Despite his brilliance, Kaczynski’s mother described him as uncomfortable around other children and “displaying fears of people and buildings.” She noted that he played beside other children rather than with them, and she considered enrolling him in a study conducted by Bruno Bettelheim regarding autistic children. Instead of pursuing this opportunity, Wanda Kaczynski utilized advice published by Dr. Benjamin Spock in attempting to rear her son, according to Johnson’s report.
Spock was the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis to try to understand children’s needs and family dynamics. His ideas about childcare influenced several generations of parents to be more flexible and affectionate with their children, and to treat them as individuals. His message to mothers in his book Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, was that “you know more than you think you do.” Instead of using discipline and confrontation with a misbehaving child, Spock wrote, the parent should rather divert the child’s attention to something else. In Spock’s opinion, complaining or scolding a child was counterproductive.
Breivik’s mother also maintained that she used Dr. Spock’s advice when raising young Breivik.
McVeigh’s home life seemed fine until his parents divorced in 1986. McVeigh, then a teen, isolated himself in his room with his computers and became skilled at programming and hacking. Anders Breivik chose similar isolation.
Before entering grammar school, Breivik had some serious adjustment problems. It is questionable whether he was close to his sister, Elisabeth, and doubtful that she, being several grades ahead of him in school, had much to do with him. He was three years old, possibly younger, when his mother began showing signs of erratic behavior in her parenting style. Neighbors watched and gossiped about her smothering her son with inappropriate affection, having him sleep in her bed with her, and then suddenly turning on him with a mix of anger and fear, as if she were frightened for her own safety.
With this unusual social structure of a single mother and son demonstrating such behavior that was almost unheard of in Norway at this time, Anders’s home became an object of discussion. Due to exhaustion, his mother contacted the State Center for Child and Youth Psychiatry (SSBU), and the family spent three weeks there when Anders was about four years old. Child Protective Services, upon hearing reports of Wenche Behring’s fear of her small son, and of her own general instability as a mother, stepped in to recommend that the boy be sent to a foster home. His mother was clearly too immature to handle her sporadic workload and the two children she had failed to raise in a controlled and settled environment. And the fact that she felt threatened by the small boy was also unsettling to the authorities.
“Even when [I was] breastfeeding him,” she would say later, “he was a terrible child.”
At SSBU, it quickly became clear that young Anders was a quiet and docile child, showing no signs of violent behavior. One of the many psychiatrists involved in studying Breivik’s boyhood concluded about Wenche that “She projected all of the anger she felt for her former husband onto her son.”
Neighbors expressed shock at the mother’s “sexual language” with her children, and the Center for Child and Youth Psychiatry referred to her as “a woman with an extremely difficult upbringing . . . [who] projects her primitive aggression and sexual fantasies onto her son.” The fear she felt of Anders was a subject of her imagination. If anything, the psychiatrists concluded, Anders needed protection from his mother.
Breivik himself told authorities he remembered nothing of all this. Despite his statement, he also said “I probably would have been better off had I been raised with my father and stepmother.”
The Psychiatric Center (SSBU) considered Wenche Behring too unstable to care for Anders. His father had remarried, and along with Tove, his new wife, he came from Paris to pursue custody of his son. Although there seemed to be a case for Jens and Tove—a woman whom Anders seemed to dote upon immediately—to take custody of Anders, a special court ruling allowed Anders to remain at home in Oslo with his mother.
Had his family life stabilized? Inspecting these years, an educated answer would have to be no. It had, in fact, gotten worse. The conclusion of the Center for Children, after it studied the boy for three weeks, might not have been illuminating at the time, but now we can appreciate their findings. The Center wrote: “Anders has become a withdrawn and passive child, a little afraid. He responds mechanically, with restless activity.”
Those observing the case concluded that Anders had difficulty communicating. Although his language was well developed, he seemed unable to express his emotions. Something else they noticed had the tone of what could have been a warning. The report stated that “He almost completely lacks spontaneity and elements of joy and happiness.”
As a preschooler, did Anders’s brooding and the manner in which he projected his role as a loner suggest that he lacked empathy? Or was the instability at home, along with the fraught relationship with his mother, starting to take its toll? Or was he merely one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of youngsters who were facing a culture where becoming invisible in a crowd seemed a better choice than standing out?
Anders’s parents grew up in post–World War II Norway, a country in ruins which was slowly being rebuilt after the war. The Labor Party came into power and, except for a few years in the 1980s, it stayed there until September 2013. The social-democratic state focuses on groups and institutions, making the individual no longer responsible for social problems, education, charity, unemployment, or poverty. Norwegians drift from home to work like sleepwalkers. Nobody seems passionate about their jobs. It’s just the thing they spend their days doing. No one is even openly critical of anything, including the government. Because Norwegians are not mindful of their lives—because they are not allowed to question—they don’t take care of one another either. In this small country, very few know their neighbors. The fact that the neighbors even noticed the bizarre behavior of Anders’s mother toward him as a toddler speaks to how remarkable her behavior must have been. This was the Norway into which Breivik was born and educated.
Almost all children in Norway are mentored to some extent by state caregivers, most of whom have completed little more than a high school education. Anders, from age two until he was six, had been exposed to the collective ethics that did little more than keep him under control. Mediocrity was the standard he would be judged by.
Anders’s early behavior is similar to the definition of “orchid children,” those who are highly sensitive to context, making them more susceptible to both positive and negative environments. This coincides with Swedish folk wisdom that asserts that most children are like dandelions and grow despite their circumstances, but others are more like orchids and are highly susceptible to changes. Both terms appeared in a 2005 research paper by human development specialists Bruce Ellis of the University of Arizona and Thomas Boyce of the University of California, Berkeley, who borrowed a Swedish idiom to name a new concept in genetics and child development. Orkidebarn, or “orchid child,” contrasts to maskrosbarn, or “dandelion child.” As Ellis and Boyce explained, dandelion children seem to have the capacity to survive—even thrive—in whatever circumstances they encounter. They are psychologically resilient, but at the same time they are less sensitive to nourishing stimuli. Orchid children, on the other hand, are highly sensitive to their environments, especially to the quality of the parenting they receive. If neglected, orchid children promptly wither; but if they are nurtured, they not only survive, but flourish.
James Fallon, professor at the University of California, Irvine, is known for his work examining psychopathic murderers and other personality disorders. In studying their genes and brains, Fallon compared the killers’ tests with his own, and the result stunned him. According to his findings, Fallon himself should have ended up with a personality close to Breivik’s.
“My case fits well with the theory of orchid children,” he said to A-magasinet, a weekly segment of the newspaper Aftenposten. Fallon has th
e genes of an individual prone to violence and crime. In his family, there have been several killers on his father’s side. However, Fallon turned out to be a non-violent famous researcher. He confirms that people with the “warrior gene,” as researchers call the MAO-A gene, are not only more prone to destructive behavior, but also to greatness if raised in a nourishing environment that helps them funnel their inner “warrior” to a constructive outlet.
Had Anders shriveled under his adverse home conditions? Could he have bloomed under the right mentors in an environment where his intellect was allowed to roam and be free? Although the folk wisdom is old, the genetic research is still in its infancy, and the what and why of Anders Breivik is still at large. It is the eternal question of “nature” versus “nurture.”
After the court chose to allow Anders to remain with his mother in October 1983, Child Protective Services kept the family under supervision another seven months. Eventually, authorities decided that things had stabilized, and the little family was left alone, off the radar.
His father, although distant in his attitude toward his ex-wife and Anders himself, arranged for the boy to visit him in Paris. According to Anders, he got on well with his stepmother, Tove, but his relationship with his half-siblings never seemed to develop any closeness. Later, his written words would castigate Elisabeth, the half-sister with whom he was raised in Oslo, who was six years older. He also reproached his mother. It seemed, in the long run, the only one who would escape his wrathful pen was his father.
If by magic we could visit Anders at the age of seven, beginning school at Smestad Grammar School, Class 1C, what sort of little fellow would we find? He would be joining about five hundred other students in this yellow, fundamentally designed, multi-story building that, in the winter with its outdoor playing courts covered in snow, could be a setting for a Christmas card. This was the same school the royal family of Norway attended. He would be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. He would learn how his homeland had originated, how it had grown from the Viking Age to the present and was ruled by a king who was really just an ambassador. The power, he would be told, rested with the prime minister and Parliament, and no longer with the state Lutheran Church, of which he was a born member. The world, he would learn as a grown man, was a place of many ideas, most of them contrary to what he had been taught.
“You’re asking too many questions,” a typical teacher might tell him on a typical day. “Be quiet and let somebody else speak.” What they meant was “Don’t rock the boat. Don’t challenge the fundaments of our system.”
His mentors looked at the world through a socialistic lens. “The capitalistic United States is the worst of the countries we will be studying,” one would point out, following the national curriculum. “They spend their wealth invading other countries.”
Breivik’s experiences mirrored those of all students growing up in Norway, most of whom lived in a middle ground where there was no passionate viewpoint. No strong right. No strong wrong. The child’s goal? Stay in that jelly-like center where you will not cause the teachers—or yourself—any discomfort.
How could anyone possibly predict that Anders would become a killer, especially one capable of such slaughter? If we had been able to observe Anders during his first couple of years at Smestad, we would have had a difficult time determining what would happen twenty-some years later when he armed himself to the teeth and marched off to commit mayhem and murder. It is difficult to find much said about the boy until he reached the fifth and sixth grades. Perhaps he blended in with his classmates and found a level of mediocrity that would enable him to remain unnoticed.
How about his teachers? Had they, in their own inadequacy or desire to herd the students at an easily workable level, numbed him into a type of nonentity? Could he have been posing as an average student with no desire to stand out?
A child wishing to excel and achieve would be considered a misfit by his teachers and told that he was “too noisy” and “too loud.” Anders’s hunger to succeed and be recognized would find little nourishment in this environment. A misbehaving or openly ambitious child would quickly be put in its place by the teachers and even by fellow students. Sticking out, even if in a positive way, was unaccepted in Norwegian schools. Perhaps it still is.
In the sixth grade, he, considering his undeveloped physicality, took on an unlikely project. He persuaded a few classmates to join him in founding a boy-only gang he’d named the Skøyen Killers. The members listened to hip-hop and made versions of Shako weapons, large boomerangs they fashioned after the weapon of choice in InuYasha, manga artist Rumiko Takahashi’s fictional series based on Japan’s ancient Warring States period. Trying to appear threatening, Anders and his mates chose to wear headbands as a trademark of their legion. However, the group proved to be dangerous in name only. Although failing in his first try at being menacing, he was considered a good student.
Skinny and self-conscious, Anders still lacked a stable base. He didn’t fit the expectations of Norwegian society of that era. He wasn’t among the first wave of disenchanted children to rebel, but his generation, with social media exploding in the center of its existence, was different from any before it. Maybe it was the difference people didn’t see coming. Maybe such changes were so subtle, this nation couldn’t measure the slow metamorphosis. After all, in a culture that rewarded sameness, they might have become blind to difference.
In his manifesto, Breivik claimed that his mother had been infected with genital herpes by her boyfriend, Tore Tollefsen, when Breivik was a child. He blamed the infection for causing her to take an early retirement and said that she then had the intellectual capacity of a ten-year-old.
“Both my sister and my 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 secondary effects of the feministic/sexual revolution,” he writes. “I can only imagine how many people are suffering from STDs as a result of the current lack of sexual moral [sic].”
Breivik certainly didn’t have a stable family situation and parents who were there for him. In order to survive, he had to make his teachers and everyone else believe that he accepted what he was being taught. As soon as he was placed behind a small desk, and a teacher acknowledged his presence, he was required to fit in with the majority of his schoolmates. Being a good student meant blending in. A normal student soon realized that making noise of any kind would get him or her nowhere. Anyone too ambitious, trying to excel a bit too hard, was denigrated.
“Who do you think you are?” every Norwegian child who tries to stand out is asked while growing up. “Do not think you are any better than the rest of us.”
Anders Breivik was told that many times during his grammar-school years. Was he a bad student? Not really. Was he entering puberty without any supervision or guidelines? Was he having trouble with his mother? The few who bothered to notice him at that time would, no doubt, agree. The history of their troubles at home when he was a small child would no doubt be exacerbated by Anders’s maturation into puberty. Were these signs of a young boy becoming the most malicious man in Norway’s recent history? Certainly not. Other young people manifested criminal behavior far beyond anything young Breivik had exhibited as he approached his teens. Before entering the seventh grade at Ris Junior High School, however, he definitely could be described as a kid who had run into a turbulent phase.
Dr. Puckett said that Breivik’s social pattern as a young man is typical of a lone wolf. “What really struck me the most was, despite the fact that these killers were drawn to the ideology of extremist groups, and that they were angry, they lacked the ability to connect with other people meaningfully,” she said. “Humans are hardwired to connect with each other to survive. It’s really hard to be alone. They can’t make the connections they crave with other people, although they try over and over to make those connections.” So, like McVeigh and Kaczynski, although their behavior started to become more odd and menacing, none
of them necessarily fell in with a “bad crowd” or gang, because they lacked the social ability to connect with these people, despite their misfit status.
The theory of attachment was originally developed by British psychoanalyst John Bowlby as he was trying to understand the immense distress experienced by infants who were separated from their parents. The attachment behavior system is, according to Bowlby, important because it provides the conceptual linkage between the study of human behavior and development and modern theories on emotional regulation and personality. Basically, the attachment theory states that if the attachment figure, in most cases a parent, has been nearby, accessible, and attentive, the child will feel loved and secure. These children, as discovered by psychoanalyst Mary Ainsworth, will act in a playful manner, be easily comforted after being separated from their parents, and have the necessary confidence to easily develop relationships with others, as children and as adults. But when a child hasn’t had his attachment needs fulfilled by his parents, he may develop, among other disorders, anxiety, difficulties in connecting with others, and, in some cases, depression.
Researchers only began taking seriously the processes of attachment and its influences on adult relationships in the mid-1980s. Psychologists Cindy Hazan and Phillip R. Shaver were two of the first to conclude that adult attachment is guided by the same motivational system that makes a child have a close emotional bond with his or her parents. This system is also responsible for the bond between adults in emotionally intimate relationships, or the lack thereof, which is often the case with lone wolves.
UNABLE TO CONNECT
Because the lone wolf cannot connect with others—not even in “extremist” groups—these individuals connect with just the ideology of the group, as Breivik ultimately did. With their intelligence ranging from high to genius levels, as was the case with Kaczynski, they have the mental capacity to connect with an idea as a substitute for human relationships. They convince themselves that they are killing for a cause, and they plan carefully. And the lack of social interaction to dilute or distract from their connection to this idea makes the possibility of extreme violence that much more likely. Group dynamics, while they often function in a negative way by pushing teens toward alcohol, drugs, or sex, can also mitigate extreme behavior. Most people who are attracted to violent groups do not commit violent acts: they get together to hate together, and that feeling of belonging meets their social needs.
The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer Page 5
