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Norway massacre | Inside Killer Anders Breivik's Mind

Charles Wilson

July 26^th 2011

Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer who killed 68 teenagers on the island of Utoya north west of Oslo, is going to be the subject of books and university psychology courses. What drove him to plan and execute a terror plot in such a callous, calculate and meticulous manner? He appears to be a narcissist from Hell.

Until we can read the results of the thorough psychiatric evaluation, which he most certainly will go through, we can but speculate. However we do have a wealth of material we can look at to get an insight into the warped and deviously twisted mind of this killer of innocent teenagers. There are his manifesto and on Internet forums.

Looking into his childhood does not give a reason for anybody to commit the criminal acts he did. Millions of children grow up in multicultural environments. Millions of children have experienced an upbringing similar his. His parents were divorced. He grew up with his mother, but he did have contact with both parents during his childhood. His mother, a nurse, remarried a Norwegian Army officer. His relationship with his biological father, a career diplomat, soured because of Anders Breivik’s anti-social attitudes in his mid-teens. Obviously his upbringing affected him, as he includes a chapter in his manifesto titled, “The Fatherless Civilisation.”

Breivik’s mother seems to have tried her best to raise him up to respect others and have normal social moral values. Breivik criticizes his mother for not being more of a disciplinarian. Obviously young Anders was allowed to run free as a teen. If she were a disciplinarian, Breivik would have criticised her for that.

He saw himself as a Knight Templar on a Christian Crusade to Save Europe from Islam, Marxism and newfangled ideas like feminism. Was his lack of respect for women behind his choice of shooting pretty girls first?

Anders Breivik’s parents are not to blame for him becoming a monster. He specifically rejects the moral values his mother tried to inculcate in the young Anders.

Anders Behring Breivik

Breivik is well read, but cherry picks what he wants from the different sources. He also interprets what he reads HIS way. Not trying to understand the message the author is trying to convey, but twist what is written to fit his own preconceived and warped ideas.

Our teenage years are important in our social development. This is the time when we start breaking away from our family and start to develop an independent personality. Breivik experienced a seedy side of Oslo teenage culture. He was a Hip-Hop, break dancing, graffiti spraying, gangsta-lingo speaking teenager who was in the West Oslo teenage gang culture. It was around this time when his father says he began to behave antisocially

His anti-Islam attitude was colored by his contacts with immigrant gangs during these years. In his manifesto he refers back to this time in his life including fights with immigrant gangs.

Understanding Breivik’s Beliefs

To understand the mind of somebody who is as intelligent and well read, yet totally out of his gourd deranged, as Anders Breivik obviously is, we need to get back to fundamentals: his basic assumptions and paradigms.

Every opinion and belief any person has is based on two things:

1. An unprovable preconceived assumption, which gives rise to
2. That individual’s paradigm.

Every thought we have, every idea and belief we have is based on an unprovable assumption. We are totally unaware of it; it is so basic. From this assumption we build our paradigms.

The meaning of the term paradigm is not an easy concept. Although a definition can be given, a more practical explanation of the paradigm concept is well illustrated by Donella Meadows writing in her weekly column, The Global Citizen:

Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.

To try and understand the mind of deranged individual like Breivik in a meaningful way, we first need to identify his paradigm and if possible his preconceived assumptions.

His manifesto gives us many clues. It is 1508 pages of manifesto, with photographs tagged on at the end making a total of 1516 pages. This is a mixture of philosophical and political statements with conspiracy theories, as well as a self-glorifying autobiography that gives a chilling insight into his thought processes.

One example can be used to illustrate his paradigm. Let us take his Christian fundamentalist beliefs. He claims to be a Christian, but there are few references to Christ and Christian morals in his manifesto. Then there is the problem that he includes in the Christian community something he calls, “Christian atheists.”

This shows that in his paradigm religions are not based on “Faith” (with a capital “F”). Religions in his paradigm are political forces. Faith does not feature.

He writes about The Koran, as if it was Muhammad’s Mein Kampf. He seems to lack a concept of God from a faith based perspective. God to him is a vague, ill-defined philosophical concept. He can use Christian phrases and repeat Christian concepts, but without understanding their implications.

Leaving religion aside, in Breivik’s worldview, prisoners are tortured in Norwegian jails. This is a perfectly reasonable assumption, if one reasons from his paradigm.

When I read his manifesto, I first worked out his paradigm, and then I adjusted my thinking so I could read it through his paradigm.

His paradigm is severely warped, twisted, convoluted and pathologically delusional. But within that paradigm, Breivik is intelligent, logical and rational. Many of the facts he mentions are true. It is the conclusions he draws that are chilling, but perfectly logical from his preconceived paradigm.

Everything he wrote appears to be about self-aggrandisement. He needed to be in control and in charge. If he had had a relationship with a woman it would have been a controlling abusive relationship. There would have been both physical and emotional abuse. Some women apparently were attracted to him because of his handsome appearance. He is a classic example of why one should choose a partner based on personality and not outward appearance.

My personal opinion after reading his manifesto and a number of his online forum comments is that Anders Behring Breivik is what is commonly called a psychopath. I believe his psychiatric evaluation will describe him as having some mixture of personality disorders, with obsessive, delusional, narcissistic and paranoid traits.

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