The Life of I Updated Edition

The New Culture of Narcissism

Anne Manne

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780522868982
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Far from being the work of a madman, Anders Breivik's murderous rampage in Norway was the action of an extreme narcissist. As the dead lay around him, he held up a finger asking for a Band-Aid.Written with the pace of a psychological thriller, The Life of I is a compelling account of the rise of narcissism in individuals and society. Manne examines the Lance Armstrong doping scandal and the alarming rise of sexual assaults in sport and the military, as well as the vengeful killings of Elliot Rodger in California. She looks at narcissism in the pursuit of fame and our obsession with 'making it'. She goes beyond the usual suspects of social media and celebrity culture to the deeper root of the issue: how a new narcissistic character-type is being fuelled by a cult of the self and the pursuit of wealth in a hypercompetitive consumer society. The Life of I also offers insights from the latest work in psychology, looking at how narcissism develops. But Manne also shows that there is an alternative: how to transcend narcissism, to be fully alive to the presence of others; how to create a world where love and care are no longer turned inward.

Part One

Narcissism and the Individual

Chapter 1

The Chosen One

Paranoia is the self-cure for insignificance … the paranoiac is at the centre of a world which has no centre … to be hated makes him feel real: he has made his presence felt. To be unforgivable is to be unforgettable.

Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst

IT WAS THE THE first day of the holiday season in Norway. On the idyllic island of Utøya, in the great tradition of the Norwegian labour movement, young idealists gathered for their annual camp. In a tent city sprawled cosily among the trees, the teenagers could meet, passionately discuss politics, talk and sing around the campfires, go hiking and fall in love. In the tiny coves beneath the rocks, the water from the lake, deep and cold, lapped quietly on the shore.

Just then news of a bomb blast came across the radio, shattering the calm of the day. Terrorists, it seemed, had struck at the very centre of the peaceful Scandinavian nation. Eight were dead, many more injured. Frightened parents texted their children, telling them how glad they were that they were safe at Utøya.

A handsome blond man, heavily armed and dressed in police garb, walked calmly towards the youngsters, beckoning them to come closer, telling them, ‘You will be safe with me. I’m a cop.’ Alarmed by news of the bomb, and reassured by the fact of his uniform, many of them began to move towards him. Then he shouted, ‘You all must die!’ And opened fire.

As their friends fell dead around them, the survivors took flight and ran, screaming in terror as the uniformed figure whooped with joy, laughing and cheering, as he picked them off one by one. They ran onto beaches and sheltered anywhere they could find: in tents, in buildings and under rocks. Some hid beneath corpses of the fallen. They dived into the icy lake, trying to swim away. Some could not bear the cold and turned back, only to find him standing above them, spraying bullets into the swimmers. As the water in the small coves turned red, they begged for their lives. Then the killer turned and pursued the others, who had fled through the trees before realising that, on the island, there was nowhere to run to. They hugged each other, sent text messages to parents saying they loved them, then turned off their mobile phones lest any noise—a tell-tale beep or even the sound of their ragged breathing—give away their hiding place. Few of those shot survived; the killer had chosen his weapon with care, using special dum-dum bullets that explode inside the body, causing maximum internal damage. And he shot each person multiple times.

The bomb and the holiday combined meant that police were horribly slow to arrive, allowing the killer over an hour to continue his rampage unimpeded. By the time they arrived, the gunman surrendered easily, showing the same calmness as when he had pulled the trigger. He stood with his hands above his head, his weapons lying a little way off behind him. At the end of his killing spree, sixty-nine young people lay dead on the island and eight by the bomb blast downtown. In a photograph appearing around the world, the gunman was shown being driven away, wearing a bright red sweater, unshaven, flanked by two heavily armed policemen. His expression was serene; he looked pleased, satisfied with a job well done.

The political Right around the world quickly declared, in advance of the evidence, that it was Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who were behind the attacks. However, the killer, Anders Behring Breivik, was no Islamist. Rather he was a 32-year-old Norwegian with a reasonably privileged and conventional background. His parents, a diplomat father and a mother who was a nurse, were divorced. In fact, he was much more sympathetic to the Right’s own attacks on ‘political correctness’ than anything else.

All this was clear from Breivik’s own words. Just before his crimes, he had posted on the internet a bizarre, rambling but coherent 1500-page manifesto he entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. Far from being an Islamic fundamentalist, Breivik quoted copiously from the Right’s own ideological and populist rants—from the US Tea Party to the German-speaking PI-News blog, a European website devoted to ‘politically incorrect’ views. As one of the bloggers on PI-News admitted after the killing, everything in Breivik’s manifesto could largely be found on this forum: virulent anti-Muslim sentiment; the desire to purge not just Norway but all of Europe of its Muslim invaders and their treasonous allies; a hatred of all those progressives and multiculturalists Breivik called ‘Cultural Marxists’, who supported immigration, feminism, sexual liberalism and the European Union.

In a curious echo of the Islamic fundamentalists he opposed, Breivik saw his massacre as a pivotal historic moment in the clash of civilisations: between Christian Europe and the invading Muslims; between the old patriarchal order and modern sexual depravity and promiscuity; between male domination and supremacy and what he saw as the disorder of the ‘matriarchal, feminized’ world that he had endured growing up, a civilisation brought undone by feminism.

The massacre on Utøya, Breivik declared, was no less than the opening salvo in a war in defence of Western civilisation, on behalf of a group he called the Knights Templar. Breivik claimed he had travelled to the United Kingdom, where the group had recently reactivated the medieval order of knights to fight the modern scourge, the conspiracy of global Muslims and their treacherous allies, Cultural Marxists. Breivik had, he claimed, been ‘ordinated as the 8th justicar knight for the PCCTS, Knights Templar Europe’. It was this name that Breivik used to sign off his last diary entry before carrying out his attacks.

The Knights Templar, an elect group of fighters and assassins drawing their identity and inspiration from medieval times—one called himself Richard, after Christian crusading king Richard the Lionheart—would fight against European treason, depravity and disorder, against sexual licentiousness and the usurping Islamic infidel. ‘God will anoint you with his power to go into battle,’ Breivik told his fellow knights. Breivik, then, was a political assassin who had wanted, for political reasons, to execute the flower of Norway’s leftist youth.

All political assassins, however, have a cradle. The first real clues to Breivik’s family background emerged in the passages of his manifesto concerning women. Feminism was a central modern evil for Breivik. European women, he argued, had been ruined by it. They no longer had enough children to keep at bay the threat from the faster breeding Muslims. To this end, in his future utopia they would be discouraged from having anything above a bachelor’s degree. They would have just three options: ‘be a nun, be a prostitute, or marry men and bear children’.

His most vindictive chapters were aimed at his mother and sister. He derided the materialism of his half-sister, who now resided in the United States: ‘The acquisition of wealth is the driving force in her life.’ He railed against them both as ‘promiscuous’ and representatives of a degraded, degenerate modern humanity. He condemned his half-sister Elisabeth for contracting chlamydia ‘after having more than 40 sexual partners (more than 15 of them Chippendale strippers who are known to be bearers of various diseases)’.

His mother, he claimed, had multiple sexual partners before developing meningitis from a venereal disease, contracted from his stepfather, who was a ‘sexual beast with over 500 partners’. This had left her with ‘the mind of a ten-year-old’ and a stent in the brain. Rather than express compassion for his mother’s predicament, Breivik was concerned only with male family dishonour: ‘Both my sister and mother have not only shamed me, but they have shamed themselves and our family, a family that was broken in the first place due to the secondary effects of the feministic/sexual revolution.’

Despite borrowing from Far Right thinking, the gun-toting Breivik did not appear familiar with the conservative body of thought that argues that one response to a father-absent childhood may be a hyper-masculinity marked by misogyny and violence: ‘I do not approve of the super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing as it completely lacked discipline and contributed to feminise me to a certain degree.’

Perhaps this fear of being feminised can account for Breivik’s hyper-masculine photos at the end of his manifesto. He smiles and poses in profile shots, wearing a self-designed Knights Templar uniform or military garb festooned with medals, or, perhaps weirdest of all, a tight wetsuit, as he brandishes a sniper’s rifle, with a caption on one sleeve, ‘Marxist Hunter’. Presumably the wetsuit was designed to give him extra muscle definition. These carefully stage-managed photos were also posted on Facebook.

Soon other facts about Breivik’s life began to emerge. The word ‘ordinary’ occurs again and again. Yet although he seemed to be a quiet, mild and undistinguished product of the Norwegian middle class, from an affluent area of Oslo, his background was not quite as placid as the oft-mentioned manicured window boxes and neat apartment buildings implied. It transpired that his father, Jens, had deserted Anders and his mother when he was about one year old. Jens then fought Anders’ mother, Wenche, in an ugly custody battle for the son he hardly saw.

The custody bid failed. Over the years, Breivik saw his father off and on, before Jens abruptly severed all contact with him—and indeed all his children—after Breivik became a teenage graffiti artist. The young man expressed resentment of his father and the severance of the relationship: ‘I have not spoken to my father since he isolated himself when I was fifteen—he was not very happy about my graffiti phase.’ Commenting on the fact that his father had also cut off contact with his other children, Breivik remarked, ‘So you can see whose fault that was.’

Evidence emerged of rejection, of failure and of extreme sensitivity to slights. Breivik left higher education before finishing a degree, preferring to self-educate. In his teens he was rejected by the army as ‘unfit’, for undisclosed reasons. While in his manifesto he claimed his business ventures were a success, it is abundantly clear they were a disaster. By his early twenties he had gambled in the stock market, invested in a bogus Nigerian internet scam for ‘blood diamonds’, lost a lot of money (more than a million kroner) and been declared bankrupt. It was at this point, the psychiatrists evaluating him said, that Breivik became increasingly isolated. He had few relationships with women although mentioned using the services of prostitutes just before the massacre. The only evidence of a girlfriend was an internet date he brought to Oslo from Belarus; he treated her so badly that the relationship went nowhere. She decried his ‘male chauvinism’. He had no idea, she said, how to treat women except as inferiors. After this rejection, Breivik made no more attempts to have any relationships with women. Friends referred to his large ego, and his anger when women at his workplace preferred men of Asian descent. He wore makeup, and wanted to look like the British soccer star David Beckham. He feared he was ‘ugly’, and had undergone plastic surgery in his early twenties, producing an Aryan nose and a perfectly cleft chin. He was obsessed with bodybuilding, took testosterone and steroids to build muscle, and moved in social circles of gym buddies equally obsessed. At the time of his crime, however, he had lost touch with all friends. He had moved back to live with his mother, was rarely able to be prised out for even a coffee, and devoted a year of his life to playing the violent video game World of Warcraft night and day. His friends were worried about him, and about his increasingly extreme anti-Muslim ideas. By the time of the attacks, he was an isolated loner.

Once in jail, when he was asked by psychiatrists what he thought his victims might have felt, Breivik spoke only about his own suffering. Enacting all that carnage had been traumatic: ‘On this day, I was waging a one-man war against all the regimes of Western Europe. I felt traumatised every second that blood and brains were spurting out. War is hell.’ His greater interest was in how his death toll stacked up against similar mass shootings. And Breivik had other preoccupations. He was extremely sensitive about his appearance, and was highly disturbed by being unshaven while interviewed. His one moment of regret was over his earlier decision to have plastic surgery, which resulted in the ‘loss of his great Nordic nose’.

When the first team of psychiatric experts gave their verdict, they declared that Anders Behring Breivik suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. They argued he was in a state of psychosis when he committed the crimes. He was of unsound mind and therefore unable to stand trial. Rather than being imprisoned, he should be detained in a closed, purpose-built psychiatric facility. The prosecutor concurred, offering no opposition.

Their report caused an immediate controversy. The opposition fell into three categories. For the victims’ grieving families, it seemed—after all they had suffered—a monumental cop-out. How could justice be done unless Breivik faced trial, judgement, and punishment for his crime? It seemed as if he was escaping responsibility through the ruse of mental illness. Indeed, some argued, this was the intention. No trial meant no publicity or grandstanding; it denied the oxygen of attention not just to Breivik but also to other right-wing extremists and copycat psychopaths. The Norwegian justice system, which provided for a maximum sentence of only twenty-one years—too humane to deal with a crime of Breivik’s enormity—could be sidestepped. In permanent psychiatric detention he would not be eligible for release—perhaps ever. Very quickly there were reports of a new, specialist, purpose-built psychiatric facility to house him. He could be detained indefinitely. The conclusion that he was a paranoid schizophrenic was likely a profoundly political one.

Others felt the diagnosis robbed the crime of its clear political dimension. This argument was perhaps best expressed in the e-book On Utøya, published shortly after the event, edited by Guy Rundle, Tad Tietze and Elizabeth Humphrys. Breivik’s purpose, the book argued, was a mass assassination of the young political Left. It was a clear, unequivocal political act. To treat it as a matter of ‘madness’, as if it had no meaning beyond his individual psychoses, was to rob the culture of an opportunity to understand its significance. For decades, the conservative political class, from conventional politicians to Far Right extremists, had been upping the ante with increasingly virulent anti-Muslim and anti-political correctness rhetoric. Breivik’s ideology was a horrifying end point of a veritable hate fest occurring in blogs, magazines and even mainstream publications.

Across the internet for decades, extremists on the Right had given nourishment and succour to each other, raging against Islam, multiculturalism, tolerance, openness, feminism and other values emerging from the great cultural revolution of the 1960s. This toxic political phlegm, which had spread across the globe via the internet, was characterised by similar arguments to those in Breivik’s manifesto, which he used to legitimate mass murder. But this was not just any mass murder of random people, as in a school shooting. Rather this was a mass assassination attempt of a highly political nature, a deliberate act to wipe out the flower of Norway’s young leftists, a future progressive leadership.

The third strand of objections to the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia came from psychological experts. Leading forensic psychiatrists and psychologists maintained that his behaviour was not consistent with schizophrenia and argued for a reassessment. At the point of psychotic breakdown, paranoid schizophrenia is rarely consistent with the high-functioning behaviour Breivik needed to demonstrate in order to plan and execute the bombing and mass murder. His manifesto is weird but cogent, researched and logical. Its 1500 pages show a real ability for mental organisation and order, however diabolical its premises and conclusions. The manifesto shows intelligence, a capacity for marshalling evidence, and sophisticated cognitive skills. It does not exhibit the kind of ‘word salad’ typical of schizophrenia—odd pairings and parsings of words and phrases that are connected only by associations known to the sufferer rather than by logic. The executive function in people suffering from schizophrenia, when in acute psychosis and confronted with significant organisational demands, is often disintegrative, whereas Breivik was meticulous, thorough, exhaustive, obsessive, even compulsive in his attention to detail—all adding to his capacity to execute a complex, highly coordinated plan. He had no auditory or visual hallucinations. Most schizophrenics, contrary to popular belief, are not violent. Nor did Breivik show the ambulatory restlessness or the elevated mood common to the acute psychotic phase of schizophrenia. Despite the argument that he was in a state of acute schizophrenic psychosis, which almost always needs medication to bring under control, Breivik was given no medication in jail. The psychiatrists admitted that at that time he was ‘not in a psychotic state’. Psychotic states in schizophrenia do not simply switch on and off without treatment.

According to Norway’s most famous forensic psychiatrist, Randi Rosenquist, the diagnosis was a political decision. In an interview with Der Spiegel, she likened it to the former Soviet Union’s use of paranoid schizophrenia for political ends. There were grave implications of such a ‘diagnosis’. ‘As far as I am concerned,’ she said emphatically, ‘...