Theodore Dalrymple writes:
In Winnenden, near Stuttgart, 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer went on a shooting spree at a school and then a car showroom, killing 15. He had said before the atrocity:
I’m fed up. I’ve had enough of this meaningless life, which is always the same. Everyone ignores me, no one recognises my potential.
Dalrymple comments:
This reeks of resentful, narcissistic grandiosity, the result of an imperative to be an individual at a time when individuation is more difficult than ever.
Dalrymple writes that Andreas Lubitz
was not depressed, he was of bad character, for the improvement of which there is no drug. He was an angry narcissist, murderous at least as much as he was suicidal.
Suffering reverses in life, Lubitz
sought revenge on what he thought was an unjust world.
Many people like him who commit suicide, or try to,
imagine a continued shadowy existence after their deaths in which they are able to witness the doleful effects that their death has had on others, and they enjoy the prospect. He didn’t want to slip away quietly, he wanted fame, even if it were only notoriety.
If he had killed himself
by jumping from a building, say, which requires no more courage than crashing an aëroplane, no one would have heard of him.
But now,
after crashing his aëroplane, everyone has heard of him. The 149 people were sacrificed to his wounded vanity and his desire for fame.
Lubitz
was treated as if he were ill, thereby disguising from him his own responsibility for his state of mind.
He was
a narcissist whose sorrows and failures made him vengeful and murderous as well as suicidal. He thirsted for fame, though he had no achievements that entitled him to it, and he was willing to sacrifice 149 others to achieve it.
And he was prescribed
useless drugs that possibly contributed to his aggression.
Amok, according to a recent account, ‘is found almost exclusively in men between the ages of 20 and 40. The incidents are characterised by frenzied attacks with kris, pedang or lembing. The assaults are often directed at family members or friends, then extended indiscriminately to others. Whether or not preceded by unusual behaviours (depression, brooding, sakit hati), amok occurs as a sudden outburst resembling a hyperstartle reaction, and amok-runners typically declare amnesia for the duration of the incident. The majority of amok-runners are killed during attempts by others to restrain the murderous rampages; those taken alive may be subjected to execution, imprisonment or institutionalisation in a psychiatric facility.’ Sir Hugh Clifford, British Resident in Pahang (1896-1900 and 1901-03), described it as follows: ‘Much has been written concerning the acts of homicidal mania called amok, which word in the vernacular means to attack. It was formerly believed that these outbursts were to be attributed to madness pur et simple, and some cases of amok can certainly be traced to this source. These are not, however, in any sense typical, and might equally have been perpetrated by men of another race. The typical amok is usually the result of circumstances which render a Malay desperate. The motive is often inadequate from the point of view of a European, but to the Malay it is sufficient to make him weary of life and anxious to court death. Briefly, where a man of another race might not improbably commit suicide, a Malay runs amok, killing all whom he may meet until he himself is slain.’
February 1982: amok-pilot Seiji Katagiri forces Japan Airlines flight 350 to crash into Tokyo Bay. Diagnosis: insanity
March 2015: amok-pilot Andreas Lubitz forces Germanwings flight 9525 to crash into the French Alps. Dalrymple’s diagnosis: wounded narcissism and chagrin d’amour
It would have saved the lives snuffed out by this amok-pilot
Andreas Lubitz’s problem, writes Dalrymple, was
one of character rather than of illness.
He was a narcissist whose enthusiasm for fitness was
not for fitness for any end other than a purely self-regarding one. The picture of him out running, pouting as if engaged on something serious and staring ahead with earphones in his ears to exclude the outer world from obtruding on him in his self-absorbed bubble, suggested a man more than usually self-centred.
He is reported to have been
determined to make more of a mark in the world than his native talents would permit, reducing him to the necessity of doing something terrible to catch the attention of the world that he so craved, and no doubt felt that he deserved. For narcissists, anonymity is the worst of fates.
Dalrymple says he cannot help but think that Western culture
is propitious to the promotion of narcissism of the type that I suspect that Lubitz suffered from — or made others suffer from.
Psychiatry
will never make the likes of Lubitz whole. We shall never be putty in technicians’ hands. That is not the same as saying that he should have been allowed to fly aëroplanes. A little more stigma and prejudice would have saved the 149 lives he so egotistically snuffed out.
Andreas Lubitz, writes Dalrymple, is reported to have had
a severe chagrin d’amour — or rather, I suspect, a crise de jalousie — not long before he crashed the æroplane.
He was also said to have been
a man of swiftly-changing mood, as the jealous often are: one minute domineering to the point of violence, the next apologetic and dove-like in promises of reform.
Needless to say, such jealous men
do not love the object of their supposed affections, but themselves: they need a lover as a prop to their conception of themselves.
When a lover threatens to leave them, or does so, usually as a consequence of their erratic behaviour,
they are plunged into a crisis of outraged anger. In the best of circumstances, that anger declines and disappears once they find another lover-victim: but before this happens they often become violent.
Dalrymple concludes:
In crashing his æroplane and killing so many, Lubitz may well have been taking his revenge upon the woman who so wounded his vanity: ‘See what you made me do! I told you I would do something terrible. You’ll have those people on your conscience for the rest of your life.’ According to my hypothesis, Lubitz was not so much depressed as angry with his lover, the world and fate.
A little more stigma and prejudice would have saved the 149 lives he so egotistically snuffed out, writes Dalrymple.
Amok-runners have rights, too
Amok, according to a recent account,
is found almost exclusively in men between the ages of 20 and 40. The incidents are characterised by frenzied attacks with kris, pedang or lembing. The assaults are often directed at family members or friends, then extended indiscriminately to others. Whether or not preceded by unusual behaviour (depression, brooding, sakit hati), amok occurs as a sudden outburst resembling a hyperstartle reaction, and amok-runners typically declare amnesia for the duration of the incident. The majority of amok-runners are killed during attempts by others to restrain the murderous rampages; those taken alive may be subjected to execution, imprisonment or institutionalisation in a psychiatric facility.
These penalties may breach the human rights of amok-runners. ‘Care in the community’ or ‘care in the cockpit’ may be preferred. (In the Germanwings case, there may have been a greater fear of an accusation of discrimination against the mentally disturbed than of the crash of an aircraft, Dalrymple points out.)
Who are we to exclude amok-runners from the cockpit? Who can blame them if, under the pressure of discrimination, they lock themselves in? Large numbers of people have died, but we have the consolation of knowing that we are part of a society that is appalled by the discrimination suffered daily by amok-running pilots and by other downtrodden groups, such as passengers who happen to be Islamist terrorists. Our society, if we are to call ourselves civilised, must be prepared to act to correct these injustices. To adapt slightly what Dalrymple has written about surgeons:
Social justice is social justice, and not good flying. The achievement of such justice requires that we all be prepared to make sacrifices for it: a mass murder is a small price to pay for the satisfaction of knowing that commercial airline pilots are demographically representative of the population as a whole.
Der Amok-Pilot
Wounded narcissism is Dalrymple’s hypothesis, though ‘information still to come may refute it’. The tragedy, he writes,
lays bare the preposterous contention that psychological disturbance, known metaphorically as illness, is precisely the same nature as physical illness, a contention now enshrined in the laws of several countries. This has always been dishonest, as witnessed by the public outrage that Lubitz was allowed to fly despite a history of medicated misery.
Did Lufthansa know that its employee had such a history?
If it did, it suggests that it was more afraid of an accusation of discrimination against the mentally disturbed than of a crash of an aircraft.
‘Much has been written concerning the acts of homicidal mania called amok, which word in the vernacular means to attack. It was formerly believed that these outbursts were to be attributed to madness pur et simple, and some cases of amok can certainly be traced to this source. These are not, however, in any sense typical, and might equally have been perpetrated by men of another race. The typical amok is usually the result of circumstances which render a Malay desperate. The motive is often inadequate from the point of view of a European, but to the Malay it is sufficient to make him weary of life and anxious to court death. Briefly, where a man of another race might not improbably commit suicide, a Malay runs amok, killing all whom he may meet until he himself is slain.’ — Sir Hugh Clifford, extract from entry on ‘Malays’ in Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th Ed. (1910). Clifford spent two decades in Perak; he was British Resident in Pahang (1896-1900 and 1901-03) and held many other posts.
Cartoon: Paco Calderón
Photo: Thomas Sweertvaegher
Take your medicine
Cartoon: Paco Calderón
Photo: Ronnie Kaufman (cover of 2005 collection of Dalrymple essays)
St Theodorus the Misoneist
