BackOpinion | Why the ‘well-educated’ suicide bomber is not a surprise
The war that rages in the world is not between good and evil but sanity and insanity
PremiumIn the description of the suicide bombers who killed over 250 people in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, we could not escape one refrain. That the bombers were “well-educated", and not poor. As though it was a big surprise. And people were surprised. They are surprised every time they learn a terrorist is a “post-graduate" or from a wealthy family. In the surprise lies the truth that people are adept at concealing innocuous forms of prejudice, but they often unconsciously reveal their more lethal biases. The poor are the true global race, and there is a mainstream respectable racist view that they are more likely to be evil or foolish enough to be lured by Islamist terrorism.
Sometimes truth is indecent, but the perceived link between poverty and terrorism could have been shown to be wrong even before the Easter bombings. Terror masterminds are chiefly from the social elite. Osama bin Laden, for instance, was from the Saudi aristocracy.
But then, the handlers usually never blew themselves up; they co-opt their devout co-religionists for that. And there is a dominant perception that martyrs have to be poor and semi-literate because only they will be brainless enough to submit to “religious indoctrination". This idea is popular because it is a compliment that the global middle class gives itself by over-rating its two important attributes as proof of intelligence—wealth and college degrees.
The high social class of the Easter suicide bombers points to something that the world is reluctant to accept: that suicide bombing is primarily a mental health issue.
In his book, ‘Mental Health in the War on Terror’, psychiatrist Neil Krishan Aggarwal analyses many academic papers that link suicide bombing to insanity. He mentions a condition known as “folie à plusieurs", a form of shared psychosis in which many people share a powerful delusion. It is a variety of “folie à deux", or “the madness of two", which is a shared delusion of two people. In folie à deux, there is usually a primary partner, who first sees the delusion and transfers it to the secondary one, who is vulnerable enough to receive the delusion. The two then corroborate it for each other.
A few years ago, two sisters in Noida were found nearly starved to death in their homes. They had locked themselves away after hearing the voices of their late parents that warned them that milk and food are poisoned. It is possible that one of the sisters first heard the voices and she passed on the delusion to her sister. The same principle is at work in folie à plusieurs, but with many partners. Innocuous forms of it are very common. Recently, hundreds of girls in north India, or perhaps thousands, were in the grip of a mass delusion that a mysterious force was chopping their braids. Islamist suicide bombing is a lethal form of such a shared psychosis.
Various psychiatrists link various mental disorders to suicide bombers. Ideally, it should be easy for the world to accept that a man blowing himself up and others is under the influence of madness. But that is not how the world works. Islamist suicide bombing as a mental health issue makes the bomber a victim himself, spares his religion, and presents the ludicrous suggestion that his kind need complex medical care. Also, it is easier for the justice system in most countries to grudgingly accept a criminal as insane, but not a whole class of criminal behaviour.
Suicide is too complex to be attributed to one factor. But the crucial question is whether social and political factors are subordinate to one decisive factor: the mental make-up, the neurological wiring of a person. Isn’t it true, after all, that millions who face the same set of conditions that is believed to create a suicide bomber never blow up themselves or kill a soul. Also, the Islamist “indoctrination" theory fails to explain why there have been suicidal killers from other faiths and happy affluent European nations. In March 2015, when a pilot left the cockpit mid-flight to go to the toilet, his co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, locked the cockpit door and crashed the plane into a mountain. It was easy for the world to diagnose him as a man with a serious psychiatric disorder—because he was not a Muslim.
People who commit suicide are, very simply, suicidal. But that is not enough for society. There is a tendency to attribute a “reason" to it. The suicidal themselves attribute reasons to their final act, leaving notes with the baffling certainty that they will be found.
This framework of ‘cause-and-effect’ demands befitting reasons for every suicide. And the media steps in to supply these reasons. Debt, poverty, oppression. And, of course, “radicalization".
Shared delusions that push the suicidal to self-destruct, though, are not uniformly expressed across cultures. A depressed Tibetan monk, for instance, is more likely to protest against his oppressor (China) by immolating himself without harming anyone else, imitating several monks before him. Tibetan monks are not a security threat the way Islamist bombers are. So the fact that suicide bombing is a mental health issue does not mean it is not a security issue.
Ultimately, the fact is that the only war that has ever raged in the world is not between good and evil, which is a lame concept of storytellers, but between sanity, which is not very contagious, and insanity, which is.
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