Hatred (16 page)

In the earlier days of his illness, Schreber was “tortured to such a degree that he longed for death. He made repeated attempts at drowning himself in his bath, and asked to be given the ‘cyanide of potassium that was intended for him.' ” But as Weber noted, the “ingenious delusional structure” saved him from “insanity.” By that he meant that the full-blown delusional system that ended in the redeemer fantasies freed Schreber and permitted him to return to “normalcy”:

During his second admission to a mental hospital, Schreber petitioned the courts to regain his liberty. “Such, indeed, were his acumen and the cogency of his logic that finally, and in spite of his being an acknowledged paranoiac, his efforts were crowned with success. In July 1902 Dr. Schreber's civil rights were restored.”
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Schreber, like Nash, continued his life outside an institution, clinging to his delusional system, and as far as the record shows, representing a threat to no one.

In the United States, bombers of innocent people are few in number and have tended to be psychotic. The most famous case in recent years was the previously mentioned Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

Kaczynski's career as a bomber dated back to May 25, 1978, when he was known as the Junkyard Bomber because of the crudeness of his weapons. In a portent of what was to follow, the first bomb—while addressed to an academic scientist, a professor of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—was actually placed in the parking lot of the University of Chicago School of Engineering. A pattern of targeting research scientists was to emerge. This cycle of bombings ended in 1987 but was renewed
with new intensity and more sophisticated bombs in a cycle that began on June 18, 1993.

Kaczynski that day mailed two such parcels in what had become his signature trademark, a wooden box enclosed in a mailing envelope. One was addressed to University of California geneticist Charles Epstein. It exploded with such force that shrapnel was driven into Epstein's body and face, breaking an arm and obliterating three of his fingers. The second bomb was delivered to David Gelernter, a professor of computer sciences at Yale University. Gelernter barely survived and was severely crippled, losing most of his right hand.

Gelernter's brother was also a geneticist, which may be one reason David Gelernter was targeted. Certainly the focus for Luddite hysteria these days tends to be on genetics, partly because genetic research invokes the wrath associated with the issue of abortion, partly because molecular genetics operates at a level not easily understood by the layman, but mostly because genetics seems closest to the kind of “tampering” with nature that has traditionally (think of Dr. Frankenstein) frightened many with the fear of someone's “playing God.”

What eventually emerged, when Kaczynski was finally apprehended through the courageous intervention of his brother, was the picture of a classic withdrawn and delusional schizophrenic living a hermit's life. In his delusional system, he perceived modern science as a force for evil, which justified his assault on its agents. The fact that he was schizophrenic meant that his assaults were disorganized, illogical, and irrationally executed. He seemed to attack at random those who were remotely connected to the offending sciences that endangered his barely articulated principles. He operated alone, as is characteristic of schizophrenics, who have a profound inability to relate to almost anyone. Like Schreber, he was primarily influenced by his own inner demons.

The psychotic individual may interpret events in life in a totally idiosyncratic manner—driven by his inner need to see things in a particular way—but he still will take his stimulus from the world around him. Except for the deteriorated schizophrenics of the back mental wards, most schizophrenics are not totally out of touch with reality. They are thus susceptible to the same influences as the rest of us. John Nash did work for the CIA, but in a mundane manner. Still he built his fantasies around his mathematical abilities and a romanticized need to be involved in the battle against evil represented by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Kaczynski was most likely aware of the battles over the possibility of human cloning, and for that reason for him genetics became the area of research in which the debate over the limits of scientific intervention in the human condition would be centered. He was, in addition, obsessed with computers. Methods of communicating have always been great source material for the delusional, particularly those that use invisible sources of energy with capacity to penetrate and influence—like radiation. Kaczynski, in his focus on computers, was in direct line with dozens of patients I saw in my early training who believed that “radio waves,” “X rays,” “television waves beamed from outer space” were means of either sending messages to them or taking control of them.

The real world may not appear the same to psychotics as it does to us, but the real world does influence them. Since anything can play into a preformed delusional system, schizophrenics can be the instruments, unintended or otherwise, of passionate and often overwrought single-cause advocates who see the whole world as secondary to their mission. In protecting the innocent unborn, passionate right-to-lifers have been prepared to take the life of the innocent mother. Animal rightists often seem willing to sacrifice researchers for rats, certainly for
dogs or monkeys. But even if the more responsible members of those causes would not engage in such violence, their rhetoric suggests that they would, or it implies that to do so would be just and honorable. This rhetoric is ready tinder, waiting to ignite the psychotic, who is looking for legitimate explanations for his inner agonies and is eager to do battle against the evil that torments him. The inflated rhetoric of the radical fringe groups in the various rights movements supplies the rationalization that the psychotic needs and locates an enemy for him. He can now project his internal conflict to those who have been identified by others as threatening innocent populations or the world itself.

In May 2002, after the FBI had issued an all-points bulletin in relation to a serial bomber, Lucas John Helder, a twenty-one-year-old college student, was arrested. Cameron Helder, the defendant's father, said to reporters: “I really want you to know that Luke is not a dangerous person. I think he's just trying to make a statement about the way our government is run.”
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By definition anyone who plants eighteen pipe bombs, injuring six people, is a dangerous person. If I were to ask the senior Helder, who knew of his son's actions when he issued his statement, whether he thought delivering pipe bombs into the mailboxes of innocent Americans was a dangerous action, I am reasonably sure that he would have answered yes. The father was in the same state of denial one encounters with other parents of dangerous children. And he was not alone. Even after all the evidence was assembled and published, Helder's friend said: “There's no way he could be armed and dangerous. That's just not him.” His roommate and another acquaintance, a fellow member of the golf team, offered in Helder's defense the fact
that “he never showed any emotion” even when he hit a bad golf shot, an observation that would be a red flag to any psychiatrist.

In support of a denial mechanism designed to protect us from painful realities, Cameron Helder did that which many liberal-minded individuals are wont to do: He attempted to separate the individual from his actions. He knew that the
inner
Lucas John Helder, his son, was a loving and decent boy. But there is no inner self that is separated from one's actions. Like it or not, what one does, one's behavior, is a better definition of the self than one's inner feelings. To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define the person in those terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely. You, the essential you, will be better represented and understood through what you do than what you think.

But did the father even know what the son was thinking? In an attempt to explain his behavior, Lucas John Helder sent the
Badger Herald
, the University of Wisconsin's newspaper, a six-page letter, filled with chaotic statements about government, technology, and the environment. It included the following: “Do you wonder why you are here? Do you wonder what is out there . . . way out there? I remember those times of uncertainty, and I can't tell you how great it is to know, to know eternally, and to be.”
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Much of his rhetoric and behavior suggests the psychotic: the sudden departure from his typical behavior; the discontinuity of actions from the stimuli that preceded them; the solitary nature of his behavior; his grandiosity and his exultation at the “great feeling” of liberation. All of this is more reminiscent of Schreber than of the organized hate groups that lynched blacks in the South, or the mobs of toughs that periodically go gay bashing, or
the psychopathic teenagers that set homeless people on fire as a form of entertainment. One would not be surprised to discover that evidence of prepsychotic conditions existed in this young man. Certainly when his father and friends said that he could not be dangerous, they were drawing on a history devoid of antisocial actions. His precipitous shift suggests a breakdown of traditional patterns, which is typical in a psychotic break.

During this same general period, England and Australia were also having problems with “mad bombers.” These cases particularly expose the specific role of polemicists in stimulating even the most psychotic. The ultimate responsibility for crimes committed by many psychotics must be shared by those who inadvertently or directly manipulate them.

Glynn Harding, a twenty-seven-year-old patently schizophrenic man from Crewes, England,
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sent dozens of potentially lethal mail bombs filled with nails and other forms of shrapnel in his defense of the rights of animals before he was apprehended. Psychotic bombers are notoriously difficult to apprehend. Their very irrationality contributes to this difficulty.

An article by Helen Carter in the
Guardian,
on September 22, 2001, took note of how tenuous was the association between Harding's animal rights beliefs and his selection of victims. Try making sense of this list—even as part of an animal rights crusade. Harding's first bomb was mailed to a firm that manufactured identity tags for farm animals. Successive bombs were sent to an agricultural real estate agent, a British Heart Foundation charity shop, a pet and reptile store, a sheep farmer, a cancer research charity shop, a poultry breeder, and a fish and chip shop.
The youngest victim was a six-year-old whose father earned his living clearing wasps' nests.

Nothing is more indicative of the fact that the victim is primarily a vessel to receive the internally manufactured hatred of the terrorist than the arbitrariness by which these victims were selected. Bombings like these are clearly hate crimes, but they have often been directed at people who are not actually members of the hated group. With Harding, the self-acclaimed animal rights crusader, his chosen victims were in no way connected with the use of animals for experimentation. Even when his crimes were directed at an animal research laboratory, the putative source of his anger, it would still not represent that which truly generated hate in Harding's heart. The cause selected is a convenience for internal rage evolving over a lifetime of perceived deprivations.

Similarly in the long-standing Serbian-Croatian conflict, the civilians killed were usually just innocent neighbors. The slaughter required the abandoning of personal history and current reality. Innocent victims were viewed in continuity with the earlier atrocities committed in previous wars by previous generations often unknown to them. The most bizarre and cruel aspect of the dissolution of Yugoslavia was that both Serbs and Croats managed to put aside their historic hatred and join in massacring their Bosnian Muslim neighbors. The traditional hatred was Christian against Christian. But in the chaos of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the land grab that ensued, the Serbs managed to displace their hatred to the convenient Muslims. The result was the massacre at Srebrenica, which rivaled those of the Nazis. In the world of haters, all victims are fungible commodities.

A legitimate cause rarely generates the kind of hatred that sacrifices the innocent. Hatred works in the opposite direction. The “cause” does not generate the rage. The rage demands locating a cause. Resentment at one's lot in life—remembering that there
need not be actual deprivation but psychological feelings of deprivation—generates a powerful rage that seeks a justifiable outlet. The animal rights movement and its heated rhetoric supplied Harding—a presumed animal lover, since there were many other causes available—with a convenient hook on which to hang the hate generated by his inner turmoil.

There was no doubt that Harding was a diagnosed schizophrenic. But the law, itself, is “schizophrenic” in dealing with heinous crimes committed by the psychotic. The judge, Elgan Edwards, called Harding's actions “pure evil,” which raises question about moral judgments and moral responsibility with psychotic individuals. If a crime is obscene enough, if it offends public morality, there will be a tendency to refuse to acknowledge the nonculpability assigned to the insane under the definitions of the sick role. The easiest way to do that is to deny the presence of the illness. There is latitude in accepting the definitions, since criminal insanity and psychosis are not congruent terms. The presence of a delusional psychosis in a defendant is not sufficient to meet the standards of criminal insanity in most jurisdictions. That will demand, in addition to delusions, a proven inability to conform one's behavior to standards of right and wrong.