Anders Behring Breivik and the High Cost of Muslim Immigration

There is very little to be gained from a study of Anders Behring Breivik. He was a loner who was alienated from the society he lived in, suffered from depression, played violent video games, used steroids, listened to angry music and was of above average intelligence. This profile describes half the spree shooters in the last two decades, right down to the Columbine Massacre. 

It is not Breivik's politics that make him significant. He was an outsider who despised society and escaped into romantic fantasies of omnipotence fed by video games and popular culture. Breivik cultivated a detached attitude toward the people around him and was obsessed with violent exercises of his masculinity. All this is common to killers of all political stripes and of no political affiliation whatsoever.

His journal reveals a man who vacillated between crippling depression and grandiose plans. This manic-depressive behavior suggests Breivik may be bipolar. It is unknown if he was taking medication for it. He may have been self-medicating instead and rather than controlling his mood swings, it worsened them. Breivik's journal shows some awareness of his emotional instability, but his later entries are too caught up in his grandiose fantasy world to seek psychiatric help.  

Had Breivik not imagined himself a crusader, then he would have become an animal rights activist, an anti-capitalist terrorist, or just a random spree killer-- acting out scenarios from Modern Warfare 2, his favorite video game, in real life. There is no use in trying to apply some measure of consistency to his beliefs. And his choice of targets likely had a large element of personal grievance or resentment to it that he then dressed up in manifesto form. 

Breivik, like so many modern young Western males, was a loner, a disaffected cynic looking for something to believe in. A man in a place without positive images of manhood. No decent path between the hyperviolence of the action hero and the submission of the citizen of the postmodern state. A favorite escape of his was into a fantasy past through role playing games. An identity that he tried to adopt in reality by calling himself a knight.

The combination of steroid use, isolation and violent fantasies made him a ticking social time bomb. But it was the system that lit the fuse and made it possible for him to transform personal dysfunction into a political statement. That convinced an intelligent man that he could exploit a social problem to bring down the authorities. It was Breivik who pulled the trigger, but it was the Norwegian authorities who created and then ignored the social problem of Islamic immigration, that enabled him to exploit it in a burst of horrifying violence. Read the rest on: