On Tuesday, we heard slightly surprising news out of Norway. Anders Behring Breivik, the conservative Eurocentric terrorist who killed 77 people this past summer, was found sane enough to stand criminal trial. This is a dramatic reversal of the original decision declaring him psychotic, absolving him and his society from some of the blame of this heinous act. After all, it's much easier to declare that these kind of actions can only result from a deranged mind. Yes, we are a violent species, but we have moved beyond that kind of barbarism-especially in the West. This is the lie that those who want to maintain the status quo feed us. They have created a linguistic system by which we label everything which appears to be outside of the Dominant culture/counterculture duality as socially, if not scientifically, insane.
Breivik is a perfect example of how part of this works. Rather than trying to explain how or why our people like Timothy McVeigh, Adolf Hitler, or Anders Behring Breivik, exist in our-or any other-culture, we dismiss them as being insane, evil, and/or heretical. We have seen the results of closing our eyes jamming our fingers in our ears and attending our society has "evolved" beyond that. It is certainly true that human society has, in many ways drastically progressed in the past 200 years. However without knowledge of the past and an understanding of what it means for us today, we will find ourselves as part of a regressive society. The idea of declaring someone or something insane has far more insidious repercussions than the blunt example of Anders Behring Breivik. As acceptable behavior becomes more severely codified (not only in terms of one set of acceptable behaviors, but also a different more restrictive subsets), more becomes deemed as unacceptable.
I do not mean to suggest that this is a unique phenomenon, rather it is a basic definition of how collectivized societal power works. Some measure of this is necessary for basic human interaction. For example we could not communicate effectively if we had personal definitions for every word. However, the branding of nonconformist or dominant thought as insane must be thought of as regressive. It is simply a scientifically-charged way of calling someone a witch or a heretic. That is when they don't just call you a witch or a heretic. We can see this in the way that people in the LGBTQ community are treated, the way that Feminists are treated, the way the Wicca are treated, and certainly the way that Progressives are treated (these are three of many groups I could name). Look at the way that Progressive ideas like having a more equitable tax system, ending oil subsidies, ending or at least changing the tactics used in the 'War on Drugs,' or free public college are treated. No matter how popular these policies may be, as shown through polling, their ideas that do not fit in with how we are told that our society is run. So they are dismissed as impossible, as insane.
Once again this is not a new phenomenon. Other 'insane' ideas from our history are that women are not just property. That, really, when it comes down to it, no person should be any other person's property. Or the insane idea that everybody should be taught to read or write. The key point in understanding this is not that the Dominant forces in society are using a new tactic, it's that they're using the same one. No matter how many times we are told that we do, we do not live in post-racial, post-sexist, politically correct 'end of history' world. The Dominant forces in our society, the corporatists, the one-percenters are counting on the rest of us to be satisfied enough with the status quo and scared enough of being branded as 'insane' that we will accept the wool which is being pulled haphazardly over our eyes. We have to prove to them and to ourselves that we aren't. That this is still a world which needs new ideas and transformative policies.
Which brings us back to Anders Behring Breivik. Norwegian society, and European society on the whole, was rocked by his violent actions. The original decision to declare him insane seemed designed to be sedative, calming a terrified populace than anything else. "Don't worry," that decision said to Europeans, "he was just an outlier, a random force in our standardized society." Just one look at European society shows this not be the case. While Breivik certainly went a step further than some of his compatriots, his bigoted beliefs are far from uncommon across the entire European Union. All of those people are not criminally insane, regardless of how distasteful their particular beliefs might be on, say, race relations. Before we can have a conversation about the direction our societies and our species is going in, we must recognize the existence of multiplicities of thought. We must insist that there is not a black-and-white choice here, that insisted upon this does not lead to the trap of cultural relativism. I have no problem condemning Breivik’ s way of thinking, but that doesn't mean that I can simply dismiss the conclusions he draws or factors that caused him to believe those things. The only way for society to progress as a whole is for us to look honestly at the component parts which our species contains. The court's decision to declare Breivik sane, and thus fit to stand criminal trial for his actions, is a small step in the right direction.
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