After it was determined that Kaczynski had an IQ of 167 in the fifth grade, and his parents were told he was a genius, he skipped a grade and enrolled in the seventh grade. In his journals, Kaczynski described this as a critical event in his life, and in high school he would skip another grade. He recalled not fitting in with the older students and being subjected to bullying.
“Mr. Kaczynski denies any history of physical abuse in his family,” Dr. Johnson reported. “He does admit to receiving occasional spankings, but felt that this was not excessive or cruel. He does specifically describe extreme verbal and emotional abuse during his upbringing, although he did not identify this as a problem until he was in his 20s.”
McVeigh was also exposed to bullying, beginning at age ten at Little League baseball practice. He was small and skinny for his age, and a bigger kid grabbed his baseball cap in front of the other children. When McVeigh tried to retrieve it, the bully punched him. Stunned and humiliated, Tim ran to his father’s car and hid in the back seat, crying.
Over the course of her study on McVeigh, Dr. Puckett realized that he was not the steely-eyed, cold-hearted young man pictured by the media, but someone who needed to protect himself from harm and who needed to believe that he mattered in the world despite his discomfort with a life inside it. Like Breivik, he was seeking recognition and accomplishment.
Between May 28 and 30, 2002, Breivik posted on the Progressive Party’s Youth Unit’s blog. He was writing about liberals, which in Europe, unlike the United States, are those with right-wing political beliefs. The Progressive Party is even farther to the right than the Conservative Party in Norway. On the blog, Breivik wrote: “Liberals are in many ways individualists and should feel disgust for the principles founding the Law of Jante. I have been a member of the [Progressive Party/Progressive Party’s Youth Unit] for several years, and I’ve noticed that the Law of Jante is, unfortunately, quite at the core in this fantastic organization.”
He continued: “One should not be ashamed of being ambitious! One should not be ashamed to have goals and then reach them! One should not be ashamed to break with established norms to obtain something better!”
To that, he added: “I have seen quite a few good people be sabotaged or frozen out just because they are too good, too ambitious—a threat, maybe, to others who have been part of the organization longer but who have not climbed as well. This is a sad development, especially in an organization that should take the high road above this loser mentality that, unfortunately, is deeply rooted in the Norwegian culture. The myth about the timid Norwegian who stands holding his hat in his hand is very real. It is still not politically correct to stand out, to be different, or to show that one has succeeded, but one should follow a pattern set by our ancestors.”
Norway’s particular culture was a facilitator in Breivik’s process to becoming a killer, but other countries—including the United States—can contribute to one’s sense of isolation in similar ways, like that government’s use of massive covert surveillance programs and by covering up civilian casualties at war. Having seen what really happened in the Persian Gulf in 1991, McVeigh couldn’t stomach his government’s manipulations of the American people during Operation Desert Storm. Because of the lone wolf’s fragile and sensitive personality, he sees his government as the ultimate bully that is stifling him.
“The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful, and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control,” McVeigh said in an interview at the Waco siege, where he went to lend support to people’s rights to bear arms.
“Politicians are further eroding the ‘American Dream’ by passing laws which are supposed to be a ‘quick fix,’ when all they are really designed for is to get the official re-elected,” McVeigh wrote in a letter to the Lockport Union Sun & Journal, published on February 11, 1992. He gushed about issues from government and its leaders to crime, taxes, and racism. “America is in serious decline,” he wrote. “We have no proverbial tea to dump. Should we instead sink a ship full of Japanese imports? Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that, but it might.”
Kaczynski’s war on technology was founded from the same rage as Breivik’s and McVeigh’s rage against their respective governments.
“The system needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers,” he wrote in his journal. “It can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world.”
In 1959, as a sophomore at Harvard University, Kaczynski was recruited to participate in a personality assessment study conducted by psychologist Henry A. Murray. Students in Murray’s study were told they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student. Instead, they were subjected to a “purposely brutalizing psychological experiment” stress test, which, according to author Alston Chase, was a personal and prolonged psychological attack. During the test, students were taken into a room and connected to electrodes that monitored their physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a one-way mirror. Each student had previously written an essay detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were turned over to an anonymous attorney, who then entered the room and individually belittled each student based in part on the disclosures they had made. Students’ expressions of rage were filmed and later played back to them several times.
According to Chase, Kaczynski’s records from that period suggest that he was emotionally stable when the study began. The stress tests would likely be more harmful to a lone wolf’s particular psyche than to someone less vulnerable. Kaczynski’s lawyers attributed some of his emotional instability and dislike of mind-control techniques to his unwitting participation in this study, which lasted three years. Indeed, some have suggested that this experience may have been instrumental in Kaczynski’s future actions.
In 1995, at the age of sixteen, Breivik began at Hartvig Nissen High School. At Hartvig, he was elected student representative for his class and finally seemed to fit in. But for some reason, he decided to change high schools after his first year at Nissen and began attending Oslo Handelsgymnasium (Oslo Commerce School).
Also in 1995, his mother had surgery. Never a stable parent, she grew more mentally fragile and seemed unable to care for herself after the procedure, let alone be responsible for Breivik’s needs. Slowly, he and she began to change roles. Eventually, he brought in money from a morning job of delivering newspapers; and before he left for school, he took care of his mother as if she were his ward.
Staying focused on school while taking care of her, spending time at the gym, and multitasking with all of his odd jobs could not have been easy. Still, he shopped, did much of the cooking, and earned excellent grades.
In Norway, mandatory military service begins after high school. In his last year at Oslo Commerce School, he applied for an exemption from military duty, citing his mother’s almost complete dependence on him. A board of civic officials, after reviewing his situation with his ill and jobless mother, granted the deferment. The reluctance he showed toward military service might have been the kindling his classmates needed to classify him as “weird” once and for all, and to consider him “feminine,” too, as some have admitted to these many years later. His effort to counter such opinions of him no doubt led to his hanging out with a gang from Tåsen in the northern part of Oslo. This band of strictly Norwegian boys in their late teens protested the influx of Pakistanis. Claiming that their motive wasn’t racist, they pledged to fight back against the Pakistani gangs who were causing a scare in the Oslo community.
Breivik was only partially accepted by the group. These Norwegian boys were a rough bunch. They felt that violence would be needed to defend their territory from other gangs. Breivik, who had been picked f
or his daredevil days as a tagger, didn’t quite fit into this violent organization. He would be found among those holding a “Go home, Pakistani!” sign, but little evidence exists that he participated in any physical rumbles. Other members of the Tåsen group admired his intelligence, but soon they, too, no longer desired his membership. Falling short of the gang’s social code, Breivik once again failed to make his mark. When he began dating a girl unpopular with the rest of the boys, they expelled him from the gang for good.
This latest try at coming in from the outskirts to join in the center of an organized activity, but being rejected again, must have affected him deeply. Due to his past failures at joining the mainstream functions at school, and now being cast away from the more macho types who were springing up in his realm, Breivik started to withdraw and disappear. Unfortunately, his experience was not exceptional. The tyranny of the pack had just claimed another victim.
Before Christmas in his final year of high school, Breivik decided to quit school. He wrote a very polite—and humorous—letter to the principal:
To Oslo Commerce School,
I hereby notify you that I, after thorough consideration, have decided to quit in my last year of high school. I would like to thank you for having me and for everything I have learned during my time at school.
Kind regards,
Anders Behring Breivik
(Only a joke)
PS: Had I not been forced to take French, I would not have left. D.S.
Living in his mother’s basement, he envisioned himself not as a soldier against immigration, but as a budding businessman. He was smart, well organized, and a great planner. Why, he must have been asking himself, couldn’t he prove to the world that he could excel in business or politics? He must have wanted to prove the Law of Jante wrong, and dropping out of high school was his way of extricating himself from the system so that he could finally achieve his goals of success.
In a repression-based culture, respect is not based on trust and reciprocity, but on fear and power. People are aware of the problem, but somehow the awareness is not internalized. Somehow, an individual—a teacher, for instance—can understand and communicate the danger of a society of suppression, yet continue to suppress themselves even in their conscious attempts to teach and nurture.
Nobel Prize nominee philosopher George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This is the case in so many places around the world, and Norway is no exception. Norway today has not forgotten the danger inherent in the Law of Jante, yet it has not necessarily changed. Has Norwegian culture learned its lesson from the massacre of 2011? Has it learned what happens when it ignores the individual, however ambitious or troubled, in favor of the group? And if it has not learned, what then will be the price of ignorance?
CHAPTER FOUR
THE TURNING POINT
If you see the ship is burning, you don’t ignore it and start cooking noodles, do you?
—ANDERS BREIVIK MANIFESTO
After he dropped out of Bryant & Stratton College and as part of his quest to become a survivalist, Timothy McVeigh read everything he could get his hands on about firearms and self-defense. On May 24, 1988, the month after he turned twenty, he joined the Army. McVeigh had finally found his calling. The Army was everything he wanted in life and more. When he joined, he was not a leader but an eager follower.
“McVeigh had never really felt like he fit in back home in Pendleton, but he felt comfortable here,” Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck wrote in American Terrorist about McVeigh joining the military. “He threw himself into Army life with everything he had. Military life gave him structure—a code of honor, a sense of purpose—that he’d never felt before. He enjoyed it all—the frantic 5 A.M. wake-ups, the rushed meals in the chow hall, the crass jokes, even the uniform inspections. He thrived in the outdoors, the smell of sweat mingling with the scent of Georgia pine. Most of all, he loved everything to do with firearms.”
McVeigh dreamed of becoming a part of the U.S. Army’s elite Special Forces. The Green Berets are given the toughest and most dangerous jobs, and the Army calls its prototype Special Forces soldier “a breed apart, a cut above the rest . . . mature, highly skilled, superbly trained . . . a fighter of uncommon physical and mental caliber, ready to serve anywhere at any time.” As a star soldier, McVeigh had a chance of making it.
“Some at Fort Riley did consider Tim McVeigh an oddball,” Michel and Herbeck wrote. “Some were put off by his political views [he railed against gun control, the government’s abuse of power, and conspiracy theories including drugs and UFOs]. But even the harshest critics were impressed by McVeigh’s dedication to Army life. He was devoted—fanatically, some would say—to becoming the best soldier on the entire base.”
When, at 5:30 every morning, the soldiers had to get up for uniform inspection, McVeigh would be up by 4 A.M., his roommate William Dilly recalled, “not only getting himself ready, but cleaning up the barracks.” He would keep an extra uniform, boots, and set of equipment in immaculate condition, just for inspections. “The man was a perfectionist,” Dilly said, according to Michel and Herbeck.
Instead of going out on his free time, McVeigh preferred to stay at the barracks, cleaning his weapons or reading books. At night, he would often receive calls from fellow soldiers asking him to pick them up from the bars nearby, which McVeigh was happy to do—for a fee. McVeigh had a superb business sense and his taxi service paid off. He also made a profit as the army lender and, as an excellent card player, he made money on the poker games he always won. He was so successful, in fact, that he stopped out of guilt. “It’s too easy,” he said.
Before he had the chance to be evaluated for the Special Forces, the Gulf War erupted in 1991, and McVeigh’s First Infantry Division was dispatched to the Persian Gulf to serve in Operation Desert Storm. Again, McVeigh served with distinction, was promoted to sergeant, and became lead gunner on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle in the first platoon.
Although he was an outstanding soldier, the war changed McVeigh, as it did many other young people. But perhaps this traumatizing experience was more harmful to McVeigh than most, given his fragile psyche. It troubled him that the Army would lie to the soldiers and the press about what was really going on, shattering his illusions about the Army and forcing him to question his near-blind devotion to the military lifestyle. Later on, McVeigh cited as an example an incident on February 13, 1991, when the U.S. Air Force bombed a shelter in Baghdad and more than three hundred, mostly women and children, were killed. The Army kept the incident hidden from the public.
“McVeigh hated to hear the Army lie, to soldiers or the public,” Michel and Herbeck wrote. “He saw a reporter after the news briefing, and for a moment he thought about telling him what [had] really happened. But he didn’t. He was still a soldier.”
And a decorated soldier, at that. He earned the Army Commendation Medal for fighting in Iraq, as well as the Bronze Star. Now he renewed his attempt to gain acceptance into the Special Forces. But McVeigh was emotionally exhausted and had lost the physical stamina he’d built up during his training before the war. A commander recognized the difficulty facing McVeigh and the others returning from Desert Storm, and gave them a chance to defer the Special Forces tryouts. But peer pressure was strong, and McVeigh, afraid he would appear weak if he waited, refused to postpone. McVeigh was simply not fit enough and, on his second day of the assessment program, told the commander he was giving up. Disillusioned and shattered, McVeigh quit the Army shortly after.
Returning home to a civilian life, he felt nobody was interested in welcoming a war hero back into the workforce. McVeigh, having lost faith in the Army and his country, started giving way to bitterness, anger, and an increasing desire for isolation. He had reached his turning point.
Breivik’s turning point came after high school as well. He had given up his chance to graduate and continue his studies. With his ability to organize his time, his innate curiosity,
and his strong desire to become a businessman, he was ripe for further schooling in a facility where he could graduate with a bachelor’s degree in business; but instead, he had chosen to quit. One might argue that in no other land could this free education be accomplished with such ease as in Norway. Why then would such a young man, who had exhibited himself capable of achieving a degree of excellence in his high school classes, leave all this bright opportunity that lay within his reach?
Breivik put it this way. “Formalizing your education is all about prestige and the possibility of working for various organizations. I care little about prestige and even less for the opportunities to work for ‘publicly approved’ politically correct entities. It was therefore no incentive whatsoever for me to invest so many of my resources in formalizing my education in any of the fields that interested me.”
A true lone wolf, McVeigh did not pursue further schooling, although he had graduated from high school with honors and was named the school’s “Most Promising Computer Programmer.” At Bryant & Stratton business college, he had wanted to devote himself to programming and not delve into old subjects that had bored him in high school. The college required all new students to take a lengthy math aptitude exam, according to Michel and Herbeck. McVeigh breezed through the test in twenty minutes, to the teacher’s amazement, and scored 99 percent. None of the other students scored more than 80. Thinking he didn’t need a piece of paper telling him how smart he was, he quit. Unlike Breivik, however, McVeigh dropped out of college also because of the steep tuition and because he didn’t want to add on to his father’s financial burden. His days of formal education were over.
The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer Page 7
