Counterblast

When one goes to fight monsters, Nietzsche once wrote, one had best take care not to become the monster oneself.

Nothing illustrates this truth better than the case of the Oslo killer, Anders Breivik. In one horrific act, he annihilated and destroyed all the values he ostensibly held dear, values rooted in love of country and Christianity. This is the irrational psychology of the reactionary, which has been rightly called “the revolution of nihilism” with good reason.

A mind and heart consumed by hate eventually devours itself, and sometimes quite literally. A Norwegian police officer expressed surprise that Breivik had not taken his own life after his murderous rampage of slaughter on Utøya Island, as is very often the case with these types. No fascist regime has ever survived long without invoking the principle leading to its own self-destruction. Their hatred and enmity becomes an absolute and literally all-consuming nihilism… Nietzsche’s “monster”. The twilight of the idols.

This annihilating and self-annihilating dynamic of nihilism the reactionary often misconstrues as, and deceives himself as being, his own “martyrdom”, which it is not. He bathes himself in false glory. It is not martyrdom because the truths or values for which he sacrifices himself (and most especially others) he has already negated and destroyed by his act and example. In the case of Breivik, too, we have another real-life instance of that Jekyll and Hyde dichotomisation of the soul that meets like matter and anti-matter and becomes mutually annihilate. And there’s no doubt that Brevik, perversely, considers himself a martyr.

Ostensibly a patriot, he attacked his own country and people. Ostensibly a Christian, he acted from an all-consuming hate, which became for him a compulsive fate. He now describes what drove him as “necessity”, and that he was in the grip of this necessity even as he recognised his act as “gruesome”. But this “necessity” was only his own  hatred become, in his mind, a supernatural guiding force. Indeed, it is. But it is demonic force.

Let us recall and remember the wise words of Omar Khayyam: “only a hair separates the false from the true”.

The same applies to hatred and love. Hatred is not the opposite of love. Hatred is love that has become perverted, demented, and deranged. Hatred is diseased love. I invoke again, here, what I’ve taken to call “Khayyam’s Caution,” that we do not misconstrue things that are related as being opposites. Hatred is the innocence and power of love that has been perverted and distorted beyond recognition. One might even say that all-consuming hatred is love that has become totally estranged from itself, and that implies that old problem of the human condition — narcissism. We’ve defined narcissism, succinctly, as the confusion of self with self-image or self-concept, or true self with false self. So, it’s no coincidence that Mr. Breivik is, as I’ve mentioned, an über-narcissist.

This (and what it means to be an über-narcissist) will become very apparent in due course. Even Brievik’s sense of martyrdom for his cause is deceit and self-deception, and arises from the self-aggrandising narcissism of the false self or ego-nature.

Narcissism is the source of all deceit and self-deception, as it is also of hatred, enmity, and malice.

An analogy from literature may help to clarify how hatred can be appreciated as deranged or perverted love. From Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, we learn how the orcs were once elves, protectors and conservors, but having given themselves over to the ring of power they became perverted and deformed, becoming evil (or, perhaps better, sick). They are the image of nihilism and destructiveness, their physical deformities symbolically manifesting their spiritual perversion, being now lustful rather than loving. Tolkein himself referred to such displays of destructiveness and nihilism as “orcery”. The world of the orcs is a dark wasteland and a ruin, the physical manifestation of their inner spiritual deformity and nihilism, in which they even turn on that which they formerly loved, protected, and treasured — the forests.

We are far closer in our spiritual condition to that of the orcs than we are to the elves, in fact. And a conservatism which conserves nothing is falsehood; is, in fact, nihilism itself. Yet, Mr. Breivik calls himself “a conservative Christian” and probably truly believes it, even if his actions betray the lie and the deception he actually lives. For by his actions, rather than in his rhetoric, he destroyed, effaced, and devalued the very things he claimed to be “conserving”. His acts, in fact, remarkably mirror Nietzsche’s own description of nihilism: “all higher values devalue themselves”.

This dichotomisation of Being into radical dualisms is a delusion and is unsustainable. But it is now all too common at our “end of history”, and manifests as the present plague of hypocrisy. It belongs to sickness. It is the basic theme of Stevenson’s story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which is somewhat the equivalent of Tolkein’s narrative of the elves and the origin of the orcs.

I’ve mentioned it before, and it’s worth mentioning again. We have our own “four riders of the apocalypse” at our end of history, and their names are Double-Talk, Double-Think, Double-Standard, and Double-Bind.

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