Commentary: A fanatic's 14 features

TORONTO, Oct. 5 (UPI) -- We are told that terrorists are fanatics, but what are fanatics? Here's a primer:

1. The typical fanatic starts off filled with insecurity and self-loathing, believing himself an insignificant failure, his life spoiled, and he wards off this negative self-image by developing a grandiose fantasy about himself.

Fanatical grandiosity is an attempt to obliterate self-loathing by magic, instead of by self-mprovement.

The fanatic's grandiosity predisposes him to see himself and his cause as all-good, all-powerful and guaranteed of victory. But the fanatic's newfound sense of grandiosity is achieved by projecting the hated sense of himself on to others. Now they are the ones filled with hateful traits. Thus he achieves grandiosity, but at the expense of becoming paranoid.

His paranoia predisposes him to dehumanize his chosen enemies and see them as abstract placeholders of all the traits he hated in himself. Seeing them as hateful and inhuman, he sets out to destroy them -- without guilt. Hence his psychopathy.

Hitler, the most famous fanatic of all, was filled with self-loathing. He frequently threatened suicide, and ultimately killed himself. He considered himself "weak-kneed." Writing in "Mein Kampf," Hitler stressed his early, ongoing misery and humiliation. He failed repeated grades in school, twice failed the entrance exam to the Vienna Academy of Art, and was consumed with bitterness about his lack of success as an artist. He was fearful of sex, and had, according to a Russian autopsy and other sources, a genital malformation. In sex he often got his partners to kick him and urinate on him. He had a depression which did not lift until he began his political career in 1919, became an anti-Semite, and began to direct his fury outward.

2. The fanatic doctrine need not make sense, but it must command obedience.

Fanatic doctrines are often vague and riddled with contradictions. What they offer the convert is not sense, but a sense of certainty. People prone to fanaticism will often switch from one fanaticism to another because what they are looking for is not the truth, but a passionate attachment to a project that will give them hope and relieve their sense of being hateful and unimportant.

3. He is preoccupied with metaphors of things invading him -- cancers, viruses, bacteria, bad non-Aryan genes and filth -- and corrupting him, his cause or his country from within.

Bin Laden's reason for attacking America is that American troops sit on sacred Islamic soil, despoiling it. Muslim extremists frequently describe America as a cancer. These metaphors are very telling. The fanatic's sense that he can be invaded by this harmful thing in the external world is actually a symbolic representation of his fear of what would happen if his psychological defenses break down and the truth re-emerges: that hated part that he imagined he had projected outside onto the world is really inside him, controlling him.

4. He accuses, but the accusations apply more to himself than to the accused. Again, this occurs because the fanatic projects the bad he cannot bear about himself on to his enemy, and then attacks the enemy for being bad. Hitler accused the Jews, a small stateless people at the time, without an army, of posing a threat to take over the entire world. All the while he, with his massive war machine, was attempting to do just that.

5. He's always intolerant. The fanatic believes not only that his cause is good, but that it is the only good, an absolute good, and is intolerant of dissent either within his ranks or without. It was Voltaire who observed of the fanatic that "... neutrality itself has no place with a power that seeks to dominate; and whoever is not for it is against it." So strong a need do terrorist cells have to silence opposition and establish their own unassailable authority, that they frequently develop a campaign of terror against their own ethnic or religious group.

6. He's against it. Though the fanatic believes in a utopian future, in practice he is more defined by what he stands against. Life is organized around a sense of grievance, resentment and injustice collecting. Even the name of bin Laden's organization is defined not by what it stands for, but what it stands against -- "The World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders."

7. The fanatic devalues the present in the name of the utopian future.

Since the fanatic believes this world is spoiled, and he wishes to transform it, he is as contemptuous of what he sees around him as he is enthusiastically hopeful about the future.

8. Fanaticisms are apocalyptic. Not all utopian visions are apocalyptic. Some few have been conceived as being brought about by evolution and reason. Because fanatics are driven by grandiosity, all fanaticisms are utopian, promising not just a better world, but a perfect world. But, because all fanatics are also paranoid, the utopian future world can only be achieved by first destroying this world which is full of enemies.

9. Utopian religious fanaticism and nihilism are, ironically, fellow travelers and both have sadistic and/or suicidal tendencies. Nihilism and religion would seem to be opposites -- the one preaches life has no value, and there is no God, the other that it is filled with value revealed by God. But nihilism and fanatical religion are co-travelers, in part because both devalue the present. As Nietzsche observed, nihilism and fanatical otherworldly religions both have a similar root. Otherworldly religions, by emphasizing the greater reality of the afterlife, have a way of devaluing this life. The life-to-come begins to seem more just and meaningful than this passing one which seems arbitrary, empty of meaning and deadened by comparison. The nihilist also believes life on earth is without meaning, a dead world. Hence, Nietzsche wrote, "The deed of Nihilism ... is suicide" -- yet not just a single suicide, but a suicide of humanity. Nietzsche saw a "blood bath" ahead in which all the existing values of civilization would be undone, including the basic value, "Though Shalt Not Kill." The terrorist and Islamic suicide bomber put nihilism into action.

10. The fanatic believes that he and his cause are merged with Almighty God or destiny. In an interview he gave to ABC News in December 1998, soon after U.S. prosecutors indicted him for bombing two U.S. Embassies in Africa, bin Laden explained, "We will continue in this course because it is part of our religion, and because God, Praise and Glory be to him, ordered us to carry out jihad (holy war) ..." Of course the man merged with God is soon tempted to play God, and decide who shall live and who shall die.

11. He feels confident of victory. This follows, of course, from believing oneself merged with God, or a God-like force. "By the Grace of God victory will be the lot of Muslim peoples ... By the Grace of God, Praise and Glory be to him, Muslims were able to defeat and force them (the United States) out of Somalia, as these expelled them before, from Aden. This blockade and this tightening doesn't hurt us much. We expect to be rewarded by God, Praise and Glory to him." Such certainty led Hitler to open a second eastern front with Russia, which may have cost him victory. He overextended himself.

12. He seeks to expand his domain, and convert or conquer the world. The fanatic is not the madman who functions alone; he seeks to create a mass movement whose members rally together in a united action and submerge their own individual interests for the cause. All major fanaticisms, because they are based on grandiosity, sooner or later attempt to take over the world. Ayatollah Khomeini, when he called for a jihad, said jihad "means the conquest of non-Muslim territory. The domination of Koranic Law from one end of the earth to the other is ... the final goal ... of this war of conquest." His administration immediately set out to get an Islamic nuclear bomb.

13. Special reinforcement techniques are used. Incantation, continual prayer, meditation, brainwashing, drugs or other hypnotic phenomena are used to reinforce the sense of fusion with the omnipotent one. In the ABC interview, bin Laden repeated that God was informing him and his followers to conduct the jihad in almost every answer he gave. The original assassin sect made use of hashish; Indian sects made use of meditation. The purpose of these techniques is to help the fanatic to dissociate from his self, to block out natural urges for self-preservation or natural sympathies with victims, and replace them with a fantasy that he is about to merge with God.

14. In the search for purity, the fanatic frequently flirts with asceticism, and has an equivocal attitude to sexuality and the body. The fanatic seeks to control everything in his world, but his body makes its own demands. Mohammed Atta's letter to the suicide bombers on the eve of the World Trade Center terror attacks was complete with instructions about washing and cleansing the body.

Not surprisingly, fanatical movements are often equivocal about sexuality -- very much against, yet prone to debauching. Thus, the terrorists criticized America for being licentious, yet several of them went to visit strippers the night before the World Trade Center attacks. Bin Laden's suicide bombers spoke repeatedly of the Koranic promise that, as martyrs, they would be met, immediately, in paradise by 72 hours -- virgins with whom they will have sex for eternity, these girls' virginities being renewed after each sexual act.

The next time you are told that fanaticism is merely in the eyes of the beholder, and one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, why not see how the reputed "freedom fighter" scores on the above list?

(Norman Doidge is a research psychiatrist and psychoanalyst on the staff at Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.)