Hatred (11 page)

All “mental illness” cannot be a free ticket to exoneration. “To understand all is to forgive all” is not an operative principle except in the psychiatrist's office—in the context of medicine—where the patient is granted certain special privileges and understanding. Inherent in the definition of the “sick role” is the principle of nonculpability. The sick person is a victim, not a criminal. He is not to be held responsible and punished for his illness, whether that illness is typhoid fever, which can infect others and kill them, or schizophrenia, which can also produce behavior that kills others. That is all true in the sick room. But not in the courtroom and, for that matter, not in the mind of the ordinary person.

Unfortunately, at the same time that psychiatrists were continuing to defend the nonculpability inherent in the sick role, psychiatry was vastly expanding the definition of mental illness. The population of those with some symptoms of mental illness came to include the majority. Still, the courts, in order to secure a society of law, had to defend the idea of a populace acting voluntarily and freely, therefore responsible for their actions. How could the courts do that, when almost everybody was now assumed to be a little sick?

When confronted with this dangerous contradiction in definition and purpose, two distinguished students of human behavior articulated two opposing, and equally unmanageable, solutions. One decided that there was no such thing as mental illness. And the other announced that there was no such thing as human freedom.

In 1961 Thomas Szasz published his immensely influential book,
The Myth of Mental Illness,
and became a hero of both the libertarian Right and the libertarian Left, who shared his anti-authoritarian and antiestablishment sentiments. In this book, as the title suggests, Szasz denied the very existence of a population of the mentally ill.

The 1960s was a period that chose to romanticize the insane as saner than the rest of us, as demonstrated in such movies as
The King of Hearts
and
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.
It took a long time for the liberal supporters of Szasz to realize that if you deny the validity of mental illness, the only proper place for a schizophrenic man dangerous to others was a prison—as Szasz, himself, would state.

At the other extreme was the brilliant psychologist B. F. Skinner. In his influential book
Beyond Freedom and Dignity,
published in 1971, Skinner denied the very existence of freedom, thus any voluntary action. In his image of human behavior, the adult is tied to his past by connecting bonds of conditioned responses
that force him into predictable and patterned responses. Skinner thus links Homo sapiens to the lowest living creatures in one seamless continuum. Autonomy is a myth that human beings perpetuate about themselves to narcissistically assert their superiority to lower animals.

Nevertheless, most of us are prepared to accept both: a concept of human freedom, with its element of accountability for action; and a category of the mentally ill, who being sick must not be held fully responsible for their behavior. Simple prudence must be exercised. Both constructs, autonomy and mental illness, need a little pruning at the edges. And if we approach the problem with a clear head, we can allow these contradictory theories of human behavior to coexist. In certain contexts we must assume one, while in other contexts we are obliged to accept the alternative.

Obviously, Colin Ferguson and Rashid Baz are not normal variants of their cultures. They are individuals obsessed with hatred. Their behavior is clearly pathological. They would undeniably be diagnosed as mentally ill by a modern psychiatrist—as would be the murderers of Matthew Shepard, the Oklahoma City bombers, and the men who chained James Byrd, Jr., to the back of a truck, dragging him to his death. All of them would be sent to jail by a jury of their peers. And rightly so. There is sick and then there is “sick.”

T
he average physician starts the diagnostic process by taking a history, a testament to the continuing importance of symptoms even in this day of CAT scans and MRIs. A doctor wants to hear the patient's “complaints.” Is he suffering from headache, tightness in the chest, excessive thirst, or undue fatigue? Is he demonstrating shortness of breath, dizziness, insomnia? The doctor is directed to further investigations by the nature of these symptoms.

The psychiatrist approaches her patient in the same way. She is interested in emotional and mental symptoms. These can be particularly confusing, especially in modern times where the definition of mental illness has been expanded well beyond its original conception and the terminology has become more complicated. “Abnormal,” “sick,” “crazy,” and “insane” are confusing terms, used quite differently in different environments and by different observers. At times the same observer adopts different
attitudes toward the same behavior, dependent on the context. As a psychiatrist, I am prepared to accept rude and aggressive behavior from my patients in my office that I would not tolerate from others. Such behavior in the framework of a therapeutic relationship would not even be labeled “rude.” It would be analyzed for its unconscious motives. I am not interested in the “unconscious motives” of the ugly drunk at the bar—nor for that matter, of a friend in my living room—and am not prepared to passively and benignly endure such behavior.

The hatred that is of concern here is by my definition a psychological phenomenon. An essential premise of this book is that hatred is rarely a rational response to a real threat or affront. Acts of hatred represent displacements of an internal conflict onto external sources. They are “symptoms” of a basic emotional disorder. Hatred is obsessive, irrational, self-serving, and ultimately—like any other symptom—self-destructive. We, however, do not grant an act of hatred the same immunity from judgment or punishment that we would when a psychological phenomenon is perceived as a symptom of a disease. We use a different set of criteria in the public political arena. The therapeutic attitude should have little influence there.

The problem of judgment, culpability, and punishment is complicated by the fact that the constituency of terrorists comprises at least three distinct populations. The single, lone-wolf terrorist—what I call the entrepreneurial terrorist—is often a confused and psychotic loner. The institutional terrorists, those who join Al Qaeda, Hamas, and other terror groups, may act in a manner that seems equally insane. but they are not psychotic; they know exactly what they are doing. The members of the professional SS
Einsatzgruppen,
who volunteered to slaughter the Jews by hand before the Nazis built their gas furnaces, were largely psychopaths or, at the very least, individuals with severe
character disorders.
²⁷
For purposes of justice as well as our own self-defense, we must handle these groups quite differently. But first, we must attend to the often confusing terminology used to distinguish among them.

Normal behavior refers to conformity, conforming to “a norm, standard, pattern, level or type.” So what is abnormal behavior for a human being? The question can be answered only by a series of other questions. Am I referring to physiological behavior? Interpersonal behavior? Public or private? In relation to the standards of the species or of the culture? If the latter, what are the cultural norms and can they be considered normal?

The problem of defining behavior relates to the uniqueness of that perverse species, Homo sapiens. It is easier with lower animals. Consider the single-celled animals. Observing these simplest of creatures under a microscope, one is impressed by both their anatomical similarities, one to another—they are all essentially formless blobs—and by the identical quality of their behavior. The amoeba randomly bounces from one place to another, absorbing nutrients and excreting wastes. That's about it. And it does not matter if the swamp water in which it lives is in Toronto or Timbuktu.

In the case of the amoeba, normal behavior is easy to describe, since there can be little variation from the norm. The simplicity of the amoeba's functions allows for nothing abnormal short of cellular destruction. These single-celled creatures are the purest
individualists—they do not even require another individual to reproduce; they simply split themselves asunder, creating two where there was one. Still, it is hard to treat them as individuals. It is safe to assume no protozoologist names or romanticizes these simple creatures. They have no individuality. In contrast, I have a dear herpetologist colleague with whom I have collaborated in research on “animal rights” who ascribes emotions and personality to his cold and slithery charges, upbraiding me for being a “speciesist” with a bias toward warm-blooded animals.

We do not have to examine each step of the taxonomic ladder from species to genus to family of man to appreciate the increasing complexity of the animals. However, their increased biological complexity is not accompanied by a proportional increase or variability of lifestyle. Obviously, a primatologist distinguishes among the members of her gorilla or chimpanzee horde. They look and behave differently even to the eyes of amateur observers at a zoo. But one horde of apes does essentially that which all hordes do. In that sense, their conformity to type is only somewhat more varied than such lower mammals as hyenas or lions, or even the amoebas. This conformity makes it easier for the biologist to spot the abnormal members of his group.

When a raccoon ambles up to a larger predator like a human being in broad daylight, we know that its behavior is abnormal. It is not supposed to be active in the daytime hours, and it is recklessly approaching an animal that can and does hunt it. Life-endangering behavior is anomalous to most species. It is acting abnormally, and probably
is
sick in the physical sense of that word. This behavior is the sign of a rabid raccoon. When despite all the posted warnings, a human being approaches a dangerous bear in Yellowstone Park, we do not presume he is sick. We think of him as stupid. And to judge from the number of visitors killed or maimed by bears in the parks, his behavior is not that singular or unconventional.

It is the discontinuity of the human species from the rest of the animal kingdom, discussed in the previous chapter, that makes a judgment of sickness more problematic. More of our behavior is free of instinctual fixation. We are free to look differently, dress differently, live differently, in different climates and different terrain, and to behave differently in our daily activities. Since we spend relatively little time hunting for food these days—an activity that dominates the life of most animals—we are free to work rather than just labor to survive, and the work at which we spend the majority of our waking hours varies dramatically. We become accountants and acrobats, farmers and plastic surgeons, spending the majority of our time in wildly different pursuits.

For these reasons, we have been generous in setting the borders of normalcy for human behavior, allowing serious deviations from a standard before necessarily labeling the behavior as abnormal. In terms of emotional behavior, we accept the extrovert and the recluse as within accepted standards. All manner of nonconforming behavior is sanctioned. Even with something as primary to species survival as the sexual drive, we allow great latitude, sexually permissive communities coexisting with celibate ones. Nevertheless, since the beginning of recorded time, certain people and certain behavior have stood out. They are the outsiders, beyond the perimeters of the defined normal.

Early literature is filled with the strange and the exotic persons who even in those days were described as mad—people who were identified by their peers as having significantly departed from the wide landscape of normal human behavior. The madness was extreme and complete: like the madness of King Saul, poignant and terrible to behold; the frightful vengeance of Medea; Nebuchadnezzar,
who “did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers and his nails like birds' claws.”
²⁸
Nebuchadnezzar's appearance is an apt description of that of a deteriorated and neglected schizophrenic living on the streets of our major cities.

The assignment of the cause of such extreme behavior differs from culture to culture. Deranged people were considered cursed, enchanted, possessed by demons, or holy visionaries. In the case of Nebuchadnezzar, his behavior was perceived as a punishment from God, to whom he had dared compare himself. In some cases the behavior was seen as a gift and the eccentric viewed as a prophet. With the emollient influence of time we view Saint Francis dressed in rags and speaking to the animals differently from the way we perceive the homeless man dressed similarly and having his words with who knows whom. Until the eighteenth century, symptoms that today would be generally reserved for the insane were interpreted as special gift, a sign of the holy. Or they might equally be viewed as a sign of bewitchment, and the person would be destroyed as a henchman of evil, a witch or a warlock. The pathetic teenagers exploited by their mullahs to destroy themselves while destroying others will draw different evaluations from the Arab and the Israeli populations. And history will judge them differently, too.

These days we are unlikely to designate a deranged person as a saint or demon. Instead we designate the irrationality that defies normal human understanding as crazy. Crazy behavior is often animal-like and wantonly destructive (running amok), or simply a feckless and dangerous insensibility to self-interest. One sign that has been central to an assessment of mental illness in any individual is his wanton lack of interest in even the basic need for food and shelter, the cardinal essentials for survival.