Pig Herder

They choose death over life; attention over anonymity; the ecstasy of violence over the frustrations of daily life—and view other human beings as stage props in a drama in which they play the starring role. In short, they exhibit a narcissism so malignant it seems to consume their egos in a monstrous will-to-power. Rejecting human limitations, they desire instead the infinite, the omnipotent, the transcendent. Seeking the unlimited, they embrace death.

Promulgated in cyberspace, this 21st century Islam is a “dream that finds on the internet its virtual existence. Websites and chat rooms compensate for the lack of real social roots.” [From French scholar Olivier Roy, in his recent book Globalized Islam: the Search for a New Ummah.] Recruiters of suicide bombers look precisely for these young men and women: confused but secretly grandiose souls who find fulfillment in a never-never land of pure Islam—or an Islam realizable only on the web, where the boundary between the limited self and infinite cyberspace identity is increasingly blurred. Add to this the supremacy complex and it makes for some an irresistible temptation to slip the bonds of ego for the paradise of immortality.

But why violence? Because without limits, channels, cultural and traditional restrains, narcissism turns to power, power to domination and violence. When Bonelli stood in that New York mall, armed with an assault weapon—did he not feel for a moment like God, bestower of life and death? When a suicide bomber sits on a crowded bus and contemplates his soon-to-be victims, does he not feel an exhilarating power over the fate of so many people? What sense of godhood flitted through Mohammad Atta’s mind as the World Trade Center came into view? That the Bonellis, Klebolds and Harrises act out of a sense of resentment while the shahadah justifies his or her actions in the name of Allah makes no difference. In the end, both extremes meet in the void beyond the human ego. The Arabs, in fact, have a word for this: haram. It means at once the divine and the obscene, and implies the worst possible of all desires: to become God.