and the Beatnik. Here’s the pitch.

In late August, The New York Times ran a short profile of Colin Wilson, the last surviving member of the Angry Young Men — a literary group that emerged in Britain during the mid-1950s at just about the time Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were interrupting the presumed consensus of Eisenhower-era America. Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Osborne as the Angries’ most prominent novelist, poet, and playwright, respectively. And Colin Wilson — whose quasi-existentialist credo The Outsider appeared in May 1956, when he was 24 — was taken up by the press as the Angry thinker.

“The Outsider,” wrote Wilson, “is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeoisie, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. He sees too deep and too much, and what he sees is essentially chaos. ” He developed this theme through a series of commentaries on literary and philosophical texts, all handled with a certain vigorous confidence that impressed the reviewers very much.

As, indeed, did Wilson’s personal story, which was a publicist’s dream come true. Born to a working-class family, he had quit school at 16, taken odd jobs while reading his way through modern European literature, and camped out in a public park to save on rent as he wrote and studied at the library of the British Museum. Wilson was not shy about proclaiming his own genius. For several months, the media lent him a bullhorn to do it. He posed for photographs with his sleeping bag, and otherwise complied with his fans’ desire that he be something like a cross between Albert Camus and James Dean.

The backlash was not long in coming. It started with his second book, Religion and the Rebel, which got savage notices when it appeared in 1957, despite being virtually indistinguishable from The Outsider in subject and method. “We are tired of the boy Colin,” as one literary journalist is supposed to have said at the time.

Roundly abused, though no wit abashed, he kept on writing, and has published dozens of novels and works of nonfiction over the intervening decades. The Outsider has never gone out of print in English; it developed a solid following in Arabic translation, and appeared a few years ago in Chinese.

The piece in The Times came in the wake of his recent autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose — a book revealing that Wilson is still very confident of his own place as perhaps the greatest writer of our time. This is a minority opinion. The reviews his memoir got in the British press were savage. So far it has not received much attention in the United States. Wilson has a cult following here; and the few scholarly monographs on his work tend to have that cult-following feel.

Perhaps the most forceful claim for his importance was made by Joyce Carol Oates, who provided an introduction to the American edition of his science-fiction novel The Philosopher’s Stone (1969). Oates hailed Wilson for “consciously attempting to imagine a new image for man ... freed of ambiguity, irony, and the self-conscious narrowness of the imagination we have inherited from 19th century Romanticism.”

Her praise seems to me a bit overstated. But I have a certain fondness for that novel, having discovered it during Christmas break while in high school. It set me off on a fascination with Wilson’s work that seems, with hindsight, perfectly understandable. Adolescence is a good time to read The Outsider. For that matter, Wilson himself was barely out of it when he wrote the book. Although now a septuagenarian, the author now displays the keen egomania of someone a quarter that age.

Now, just as The Times was running its profile of the last Angry Young Man, the sentencing hearing for Dennis Rader, the confessed BTK killer, was underway in Kansas. News accounts mentioned, usually in passing, his claims that the striking of sadistic murders he committed over the years were the result of something he called “Factor X.” He did not elaborate on the nature of Factor X, though reporters often did often note that the killer saw himself as demonically possessed. (He also referred to having been dropped on his head as a child, which may have been one of Rader’s cold-blooded little jokes.)

But in a television interview, Rader indicated that Factor X, while mysterious, was also something in his control. “I used it,” he said.

A jolting remark — at least to anyone familiar with Colin Wilson’s work. Over the years, Wilson has developed a whole battery of concepts (or at least of neologisms) to spell out his hunch that the Outsider has access to levels of consciousness not available to more conformist souls. Something he dubbed “Faculty X” has long been central to Wilson’s improvised psychological theories, as well as to his fiction. (The Philosopher’s Stone, which Oates liked so much, is all about Faculty X.)

As Wilson describes it, Faculty X is the opposite of the normal, dulled state of consciousness. It is our potential to grasp, with an incandescent brilliance and intensity of focus, the actuality of the world, including the reality of other times and places. “Our preconceptions, our fixed ideas about ourselves,” as Wilson puts, “means that we remain unaware of this power.” We trudge along, not engaging the full power of our mental abilities.

Most of us have had similar insights, often while recovering from a bad cold. But the contrast between mental states hit Wilson like a bolt of lightening. In his recent memoir, he writes, “The basic aim of human evolution, I decided, is to achieve Faculty X.”

A few artists are able to summon Faculty X at will. But so, in rather less creative form, do psychopathic killers. For that is the stranger side of Colin Wilson’s work — the part overlooked by The Times, for example, which repeated the standard Wilsonian claim that he was a philosopher of optimism.

Cheerful as that may sound, a very large part of his work over the years has consisted of books about serial murders. They, too, are Outsiders — in revolt against “a decadent, frivolous society” that gives them no outlet for the development of Faculty X. Such an individual “feels no compunction in committing acts of violence,” as Wilson explains, “because he feels only contempt for society and its values.”

These quotations are from his book Order of Assassins: The Psychology of Murder (1972), but they might have been drawn from any of dozens of other titles. Beginning with the Jack the Ripper-sque character Austin Nunne in his first novel, Ritual in the Dark (1960), Wilson has populated his fiction with an array of what can only be called existentialist serial killers.

In these novels, the narrator is usually an alienated intellectual who sounds ... well, quite a bit like Colin Wilson does in his nonfiction books. The narrator will spend a few hundred pages tracking down a panty-fetishist sex killer, or something of the kind — often developing a strong sense of identification with, or at least respect for, the murderer. There may be a moment when he recoils from the senselessness of the crimes. But there is never (oddly enough) any really credible expression of sympathy for the victims.

The tendency to see the artist and the criminal as figures dwelling outside the norms of society is an old one, of course; and we are now about 180 years downstream from Thomas De Quincy’s essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” But there is something particularly cold and morbid about Wilson’s treatment of the theme. It calls to mind the comment film critic Anthony Lane made about Quentin Tarantino: “He knows everything about violence and nothing about suffering.” It comes as little surprise to learn that a girlfriend from Wilson’s bohemian days recoiled from one of his earliest efforts at fiction: “She later admitted,” he writes, “that it made her wonder if I was on the verge of becoming a homicidal maniac.”

So did BTK have Wilson’s philosophical ruminations in mind when he was “using” Factor X to commit a string of sadistic murders? Did he see himself as an Outsider – a tormented genius, expressing his contempt for (in Wilson’s phrase) “the comfortable, insulated world” of modernity?

Circumstantial evidence indicates that it is a lead worth pursuing. We know that that Rader studied criminal justice administration at Wichita State University, receiving his B.A. in 1979. Wilson’s brand of pop-philosophizing on murder as a form of revolt (a manifestation of “man’s striving to become a god”) is certainly the kind of thing an adventurous professor might have used to stimulate class discussion.

And it would be extremely surprising to find that Rader never read Wilson’s work. Given the relatively small market for books devoted entirely to existential musings, Wilson has produced an incredible volume of true-crime writing over the years – beginning with his Encyclopedia of Murder (1961) and continuing through dozens of compilations of serial-killer lore, many available in the United States as rather trashy paperbacks.

The earliest messages Rader sent to police in the mid-1970s reveal disappointment at not getting sufficient press coverage. He even coined the nickname BTK to speed things along. Clearly this was someone with a degree of status anxiety about his role in serial-killing history. One imagines him turning the pages of Wilson’s pulp trilogy Written in Blood (1989) or the two volumes of The Killers Among Us (1995) – all published by Bantam in the U.S. – with some disappointment at not having made the finals.

Well, it’s not too late. We know from his memoirs that Colin Wilson has engaged in extensive correspondence with serial-killing Outsiders who have ended up behind bars. It seems like a matter of time before he turns out a book on BTK.

Unless, of course, I beat him to it. The key is to overcome the gray fog of everyday, dull consciousness by activating my dormant reserves of Faculty X. Fortunately it has never been necessary for me to kill anyone to manage this. Two large cups of French Roast will usually do the trick.