Mark Anspach

He was a legend in his own mind: a modern-day Knight Templar leading a host of valiant warriors in a glorious crusade to save the Western World.

But in real life Anders Behring Brevik was a born loser who couldn’t get anyone to take him seriously – not even when he tried to surrender to the cops fifty minutes into his shooting spree on Utoeya Island. The recently-released tape of Breivik’s first call to the police makes plain the frustration that must have dogged him everywhere.

The call began smoothly enough. “Hello,” he said, “my name is Commander Anders Behring Breivik of the Norwegian Anti-Communist Resistance. I am in Utoeya at the moment. I want to hand myself in.” Clearly, he had rehearsed those words many times and managed to recite them with only a slight catch in his voice.

But the policeman didn’t stick to the script in Breivik’s head. He asked a question that stumped the self-styled resistance commander. “What number are you calling from?”

Breivik was using a phone he had picked up off the ground. He had no idea what number he was calling from. Like a pupil caught unprepared by a pop quiz, he tried to finesse the question. “I am calling from a cell phone,” he said.

But the policeman wouldn’t let him off so easily. “You’re calling from your cell…?”

“It’s not mine,” Breivik explained helplessly. “It’s another phone.” The conversation must have bewildered him. Why did it matter what phone he was using when he had just mowed down scores of young people with an automatic weapon?

Didn’t the policeman understand that he, Commander Anders Behring Breivik of the Norwegian Anti-Communist Resistance, had just carried off the biggest terrorist operation in his country’s postwar history?

The policeman’s next question was crushing. “What was your name again?”

That was the last straw. Breivik hung up and went back to killing unarmed civilians. It was the only thing the would-be commando fighter seemed able to do properly. By the time he worked up the nerve to call the police again, they were already arriving to arrest him.

Breivik’s encounter with the police emergency line is reminiscent of the scene in Take the Money and Run where the bank tellers can’t decipher the Woody Allen character’s holdup note. You’re pointing a “gub” at me? What was your name again?

The first thing to understand about Anders Breivik is that he’s a hopeless nebbish. Just look at the photo of him wearing a dorky wetsuit and awkwardly shouldering a mysterious contrivance (a “gub”?) tricked out with double-barreled flashlights. He wanted to be Rambo, but he was channeling Maxwell Smart.

Yet that didn’t make him any less dangerous. The second thing to understand about Breivik is that being taken for a nobody filled him with murderous rage. He was bent on venting that rage in a way that would make people finally remember his name.

After boxer Ernie Terrell refused to call the former Cassius Clay by his chosen new moniker, Muhammad Ali pummeled him mercilessly in the ring while demanding “What’s my name?” Breivik didn’t have what it takes to achieve fame as a prizefighter. He didn’t have the strength, skills or smarts of a Muhammad Ali, but he did have the anger. When the cop forgot his name, he shot some more teenage campers, letting them bear the brunt of his wrath.

Of course, Breivik himself gave a very different explanation for his actions. He said he was angry about Muslim immigrants and so-called “cultural Marxists.” For an obvious nutcase who has now been certified insane by court-appointed psychiatrists,[i] Breivik managed to get an awful lot of intelligent people to debate the contents of his cut-and-paste Internet “manifesto.”

To take Breivik’s political pronouncements at face value is to fall into a trap laid by a vicious psycho-killer. Breivik hoped that by committing a big massacre he would finally compel people to take him seriously, and to a certain extent he succeeded. Still, some commentators pointed to a curious disconnect between his rhetoric aimed at Muslim immigrants and the fact he attacked fellow Norwegians.

Not that he went after fellow Norwegians at random; he singled out targets associated with the ruling Labor Party whom he held responsible for his country’s immigration policies. The attack on the government building in Oslo created a tactical diversion that made it harder for the police to respond to the events on Utoeya. It also created an ideological diversion that has kept observers from fully understanding Breivik’s main crime: the cold-blooded murder of 69 young people attending a summer camp.

True, they represented the next generation of Labor Party leadership. Breivik justified his actions as “atrocious but necessary” to accomplish his political goals. However, in photos taken after the massacre, Breivik does not display the somber demeanor of someone who had to carry out an operation that was atrocious but necessary. Instead, he sports the self-satisfied little smile of a man who has finally gotten to do something he really wanted.

Breivik is no doubt sincere in his political beliefs, but he must be judged by his acts. His acts suggest that his hostility toward immigrants was ultimately not as deep-felt as the animosity he harbored for the Norwegian youths attending the summer camp. The bottom line is that he would not have shot those young people – shot them over and over, riddling them with bullets – unless he hated them and wanted them to die.

He hated them so much that he used hollow-pointed, deadly accurate “dum-dum” bullets that practically explode inside the body. The head surgeon at a hospital treating the victims said, “These bullets inflicted internal damage that's absolutely horrible.” But even that was not enough for Breivik, who claims to have ordered a highly concentrated poison from China in order to inject each round with a lethal dose.[ii]

                                                            Baby, I’ll be tough

                                                            Too much is not enough…

                                                            Ooh, I got what it takes.

No sane person could explain such overkill as atrocious but necessary – it’s only atrocious. The obvious question that pundits have so far failed to answer is why Breivik hated those young people so much. What did they ever do to him?

The answer is: nothing. They never did anything to him. They didn’t even know him. He was a perfect stranger to them. But that didn’t stop him from perceiving himself as a victim.

In his recent book Le Sacrifice inutile, Paul Dumouchel suggests that modern society has created a new category of victims: “victims of nobody, individuals against whom no one has committed any offense.” When the bonds of solidarity that characterize traditional communities wither away, some people just fall through the cracks. They are the victims of nobody in particular and of everybody in general. More precisely, they are “the victims of generalized indifference. An indifference that must not be construed as a psychological disposition of certain agents, but as a new institutional arrangement.”[iii]

The new institutional arrangement is one in which most citizens are strangers to each other. This is a luxury unknown to members of past societies. In the absence of traditional bonds of solidarity, people today are free to go about their business without concerning themselves with those outside their immediate family or close circle of friends. An injury to one is not an injury to all. If someone is the victim of a crime, it is up to the state to intervene; everyone else can remain indifferent. But who intervenes to help the victims of indifference?

Dumouchel alludes to the victims produced by the impersonal functioning of the modern economy. But there are also individuals who, even without being economically disadvantaged, suffer from their inability to find a place for themselves within the group. This problem does not exist in the same form in traditional cultures where everyone is assigned a place; it is a modern phenomenon, a byproduct of the freedom we enjoy.

Free societies spawn a certain quotient of lonely misfits like Breivik: individuals who feel marginalized at school or work, who don’t have a happy family or close circle of friends to fall back upon, who – in the absence of arranged marriage – never manage to find a mate. Such individuals can blame no one in particular for their fate. They encounter indifference everywhere, but indifference is not a crime – it is the accepted norm when dealing with strangers. The problem of someone like Breivik is that he is a stranger to everybody.[iv]

The protagonist of Albert Camus’s famous novel The Stranger leads a boring, non-descript middle-class existence not dissimilar to Breivik’s. Like the Norwegian, Meursault has a few superficial friends; unlike him, he even has a girlfriend, but there is no one he truly cares about. Then, one day, he offhandedly commits an act of senseless violence, killing a man with a single shot, then firing four more bullets into the lifeless body. Suddenly, this ostensibly unambitious nonentity finds himself catapulted into the starring role in a capital murder case.

Camus’s doomed rebel without a cause is supposed to exemplify the absurdity of existence. In a radical reinterpretation, René Girard argues that the antihero’s pose of nonchalance conceals a lonely individual who cannot admit even to himself that he “prefers to be persecuted rather than ignored.” The murder he commits so casually “is really a secret effort to reestablish contact with humanity.” Girard compares Meursault to the misbehaving child or juvenile delinquent who “must commit an action that will force the attention of the adults but will not be interpreted as abject surrender.”[v]

At the end of the novel, Meursault finally expresses the hidden resentment that pride had silenced, virtually acknowledging that, as Girard puts it, “the sole and only guillotine threatening him is the indifference” of other people. “In order that everything may be fulfilled,” Meursault says, “in order that I may feel less alone, it remained for me to hope that there would be many spectators on the day of my execution and that they would greet me with cries of hate.”[vi]

Breivik smiled on his way to court, basking in the attention he had sought for so long. As a youth, he flirted with juvenile delinquency, reportedly hitting the school principal[vii] and getting into trouble with the police for graffiti. The latter gambit seems to have backfired by causing his already-distant father to break off all relations. Even his fellow graffiti rebels rejected him, apparently because they suspected him of informing on them.[viii]

According to a 1995 entry in his school yearbook, “Anders was a member of the ‘gang,’ but then he suddenly stopped being friends with the others” and often resorted to doing “unpredictable, stupid things.” Investigators told Der Spiegel that he “repeatedly tried to find somewhere to fit in, first in the hip-hop scene and then in the graffiti scene. But nothing ever came of it.”[ix]

                                                    Give me time,

                                                    I’ll make you forget the rest…

                                                    I’m gonna learn how to fly

                                                    High

                                                    I feel it coming together

                                                    People will see me and cry.

“He seemed a tough guy who could do things that were unthinkable for us,” wrote a childhood friend who had known him up to the age of 14. “Like spitting in the cellar, urinating in the neighbor’s storeroom.” He also “took great pleasure in killing ants.”[x] This last detail may not be insignificant. Ants run in crowds, they form an organized, closed society and are indifferent to onlookers. The young Breivik’s reaction was to massacre them.

                                                    Baby, I’ll be tough…

It’s a big jump from killing ants to killing humans, but humans are a much bigger source of resentment to someone like Breivik than ants could ever be. The crowds of young people at Utoeya were enjoying each other’s company in a uniquely glamorous setting.  Regional Labor Party official Frode Berge describes the summer camp as “the place our party leader and other prominent leaders” – including the current prime minister – “always simply have to attend.” On top of that, “Utoeya is quite simply beautiful.” It “offers the perfect surroundings for teenagers.” Here Mr. Berge waxes nostalgic:

“The smell of a bonfire combined with the sound of acoustic guitars, harmonicas, chatting, laughing and banter at 4 o’clock in the morning will stay with me, as immensely precious teenage memories, for the rest of my life. Indeed, one of the most popular spots at Utoeya is the Love Path, located discreetly in the forest on the south of the island. Utoeya is the perfect place for a teenager to fall in love.”[xi]

If everybody who is anybody has to be there, where does that leave somebody who is nobody? Somebody without idyllic teenage memories of enchanted evenings around a bonfire, somebody who never had anyone to join him on a romantic walk into the woods?

Breivik hated the young people at the summer camp because they were the cool kids and he was a lonely misfit. But they didn’t hate him – they were totally oblivious to him. That only made it worse. He found a surefire way to overcome their indifference. What he told them while tracking them with his gun would be poignant if it weren’t so chilling. According to a 16-year-old survivor, he marched through the camp saying, “Come out and play with me. Don’t be shy.”[xii]

Anders Breivik failed to reestablish contact with humanity, but he succeeded in obtaining the fame he wanted – in the worst way. His countrymen will never forget his name again.

                                                  I feel it coming together

                                                  People will see me and cry…

                                                  I’m gonna live forever

                                                  Baby, remember my name

                                                  Remember, remember, remember, remember,

                                                  Remember, remember, remember, remember.

Mark Anspach is an anthropologist and the editor of Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire by René Girard (Stanford, 2004). He is a contributor to Mimesis and Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion edited by Scott R. Garrels (MSU, 2011).