Dealing with Anders Behring Breivik

I sat down on the sofa last night with my copy of Aftenposten, turning the pages in hopes of finding something to read that wasn’t about Anders Behring Breivik, or, paradoxically, the surge of immigrants coming to Norway (an increase in 41% from 2005-2009).

“Vanskelig å diagnostisere Behring Breivik” (“Difficult to Diagnose Behring Breivik”)  read a headline that I flipped past, and then, with agitation returned to.

My husband sat next to me on the sofa, peering intently into his iPhone. “Are you concentrating on something?” I asked him. “Or can I tell you what I’m thinking?”

I do this often: use him as a sounding board. He knows that most of the time he is just supposed to listen to me rant, but I know I can trust him to tell me when my ideas have gone completely off the deep end, or when I actually might be onto something.

“Is it possible that we just want to believe Breivik is nuts so that we don’t have to listen to him? Maybe that’s why he is difficult to diagnose. Maybe there isn’t anything wrong with him psychologically.”

I was thinking of Foucault’s theory that societies need to categorize people into normal and abnormal to gain power and control; thus, as a society we decide that certain behaviors are psychoses (for more, read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.) In other words, it serves a particular social purpose to believe that Breivik is crazy, because then we can say: he is not like us. It is much harder to believe that he is sane and could actually kill people for his beliefs. Then we might have to take what he says seriously.

“The guys is nuts,” Aidan responded. “I mean, look, he has deluded himself into believing it was right to kill lots of people.”

“What about the army, then? Soldiers believe it’s right to kill for ideological reasons.” We argued back and forth about this point. I began to believe in neither my arguments, nor those of my husband, which happens often.

Ending the debate with a deep sigh, I shook the pages of my newspaper back into a readable form, and found myself intensely engaged in the court transcripts of Breivik’s interrogation yesterday. No more than ten lines in, I reported to Aidan that I changed my mind: “He’s completely bonkers.”

It doesn’t take a psychologist to see that Breivik lives in a world completely disengaged from reality, a world in which he believes his arguments make such perfect sense, are so logical, that he could surely convince the rest of us of them if only given a platform.

Breivik described to the court his disgust at having to walk through the piles of dead bodies that he himself was responsible for: “I have never experienced anything so gruesome,” he claimed.

He spoke with eerie matter-of-factness about how he tricked a group of youth into believing that he was a police officer:

“It was actually just a coincidence that I saw a head sticking up from behind the pump house. And I realized that there were many people [hiding] there . . . I think I began with: ‘Have you seen him? Do you know where the shots came from?’ And then there were some who pointed in one direction. It was to lure them out so that I could execute them . . . I said there was a boat that would take them safely away, that they must come out now . . . They seemed very skeptical. But there were some, two or three of them, who seemed very relieved. I said: ‘You must come now.” And then there were three who came to me.”

Breivik shot and killed fourteen people at that particular spot on the island.

When asked by the prosecutor whether he had any feelings for his victims, Breivik responded, “I know what I have done . . . but one must remember that I, too, lost my whole family on 22 July, I lost all my friends.”

As spell-binding as statements like this are for giving us insight into the mind of a mass murderer, they divert us from Breivik’s message – a message the government and the press are intentionally suppressing by not televising the trial, and choosing what to print in the papers. After all, Brievik did say that the killings were only the first part of his campaign; he hoped the trial would comprise his propaganda phase.

But what would happen if we actually listened to Breivik’s message, if we could filter out his god complex and listen to the core of what he is trying to say? Would we agree with him that multiculturalism doesn’t work, or at least not in the “let’s all be happy about difference and just get along” way? Would we, too, want to protect Norway from the change that necessarily comes with an increasing immigrant community? (And would anyone dare to agree with Breivik and join the exiled ranks of Fjordman or certain hounded and now back-peddling members of the FrP?)

Norwegians do have very good reasons to be proud of their country, and there is much here that should be protected. Norway consistently ranks first in world indexes of prosperity, wellness, and human development; the Global Peace Index ranked it as the most peaceful country in the world; it is the world’s fourth wealthiest (GDP per capita), and its government has the world’s largest pension fund.

Norway works. It works exceptionally well. But Breivik knows there is more to it than that: Norway works, as long as everyone agrees to be Norwegian.

What does it mean when a country refuses to join the EU and taxes imported cheese to protect its farmers and encourage the purchase of local variants like Nor-gonzola? What views about being “non-Norwegian” are there when, during a butter crisis, people stew for weeks about whether they could/should/would opt for importing foreign butter, or would simply prefer to go without? (And when the foreign butter did arrive, large numbers refused to buy it.) What underlying values are at play when social integration into the culture of Norway is deemed the highest goal, more important, in fact, than learning to read and write in the first grade?

Breivik claims he was acting to protect his nation of Norway from multiculturalism, from immigrants, from foreign influence. Is it possible, then, that he simply took to extremes the very values that define what it means to be Norwegian?

Might there be good reasons to be critical of multiculturalism and immigration? Might there be good reasons to cling to the country we have now and fear the country it might become in the future? Globalization has coerced us into viewing the world in terms of flux, flow, open borders, dismantled barriers; we are one world, we are citizens of the world. But which of us actually lives as though we can float, problem free, from culture to culture, without ever feeling the blisters from the ill fit?

After I wrote the post titled “Normal,” I was surprised at how many readers resonated with a need for having things just the way they want them to be. We actually like our normal and predictable lives. Is it taboo to believe that in this tiny way we understand Breivik?

[A final note: Because Breivik has wounded Norway so deeply, I feel I must add that I in no way sympathize with Breivik’s thoughts or actions. In this post I merely intended to raise questions about the paradox between being a protectionist nation with strongly-felt patriotism that at the same time points a chastising finger to those with anti-immigration sentiments. I wonder where globalization will ultimately lead us and if it will ever be possible to exist in a world without nations or citizenship. As always, I welcome comments and criticism!]