On Murder and Being an Intellectual

Are they related? Are you kidding? Somehow I think they are. It started the other day when I was discussing with a colleague about a very smart scientist we know who has got into booga booga and how ‘we live in a parallel universe but don’t really know it”…blah blah. I was going to send him a piece that I wrote about booga booga, and then decided against it as a useless, vain attempt. He couldn’t hear it. Then I thought about the guy in Norway who killed 60 people in a murderous rampage. Nothing could have reasoned him out of it. Neither my killer or my intellectual could be reached. They were locked into an idea that was unshakeable. The left brain was being crowded out by massive right brain input.

Well, you might say, the Norwegian surely knew right from wrong so he was clearly sane. I mean he could decide on what guns to use and what ammo; what ferries to ride and made a whole series of “rational” decisions. Yet he killed at random. He wasn’t mad at anyone; he was just plain angry and had no specific target. He could not be reached; he was living in a brain that had no contact with his feelings, that absorbed a mountain of rage but could not connect. It was disconnection, dissociation, abstracted and alienated from one’s true self. He was being driven and importuned by his deeper and mostly right brain; beyond his control.

Isn’t that a bit similar to the intellectual who wallows in delusions and booga booga thinking? And he cannot be reached or have his mind changed? Both are victims of a deep and right sided brain that cannot connect. Both have rationales for their behavior and beliefs. These were not beliefs that one can be reasoned with; they had a force that first stops at a way station where complex and paranoid belief systems operate in the left brain, and then if the imprinted force is strong enough, carries the person into more complex bizarre behavior. And the point is that these strange beliefs live alongside perfectly rational thought systems, sometimes precise scientific beliefs. I attended a scientific meeting where one of the presenters said to me on the side. “I know you are from the hidden side of Atlantis. “ He wasn’t kidding, yet his presentation was unassailable. Clearly, there is a part of the intellect internally focused, that bends to right brain pressure, and another part that sees outside very well; the alienated self.

So what is the difference? Insane and not insane? If both harbor serious delusions, false ideas and irrational beliefs is there a real difference? One has thoughts out of control, and other has behavior out of control. We might say that there is enough cortical control left to understand that something may be irrational. Some chance to be reasoned with. With the Norwegian there was no functional cortex available; it was all submerged by pain. Pain became his total reality. Nothing to say, “I am overwhelmed by pain.” People had to die; his whole past flooded in at once leaving him no chance. It’s a bit fanciful what I am writing but it is food for thought.

Here is what science writer Bruce Wilson adds to the mix:

I checked the Wiki entry on Brievek. Here's his diagnosis:

"According to the report, Breivik displayed inappropriate and blunted affect and a severe lack of empathy. He spoke incoherently in neologisms and had acted compulsively based on a universe of bizarre, grandiose and delusional thoughts. Breivik alluded himself as the future regent of Norway, master of life and death, while calling himself "inordinately loving" and "Europe's most perfect knight since WWII". He was convinced that he was a warrior in a "low intensity civil war" and had been chosen to save his people. To the psychiatrists, Breivik described plans to carry out further "executions of categories A, B and C traitors" by the thousands, themselves included, and to organize Norwegians in reservations for the purpose of selective breeding. Breivik believed himself to be the "knight Justiciar grand master" of a Templar organization. He was deemed to be suicidal and homicidal by the psychiatrists."

He was clearly psychotic and a psychopath, but how different is he from Gadafi, Hitler, Kim Jong Il, or a host of other functional crazies?

The similarity between the psychotic and the intellectual is that they've completely lost touch with their right brain. McGilchrist likens our current culture to the world of the schizophrenic: non-feeling, non-empathic, individualistic, bureaucratic, no sense of the whole, rigid, obessed with rules. It's a schizoid culture. Like psychotic murderers, intellectuals are split from feeling; they resort to ideology rather than intuition, they support and uphold insane regimes (including the USA), they follow rules of logic rather than gut feelings, they miss the whole picture and focus on specifics, numbers, statistics, legal arguments, etc. Finally, intellectuals can easily justify mass murder as they did in Nazi Germany.

So I think it's a spectrum, with psychotic psychopathy at one end and cold, calculating intellectual psychopathy at the other end. Think Kissinger, Karl Rove, Machiavelli. You have those in the middle who are semi-delusional but functional.

Peter Prontzos adds: don’t forget the common every-day delusions like spanking is good for children; blind patriotism is good and greed is wonderful. These are delusions created in the zeitgeist and adopted as true by most of us. Our social life, in short, creates our conscious awareness, in a way. I grew up working class. Thus the idea of crossing a picket line was an anathema to me. It was part of my social being, engraved in me. Physiologically, to this day I cannot and will not cross a picket line.


Don’t mix psychopath from the psychotic; they are very different animals. I have written about psychopaths before, and if necessary I will write again. Whatever Breivik concocted in the way of being the regent of the world they came out of a mixture of so much pain until he cracked and then that past became his total reality; there was no present. Rather his past was his present. This is not so egregious in intellectuals because their theories and belief shave a rational patina even if they make no sense. Like the Fox News shrink who claims that Gingrich’s affairs will help him with the presidency unless he is seduced by some foreign power: I cannot make this up. But once you are detached from feelings you can concoct all sorts of nonsense. Yet, these people concoct ideas derived from feelings even though they have no way to connect to them. Like acting dumb and unfaithful is good for you; and for the country!

There has to be a special category for Kissinger. Not a psychopath but some kind of diabolic manipulator, hated by my hero Joe Heller and written about well as a war criminal by Chris Hitchens. Hitchens did us all a service with his book on Kissinger.


So here we have many schools of psychology which are only elaborate rationales for the theorist’s own neurosis. In the early days in the split from Freud there was the Will to Power, That Sex was paramount in all neuroses, and on and on’ raising personal neurosis to the level of a theory. But it was still extrapolated pain; the right side pressing against the left and forcing it to think nonsense. You want objective? Be relatively free of pain. Then make a theory all you want.

Yet they went on with elaborate philosophies, studies that supported their position, etc. Much like EMDR today which is utter nonsense yet has thousands of supporters who swear by it. Worse it has hundreds of “research studies” to confirm its validity. So let me say it one more time, ad nauseam: Once you understand that there is an imprint, an engraved memory that endures even during gestation and dominates our behavior and symptoms, then if you do not address generating sources you cannot change. It is no more complex than that. We can dance around the edges pushing back each surge of feeling and crying out CURE! But alas, it is a chimera.