The Batman effect

If you’re the biggest, toughest guy around you’re going to make some enemies. If you put on a cape and a mask and gird your loins with a utility belt, jump into the Bat-Car and declare that you’re going to take on a crusade to rid the world of evil, then you’re going to make a lot of enemies. In fact, as Frank Miller observed in the wonderful Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, if you make that sort of bigger-than-life impression you’ll tend to give the crazies delusions of grandeur too. Miller’s TV psychobabble puts it like this:

Batman’s psychotic sublimative / psycho-erotic behaviour pattern is like a net. Weak-egoed neurotics like Harvey are drawn into corresponding intersticing patterns.

Something like this idea has been lurking around ever since Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire quip, but it’s clearer since the Twin Towers. Bin Laden like most cult leaders had an eschatologic paranoid sort of headspace (at least in pop-psychology terms) certainly reinforced by his success on September 11. But George Bush bought into this too, possibly for political reasons at home. He didn’t say “criminal” but “terrorist”. Not just a “horrific attack” but a “war against evil.” It becomes almost like some sort of malignant co-dependency of apocalyptic grandiosity.

Which is not to say that the President should not use such language – it’s clearly a defining moment in US history, and it’s his job to rally the nation. But the consequences are a benefit to Al Quaeda. Where an impressionable and disaffected Arab youth with something to prove might not join “criminals,” a “holy war” sounds like something worth fighting. Can an outlaw in a cave, even one responsible for the destruction in New York that day, portray himself as a resistance leader rather than a desperado? He certainly can if the leader of the free world buys into it.

All this came into very clear focus with a sad little story from Australia today. Here is Izzydeen Atik, a seriously mentally ill man who has decided he is committed to violent jihad. The story is that he can’t be let out on bail to receive psychiatric help because he’s a danger to the community, which sounds completely fair enough. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell, if you’ll excuse the pun, because there are a whole lot of Izzydeens around the world, many not as ill as he is, but they all buy into this crazy headspace.

I don’t, but then I don’t wear my underpants on the outside of my pants.