Deltanine

A quarter-century ago, a cultural anthropologist named Ernest Becker wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book called The Denial of Death. For a time, during the primacy of Freud, it was huge. It's not about terrorism, it's about the psyche, and its central thesis is one of the most disturbing analyses of human behavior ever set in print.

Everything we are, Becker argued -- our personalities, our attitudes, our very being -- is an elaborate lie, a carefully crafted self-delusion constructed to avoid having to face a fact so terrifying it would drive us mad: Not only are we certain to die, but death could come at any moment, followed by an eternity of nothingness. Lower animals, blessedly unaware of their mortality, plod thoughtlessly through their lives on instinct alone.

Lacking their ignorance, Becker says, we compensate by making ourselves stupid. We tranquilize ourselves with the trivial; we make friends, raise families, drink beer, follow the Redskins, find comfort in religions promising eternal life, all of which takes our minds off the potentially paralyzing truth. We deceive ourselves into believing -- not literally, but emotionally -- that we are immortal. Paranoiacs and depressives are in some ways the sanest among us, according to Becker, because their layer of denial is so fragile it fractures. Most of us, though, are able to retain our sanity so long as our anxiety is held at bay, and our anxiety is held at bay so long as our bold illusion remains manageable. This is not exactly the anthem of romantic poets or motivational speakers, but no one has ever successfully challenged Becker's central thesis. On some level, we attempt to smother our elemental fear of death with a grand lie.

That's where terrorism comes in. Terrorism penetrates that self-deception in a way that few things can.

During the Cold War, Americans knew that the Soviets had missiles pointed at us, and we at them. And yet, paradoxically -- applying Becker's paradigm -- this gave comfort. Mutually assured destruction seemed to offer an anodyne, a plausible measure of deterrence and thus a toehold for our state of denial.

It would take something truly diabolical to dislodge that toe, something that existed only in fiction. Remember SPECTRE, the shadowy international organization that was James Bond's nemesis? The acronym stood for "Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion." It was an absurd concept, really -- an entity of no fixed address, affiliated with no state, answerable to no constituency, diffuse, elusive, nihilistic, unavailable for negotiation, promiscuously cruel, fueled by hatred, with no comprehensible agenda other than mayhem, destruction and death.

You know, al Qaeda.

With al Qaeda, however, there is an additional fillip, a small, elegant frisson. It was probably best expressed in a quote attributed to Osama bin Laden himself, a few weeks after 9/11: "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."

SPECTRE, with a suicide wish.

There has been terrorism in the world, more or less nonstop, since 12th-century Syria, when a persecuted Persian religious sect called the Assassins knifed people to death in crowds. Terrorism has persisted because terrorism works. It makes people crazy. It is a cost-effective method of waging psychological war by those who see themselves outnumbered or disenfranchised.

A disenfranchised minority cannot sack Rome, rape Nanking, burn Atlanta or firebomb Dresden. These are terror attacks by nation-states, military sieges with the primary goal of sowing despair among the enemy and weakening their will to resist. A disenfranchised people -- whether Palestinians in the Middle East, or Tamils in Sri Lanka, or Islamic zealots who see the spread of Western culture as an assault on their religion -- will use the means at their disposal. Amoral though it may be, terrorism succeeds in focusing attention on whatever cause its practitioners espouse. It does this in a particularly insidious way.

From Washington Post