I was tempted to do a full psychological breakdown for Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who attacked a socialist youth camp back in 2011. However, I am now so familiar with the character type that it was too difficult to work up the enthusiasm: a brief glance at the main books about him was sufficient—incidentally, both were by two highly narcissistic women, one a feminist and one an “FBI terrorist profiler” (naturally, both were attracted to the project because Breivik killed children—nothing could excite feminine interest more).
The story is the same as Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and so on: a narcissistic biological substrate that is subject to an unstable environment growing up that tips what would either be mildly anti-social behaviour or low-level criminality into serious crimes and/or murder. In Breivik’s case, there is a similarity to Ted K—Breivik’s mother was placed in an orphanage in her babyhood while her mother was ill (latterly, went schizophrenic); similarly, Ted K was placed in isolation from his mother in infancy. The result in both cases was to create very cold people—Breivik’s mother was highly narcissistic and completely cold (a state garnished with schizoid tendencies); his father was also very cold.
It is no surprise that Breivik locked on to nationalist terrorism to express his narcissistic racialised self-love (as demonstrated by the peculiar photos of him as a frogman and military officer); his attack on the prospective “socialist elite” owed something Michels-type elite theory and yet it was only pseudo-rational (follow these theories through and “the government always gets in”—the parties are irrelevant, the permanent bureaucracy is). Breivik, as a narcissist, would lock on to the overt and superficial, “socialist iconography”, rather than the substantial—the “cold logic”, pseudo-logic, flowed from there, “kill the next generation”. His mother engaged in similar “rational” acts—party all night with the kids at home, “…but they’re always asleep when I get back”; rational, yet weirdly cold. Breivik was less political than mentally disturbed.