Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Rolling Stone: the affable psychopath
[UPDATE: I seem to have figured out a way to comment at PJ. Although it won’t let me do so as “neoneocon,” it seems that I can under “neoneo.”]
I’ve got a new article up at PJ today. The takeoff point is the Rolling Stone article about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But I don’t write about the cover that’s generated so much controversy and chatter; I write about the content.
It struck me when I read it that the people interviewed by Rolling Stone—friends, acquaintances, and teachers of Dzhokhar—were universally puzzled by his supposed transformation from easygoing guy, affable and loved by all and particularly relaxed and cool (and who wasn’t even especially religious) into murderous jihadi. That transformation has puzzled not only those who knew him, but most journalists who write about him. My thesis is that they are failing to entertain the theory I think most likely, which is that the charming-appearing Dzhokhar was and is a psychopath. Unlike his brother Tamerlane, who was a more conventionally troubled misfit, as well as devout Muslim, Dzhokhar fits the classic description of psychopathy in Hervey Cleckley’s classic book on the subject, The Mask of Sanity.
For some reason my sign-in to comment at PJ isn’t working. I’d like to comment on my own article there, and I can’t! The reason I wanted to comment is that I noticed that a few commenters there seem to misunderstand the point of the article, and seem to think I’m saying either that Dzhokhar is not culpable for his murderous acts (he most definitely is), or that Islam had nothing to do with the Boston bombing (it most certainly did, as primary motivation for Tamerlane and as weak motivation/excuse for Dzhokhar), or that all jihadis are psychopaths (they are not—Dzhokhar is hardly typical of the genre). If you could comment under your own name there and point out these facts, it might be helpful. Thanks. [See UPDATE above.]
[ADDENDUM: Commenter Geoffrey Britain writes:
When reality proves that one’s assumptions and perceptions were gravely mistaken, puzzlement can only continue if one retains the idea that one’s prior beliefs had validity. Obviously, Dzhokhar was never really an easygoing guy, affable and cool and his actions prove that he was especially ”˜religious’ or more accurately, ideological. He simply pretended to be those ”˜nice’ things and his friends, acquaintances, and teachers lacked the discernment to see past the pretense.
I disagree:
Dzhokhar, IMHO, was an affable guy, but everything he “was” was a mask or a screen. He was not “pretending” in the same way non-psychopaths would pretend, as a sort of conscious, thought-out plan of dissemblance. Psychopaths have no core to “pretend” about, except their own emptiness. They are affable right up to the moment they murder innocent people (and by no means are all of them murderers, or even violent).
Psychopathy is a very poorly-understood phenomenon. It is what is called a character disorder rather than a mental illness such as schizophrenia. Psychopaths are profoundly different in their makeup from non-psychopaths, and the motivations for their behavior are very different. If you read the quotes I selected from Cleckley’s book, you’ll see a bit of what I mean. But you would need to read more of the book to get a fuller picture.
In Dzhokhar’s case, I would say his becoming a terrorist was multiply-determined. A psychopath first and foremost. Next, exposure to jihadi thought via the media and especially his brother, the true jihadi. And then perhaps something as simple as boredom and desire for excitement.]
I did it for you, Neo. (Mimi)
“the people interviewed by Rolling Stone–friends, acquaintances, and teachers of Dzhokhar–were universally puzzled by his supposed transformation from easygoing guy, affable and loved by all and particularly relaxed and cool (and who wasn’t even especially religious) into murderous jihadi.”
When reality proves that one’s assumptions and perceptions were gravely mistaken, puzzlement can only continue if one retains the idea that one’s prior beliefs had validity. Obviously, Dzhokhar was never really an easygoing guy, affable and cool and his actions prove that he was especially ‘religious’ or more accurately, ideological. He simply pretended to be those ‘nice’ things and his friends, acquaintances, and teachers lacked the discernment to see past the pretense.
And if Rolling Stone is puzzled, then that indicates an agenda that can’t objectively consider contrary evidence.
This is going to sound off the wall, but many of the observations about psychopaths in your piece brought Obama to mind.
Great post at PJMedia, Neo!
Ted Bundy was charming, too, which didn’t make him any less of a psychopath.
I skimmed the RS article, but I didn’t catch any quotes from his close college friends – the ones who were of foreign origin, too, and sported a BMW with a “Terrorist” vanity plate. I think it’s safe to say that Jahar didn’t reveal his true personality to Americans, such as his wrestling coach,vs. his fellow foreign college friends. Just another variation of “he was just a quiet guy” quotes from colleagues and neighbors on the evening news after a guys snaps and shoots up his workplace.
Could the Islamic (Shi’a) Doctrine of Taqiyya have had anything to do with it?
Taqiyya is a doctrine which allows a Shia muslim to be involved in dissimulation when dealing with “enemies”. It originates in the conflicts between the minority Shi’as and majority Sunni’s. When Shi’as were being persecuted by Sunni’s they would often protect themselves by passing themselves off as Sunnis – yet they really were maintaining and secretly practicing Shi’a beliefs and practices.
Now I don’t know if Dzhokhar is a Sunni or a Sh’ia, however he was likely familiar with Taqiyya and so probably would not have hesitated to practice it.
BTW – Here is an example of Taqiyya. Back in 2005, when London was bombed, Hamid Ali, the spiritual leader of Al-Madina mosque publically condemned the bombings. However he was busted later when undercover reporters from the Sunday Times recorded him calling the 7/7 bombings a good act and also praising the bombers.
Thanks.
Rather than classically psychopathic, I would suggest that Obama is a narcissistic sociopath.
Of the 7 aspects, Obama fits at least six.
amount of remorse; sociopaths can commit vile actions and not feel the least bit of remorse
sense of morality; sociopath’s often skirt morality for personal benefit
level of emotion; can experience a highly emotional event without displaying the least bit of emotion
level of social interaction; can be extremely charming, while harboring strong antisocial inclinations and can exist in isolation (college) without feeling deprived.
intellectual performance; can perform well in academics without cracking a book
manipulative behavior; understands human weakness, once determined, they can easily manipulate individuals and exploit it maximally.
violent behavior; exhibits mental and emotional abuse toward others
Neo,
I also commented in support of your claim. I haven’t followed the case closely enough to have an opinion, but I think it is a mistake to pretend to understand every single person who performs an islamic terrorist act. We turn our attention away from people who may not fit our mold and yet may be extremely dangerous.
Could it be to these friends, family, Rolling Stone etc “with exception that he killed innocents and damaged lives” he really didn’t do something all that bad?
Possibly …
He would make a good reporter for the msn. I hear that teenage girls are demanding his release because he’s too cute to be a terrorist.
Geoffrey Britain:
I disagree with you.
Dzhokhar, IMHO, was an affable guy, but everything he “was” was a mask or a screen. He was not “pretending” in the same way non-psychopaths would pretend, as a sort of conscious, thought-out plan of dissemblance. Psychopaths have no core to “pretend” about, except their own emptiness. They are affable right up to the moment they murder innocent people (and by no means are all of them murderers, or even violent).
Psychopathy is a very poorly-understood phenomenon. It is what is called a character disorder rather than a mental illness such as schizophrenia. Psychopaths are profoundly different in their makeup from non-psychopaths, and the motivations for their behavior are very different. If you read the quotes I selected from Cleckley’s book, you’ll see a bit of what I mean. But you would need to read more of the book to get a fuller picture.
In Dzhokhar’s case, I would say his becoming a terrorist was multiply-determined. A psychopath first and foremost. Next, exposure to jihadi thought via the media and especially his brother, the true jihadi. And then perhaps something as simple as boredom and desire for excitement.
Raj:
See my comment right above this one.
Neo,
And with all due respect, I must somewhat disagree with you. Yes, it was a mask or screen covering up an empty core. Yet a mask, no matter how perfect or what the underlying motivation, be it a twisted soul or no ‘soul’ at all is still a mask, and a mask, by definition is pretense.
Dzhokhar’s mask was the ‘clothes’ he wore to conceal the naked truth of his emptiness, that at his core there was no conscience. That he is incapable of conscience. Perhaps its all semantics but in any case, Dzhokhar was not in actuality, who those who ‘knew’ him, thought him to be.
Dear ms. Neoneo
I love your blog. The book “Mask of Sanity” is available on Amazon for the low low price of $210.00. I would really like to read it but I was thinking more along the lines of the ten dollar kindle edition. Any suggestions?
I envision the typical Al-qaeda or Taliban want ad this way:
Must love hurting people. Religious fervor a plus but not required. Will train.
Was Dzhokhar’s brother a psychopath too? If not, then why not think that both brothers had the same motivation and thinking?
Hummm. . .. looking closely at the comments from your PJ article on the PJ page, I was surprised. It looks to me like many did not bother to read the whole thing. In fact, I’m suspicious that many did not get past your first paragraph. That’s a disappointment to say the least. Of course, it’s good thing to reach out to a larger audience, but you’re correction of their laziness in reading and comprehension could go on forever. Anyway, it seems to me that your core thoughtful, critical blog family is here. Speaking for myself, I like it that the hostess sometimes comments on the comments. Save it for us 🙂
Steve:
The Rolling Stone piece focused primarily on Dzhokhar and trying to explain him, and I’m limited in how long my PJ pieces should be, so I didn’t deal with Tamerlan except briefly in my article.
But everything I’ve read about the two brothers (many articles in addition to the Rolling Stone one) makes it extremely clear that they had very different personalities. I could go into it in detail, but suffice to say that nothing I’ve read about Tamerlan fits Cleckley’s description of the psychopath. Plus, Tamerlan had for quite a while been very visibly and clearly devoted to Islam, unlike Dzhokhar. No one would have called Tamerlan easygoing or relaxed; he was a very different, very intense and much more troubled-seeming person. Dzhokhar, by the way, grew up mostly here (came at the age of 9) and was seemingly well-assimilated. Tamerlan was raised in Chechnya and only came here at the age of 16.
And no one seemed all that puzzled by Tamerlan’s becoming a terrorist. The puzzle was Dzhokhar, a very different personality.
right wing sort of extremist:
I would suggest exactly the way I got it: public library (I had to use interlibrary loan).
Geoffrey Britain:
Of course a mask is a pretense. We are both agreed on that.
I disagree with you not about that, but about whether (as you claim):
1. his actions prove that he was especially ‘religious’ or more accurately, ideological; and
2. He simply pretended to be those ‘nice’ things; and
3. his friends, acquaintances, and teachers lacked the discernment to see past the pretense
My points are:
1. his actions prove nothing of the sort. They do not prove he adhered particularly strongly to the religion or ideology in question. If in fact he was a psychopath (and signs point to that fact) then he did not adhere particularly strongly to any ideology. He was in fact empty.
2. he was not “pretending” in the way non-psychopaths pretend–as I’ve explained earlier
3. his friends, etc., showed no particular lack of discernment in not seeing past the pretense. It is notoriously difficult for most people to spot a psychopath until the person does something violent or that otherwise shows their pathology. The mask is very, very good.
neo,
Ah, I see what you mean now and I concede. I hadn’t thought through the psychopathic aspect fully enough.
right wing sort of extremist:
I’ve been reading Mask of Sanity all day, since neo cited it. It’s available online for free! (pdf)
http://www.quantumfuture.net/store/sanity_1.PdF
Neo, I’m tickled as can be to see you over at LI now too, in addition to PJ and also popping up at Ace’s. You’re in a league of your own and have kept me interested since I found you years ago. I’m a very very quiet daily reader. 🙂
I admire you and your work (and your merry band of commenters). I enjoy this place very much!
Obligatory.
Schmidty:
Nice to see you come out of the lurker closet.
And thanks for that link—I didn’t know it was available online.
neo, I simply disagree. I don’t think the kid is nuts (and I wouldn’t want to give the defense the excuse to see him as an insanity case instead of a competent adult, anyway).
Of course, I’m also a soldier, so there are elements of being willing to kill people to defend your culture that I have a very strong sympathy for. I don’t expect people to necessary understand and embrace that, of course, and your mileage may vary. But if you see your culture dying, well…
http://praxamericana.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-adorable-terrorist.html
SGT Caz –
I don’t think the kid is nuts. As I see it it’s not that he didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, it’s that he didn’t care one way or the other. This is more along the lines of depraved indifference than insanity.
Thank you for the welcome, neo.
SGT Caz and Schmidty:
Psychopaths are NOT “nuts.”
Let me clarify for you:
Psychopathy is NOT a mental illness.
Psychopathy is NOT insanity.
Psychopathy is NOT a defense to crime in any way.
“Depraved indifference” is actually a very good description of what psychopathy is.
My usage of the term “nuts” was poor, and I do not expect the kid to get off on an insanity plea or to even try.
But psychopathy is one of the cluster B traits, which is a disorder. That’s what kind of gets me here; there’s an implication from many people posting that something was faulty with his personality. People argue this about suicide, too, that if someone kills himself, there was some personality screwup because normal, healthy people don’t do that.
I don’t think that’s the case. I disagree with neo’s analysis that psychopathy is the first and foremost cause of what he did, and that he wasn’t particularly religious or ideological.
And what to do? Can’t be cured. Seems unfair to know a pyschopath and do nothing until he kills someone. Permanent monitoring? Preventative detention? Pre-crime execution? Nanotech virii brain restructuring?
Nor do all these revolutionists comprehend that they are allies. One group in the community strives to end the exploitation of child labor. Other groups seek to extend and improve education, to combat tuberculosis, to reform housing conditions, to secure direct primaries, to obtain the referendum, to punish force and fraud at the polls, to secure governmental inspection of foods, to regulate railroad rates, to limit the issue of stocks and bonds of corporations doing an interstate business, to change the character and incidence of taxation, to protect and recreate our forests, to reserve and conserve our mines, to improve the lot of the farmer, to build up trade-unions among workingmen, to Americanize incoming immigrants, to humanize prisons and penal laws, to protect the community against penury caused by old age, accident, sickness, and invalidity, to prevent congestion in cities, to divert to the public a larger share of the unearned increment, to accomplish a thousand other results for the general welfare. Every day new projects are launched for political, industrial, and social amelioration, and below the level of the present lie the greater projects of the future. Reform is piecemeal and yet rapid. It is carried along divergent lines by people holding separate interests, and yet it moves towards a common end. It combines into a general movement toward a new democracy.
“The New Democracy” by Walter Weyl pg 166
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While censorship and privacy intercept much information at its source, a very much larger body of fact never reaches the whole public at all, or only very slowly. For there are very distinct limits upon the circulation of ideas.
A rough estimate of the effort it takes to reach “everybody” can be had by considering the Government’s propaganda during the war. Remembering that the war had run over two years and a half before America entered it, that millions upon millions of printed pages had been circulated and untold speeches had been delivered, let us turn to Mr. Creel’s account of his fight “for the minds of men, for the conquest of their convictions” in order that “the gospel of Americanism might be carried to every corner of the globe.”1
Mr. Creel had to assemble machinery which included a Division of News that issued, he tells us, more than six thousand releases, had to enlist seventy-five thousand Four Minute Men who delivered at least seven hundred and fifty-five thousand, one hundred and ninety speeches to an aggregate of over three hundred million people. Boy scouts delivered annotated copies of President Wilson’s addresses to the householders of America. Fortnightly periodicals were sent to six hundred thousand teachers. Two hundred thousand lantern slides were furnished for illustrated lectures. Fourteen hundred and thirty-eight different designs were turned out for posters, window cards, newspaper advertisements, cartoons, seals and buttons. The chambers of commerce, the churches, fraternal societies, schools, were used as channels of distribution. Yet Mr. Creel’s effort, to which I have not begun to do justice, did not include Mr. McAdoo’s stupendous organization for the Liberty Loans, nor Mr. Hoover’s far reaching propaganda about food, nor the campaigns of the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., Salvation Army, Knights of Columbus, Jewish Welfare Board, not to mention the independent work of patriotic societies, like the League to Enforce Peace, the League of Free Nations Association, the National Security League, nor the activity of the publicity bureaus of the Allies and of the submerged nationalities. “Public Opinion” by Walter Lippman
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The key is to make sure people don’t figure the game out, as Weyl states:(still page 166)
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This revolution, in the very midst of which we are, while believing that we stand firm on a firm earth, is a revolution not of blood and iron, but of votes, judicial decisions, and points of view. It does not smell of gunpowder or the bodies of slain men. It does not involve anything sudden, violent, cataclysmic. Like other revolutions, it is simply a quicker turn of the wheel in the direction in which the wheel is already turning. It is a revolution at once magnificent and commonplace. It is a revolution brought about by and through the common run of men, who abjure heroics, who sleep soundly and make merry, who “talk” politics and prize-fights, who obey alarm clocks, time-tables and a thousand petty but revered social conventions. They do not know that they are revolutionists.
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When you try to, let’s see, improve society you affect different people and different interests differently and they are not actually commensurate. So you very often have all kinds of unintended adverse consequences. So I had to experiment. And it was a learning process. The first part was this subversive activity, disrupting repressive regimes. That was a lot of fun and that’s actually what got me hooked on this whole enterprise. Seeing what worked in one country, trying it in the other country. It was kind of what developed a matrix in fact that we had, national foundations, and then we had certain specialized activities George Soros
SGT Caz:
You can disagree all you want, but in order for your opinion to have any weight other than that conferred by simply being your opinion you’d have to offer some compelling evidence. I’ve amassed quite a bit for mine, especially from the Rolling Stone article, which you may or not not disagree with but the author of that article did a lot of original research/interviews with people who knew Dzhokhar. I noticed how well all the interviews seem to match up with the classic work on psychopathy. It was really quite uncanny, although not a single person in the article, or the author, or anyone else I’ve heard of seems to be putting two and two together in quite that way.
When you explain something—saying Dzhokhar is a psychopath, for example—you’re really not “explaining” much at all and you are most definitely not excusing anything. I think making excuses is what most people fear. Psychopathy, although apparently (perhaps) represents some sort of defect present from birth that then sometimes interacts in some way with environment and free will to result in crimininality, is NOT a bar to criminal responsibility. And although psychopathy is indeed a disorder, it is considered a character disorder that is merely descriptive. We know very little about the etiology of character disorders and they are virtually irrelevant in assigning criminal responsibility. My point in calling Dzhokhar a psychopath (which I very strongly believe he is on the basis of evidence) is not to absolve him of anything, or to say we “understand” him, but to point out the futility of trying to “understand” him in the usual psychological sense (the way the Rolling Stone article and Dzhokhar’s friends and teachers seem to be trying to do) of “what terrible trauma did he undergo to make this happen?” With a psychopath, there is not necessarily any terrible trauma at all, although sometimes there is.
Islamic fanaticism had a role in the bombing, a very large one for Tamerlan. For Dzhokhar, it seems to have acted more as another mask, a not-very-deeply-motivated excuse for violence. Not all terrorists are alike.
Normal humans use a mask or facade to protect their inner thoughts from being seen by others. Since a lot of times those thoughts are too negative and will get them exiled. Normal sane humans, fearing exile from the herd, attempt to modify their behavior to suit the societal environment.
Psychopaths have no particular need to do so. They are not hiding evil using a mask or facade. There is no evil in them per say. If they feel joy in torturing humans, it is the same kind of thing humans feel when getting rid of ants in the yard. Satisfaction. Curiosity. Power. Self Improvement. Getting work done.
Because they have intelligence, they know that they shouldn’t say things like that outloud. So in that sense, they keep their true desires hidden. But what normal people use masks for, to protect society from them and them from society, psychopaths only use it to protect themselves from society.