The Boston Marathon Bomber, Recipe for Creating a Terrorist

by Wilor Bluege, April 24, 2013

— Take one part cultural mores, one part regional history, one part family dynamics. 

— Mix ingredients in a large bowl of displacement and disappointment.

— Transfer mixture to a flask of resentment, anger, and blaming. 

— Allow mixture to marinate until an inflationary “bloom” appears on the surface of the mixture in the retort. 

— Add a pinch of radicalizing factors “A” and “B”. 

“Presto, change-o!” the homunculus of a narcissistic nihilist appears in the retort, capable of laying backpacks filled with explosives on the ground in a crowd and detonating them, maiming and killing other human beings at the Boston Marathon.

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Following the bombing in Boston, everyone is wondering about the Tsarnaev brothers.  How could they have come to perpetrate such horror?  From snippets of information gleaned from the news, a picture emerges of the development of a narcissistic nihilist personality in the older brother, Tamerlan, and a dependency in the younger brother, Dzhokhar.  We don’t know all the answers, and may never know them, however, we can probably surmise a good deal from predisposing factors of Chechen cultural mores, regional history, and family dynamics, as near as the latter can be discerned from the data so far available to us.  Perhaps all we can do is to pose additional questions, which may —or may not — make more comprehensible the incomprehensible.  It seems to me that a confluence of mores from the culture of origin, regional Caucasus history, and family dynamics — especially any changes in those dynamics upon the family’s immigration to the U.S. — was significant in molding the Tsarnaev brothers, especially the older brother, Tamerlan, into terrorists.  All that was then necessary was for the “spark” of jihad to be lit (the “pinch” of radicalizing factors “A” and “B” of the above "recipe").  For the moment, we shall leave a discussion of the younger boy, whose story will eventually be known more clearly.

Culture

The Tsarnaev family comes from a culture in which a dominant value is one’s status.  In that part of the world, and in that culture, the bolstering of family pride and the avoidance of family shame are key factors governing all relationships.  As in many cultures of the world, in Chechnya women have no power or status of their own.  Women’s power and status is inextricably linked to their husband’s social status and the success of their children, especially their male children.  If the status of the man who is the head of the family is devalued by loss of a high-status job, the woman’s status is also devalued.  Her status is also devalued if he dies.

Known Facts Regarding the Tsarnaevs: 

He had been a lawyer in Dagestan.  After he and his wife came to America, his status was abruptly downgraded to that of an auto mechanic.

Questions:  How did this status “downgrade” affect their relationship?  And, how did their displacement to the American culture affect them?  It is hard to imagine the culture shock the Tsarnaevs faced coming to America.  Why did they leave Dagestan and come to America?

Regional History

Historically, Chechnya/Dagestan was part of the northern extent of various Iranian empires, Byzantium, various khanates, and the Ottoman Empire.  The subsequent history of the Chechen peoples consisted of several hundred years of being repeatedly run over by Tartars, Mongols, Bolsheviks and the Russian Federation.  The area has been compared to the American frontier, being called the “Wild West” of Europe with Cossacks (the word means “freebooters”, i.e., thieves) running all over the place (Source:  “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies).  Their more recent history is one of invasions, pogroms, and deportations, and being under the boot of a corrupt Russian police state for approximately the last century.  Little wonder that society is “every man for himself”, fragmented, and deeply suspicious, even paranoid, regarding any and all forms of centralized state law enforcement authority.

Known Facts Regarding the Tsarnaevs:

They fled Dagestan in 2002 to come to America.  In early interviews the mother, father, an aunt and one uncle seemed not just a little paranoid and in total denial of the most blatant facts.  “It’s impossible.  Where is the proof?” each of them countered — as any of us might have, faced with something so incomprehensible.  “America has taken my son!” the mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, later wailed, her voice ringing with recrimination and reproachful regret over ever having come to America.  (She ought to think twice before repeating that sentiment to the parents of Richard Martin, the 6-year-old boy her sons killed, or the parents and families of the other victims they killed (Sean Collier, Crystal Campbell, Lingzi Lu) or the hundreds maimed.)

Questions:  Why did the Tsarnaevs flee their homeland?  What were the conditions in Dagestan that prompted their exit?  Was it because of the inherent violence in Dagestan or because the wife had been placed on a watch list of by the Russian government?

Family Dynamics

We have more questions than answers when it comes to the Tsarnaev family dynamics, but certain facts and observations point us in a direction that may illuminate what it takes to make a terrorist.  As they appear, more facts will decide whether any of these conjectures are correct or false.

According to one uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, there is a family history that produced a rift between Anzor Tsarnaev, the father of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, and his siblings.  Apparently one side of the family does not speak to the other side.  One would like to know the source of the rift.  Perhaps it’s none of anybody else’s business, but then again, it might shed some additional light on the development of the character of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, since family systems and their dysfunctions mold the character of the individuals in them.

Did the mother’s shame with regard to her husband’s (and her own) loss of status turn her into a shrew?  Smarting under the weight of her loss of status, might her major disappointment and disgruntlement have turned to anger and resentment, souring the relationship with her husband?  Is it possible that she turned to her older son as her only hope to redeem her and the family’s shame?  Might not her doting on the older boy have rankled the father?  Might not her derision and hectoring of the father cause the older son to disrespect his father?  One can imagine a scenario in which both sons may have been witnesses to an almost constant barrage of hectoring and diminishment of their father, given his wife’s dashed expectations in coming to America.  

To lose status in Chechen/Dagestan culture is to lose one’s masculinity.  To lose status in the eyes of one’s sons is even worse.  The father’s anger and shame must have boiled over, too.  Did that anger and frustration ever result in his beating his wife?  It would not be the first time in history that such an outcome resulted.  We know from other families with histories of abuse that families in which the father beats the mother are more likely to produce sons who will beat their wives, too, as an outlet for their frustration and rage at their own impotence to face life.  While this question is conjecture and supposition, one thing we do know for a fact is that Tamerlan beat his wife.  If Anzor beat his wife, did that prompt Tamerlan to become even closer to his mother and disaffected from his father?

One can also imagine the possibility of a counter reaction by the father to his wife’s coddling and pampering of the older son.  Did Anzor’s attempts to counter-balance the feminization of his son lead him to ever more stern and severe treatment of Tamerlan to “make a man of him”?  Such a dynamic would itself cause a rift between father and son.  Such close identification with the mother, along with dis-identification from the father would very likely cause the older son to be left with a “hole” in his personality with no model of effective masculinity in his life to guide him to maturity.  (Remember, even the uncles were disaffected.)  The lynch pins anchoring him to mature masculinity were knocked out from under him.  When that happens, the immaturity of youth experiences emotional “abandonment”.   Rage festers.  The immature personality is ripe for falling under the influence of what appears to him as effective masculinity.  

Initially, that appears in Tamerlan’s life as boxing.  Tamerlan, by all accounts, was a superior boxer.  Was this his way of making up for what he perceived as his father’s (and his own) shaky sense of masculinity due to his mother?  Did Tamerlan imagine that boxing and becoming an Olympic athlete would restore both the fortunes and the masculine pride of the family and redeem the mother’s shame?  When those glorious plans to become an Olympic boxer failed, whom did he blame?  The Americans, whom he professed not to understand.  In typical narcissist fashion, he blames others for his failure.  When boxing fails, the next option for salvaging the shreds of his manhood appears in the form of joining jihad where he can make a name for himself and restore his and his mother’s family’s pride.  

From what can be surmised about Tamerlan’s personality, he had already become a narcissist, a spoiled mama’s boy, the typical elder son of the family tribe, doted upon by a mother whose only power and status now lay in her eldest male offspring.  Feeling thus elevated and special, Tamerlan approached the good things in life as if they were his “due”.  Photographs and reports by his former friends indicated he dressed in high-end clothes and shoes.  His mother probably encouraged this self regard and self importance in her elder son.  Where did he get the money for the “good life” he was living?  He wasn’t working; but his wife, whom he beat, worked 60 hours or more a week to support them and their young daughter.  Did he not feel just a little bit guilty about this arrangement?  One suspects, in fact, that the rage he showed towards his wife was more than likely displaced rage over his own lack of masculine effectiveness and inability to take responsibility for his life.

He dropped out of school.  Out of touch with reality and refusing to take responsibility for himself, he conjured up a personal myth of superiority.  His inflationary bubble was about to burst.  When the parents left the US to return to Dagestan (for reasons that have not yet been revealed, as far as I know), suddenly Tamerlan was saddled with responsibility for his younger brother.  This had to put a serious wrinkle in his plans to be an Olympic boxer, dashing his self-created mythology of restoring the family’s pride.  It must have been devastating.  Like all narcissists, he festered and rankled under the unwanted responsibility and the thwarting of his exalted plans for play, living the good life, and glory.  What had been an inflated sense of self came crashing down to reality:  he was a nobody with no viable prospects for making his way in life.  Like all narcissists, he never thought to look at himself or take pains to understand his situation.  Instead, he fell into abject despair, roiling with resentment, anger, and blaming others (Americans) for his own lack of getting on with himself.  One uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, who was interviewed extensively called him “a loser … not able to settle himself”, as he put it.  This deficiency of character that kept him from looking at his situation and taking steps to become responsible led him instead to total nihilism.  He was a hair’s breadth away from becoming the Boston Marathon bomber.

Given this volatile “stew” of factors, all that was needed to produce the bomber was a “pinch” of radicalizing factors “A” and “B” added to the recipe of culture, history and family dynamics.  That “pinch” of radicalizing factor “A” was provided we now hear, by none other than his mother.  Radicalizing factor “B” was contact with radical Islam through the online magazine “Inspire” and possibly through contacts made during a 6-month visit to Dagestan.  The authorities are still combing through all leads to find out what links if any Tamerlan had to terrorist groups in Dagestan.  It is clear that he was disruptive and disrespectful during prayer services at the local Islamic center, deriding the imam for falsifying the Koran in his preaching.

What is particularly frightening is that if one looks at the perpetrators of other recent home-grown atrocities, one sees the same narcissistic nihilist type of individual.  The development of narcissism in our own culture, coupled with the availability of guns and materials and knowledge to make bombs, is a threat to our society. 

It is not only angry, dispossessed, disempowered peoples in far corners of the globe that are making bombs to destroy America.  The personality of the narcissist sees others as the source of his trouble; the “other” (whether that be another person, a company, or another country) is always to blame for their failure.  The roots of that narcissism can be found in the dynamics of the family of origin, especially the effect of an overly permissive and doting mother in whose eyes “her” boy can do no wrong, coupled with an emotionally distant and overly severe father.  This dynamic creates a large chasm, not just between father and son, but between the boy and his own developing masculinity.  With only a fragile sense of his masculinity, the boy is completely at sea and has not the internal resources to look at himself and take effective action to move forward in life in a responsible way.  Unless he has an awakening to his real situation, he will be vulnerable to any false spiritual “awakening” (jihadist or otherwise) that comes along to bolster his shaky sense of self.  If/when the narcissist — or any of us for that matter — can come to a realization that he has done everything wrong and is at the bottom of the pit, he may experience a true spiritual awakening, one that is linked to his human reality and the rest of suffering humanity rather than to an inflationary idea of his own exceptionalism and the execution of mass murder. 

Opinion of TED Talks re Psychiatric Disorders

April 2, 2013:  I was just watching/listening to several lectures in a series of TED Talks on the internet having to do with the mind and psychiatric disorders.  I had seen two of the lectures before on TV.  Two of the others were of particular interest to me:  one lecturer (a journalist), Jon Ronson, spoke on psychopathology (“Strange answers to the psychopath test”, given August 15, 2012, TED Talks at www.Ted.com).  He’d interviewed two men, one had been incarcerated in England’s Broadmoor insane asylum; the other was an American business mogul.  After interviewing these two men, the journalist presents the idea that it was the latter rather than the former (the Broadmoor inmate) that fit the psychological profile of the psychopath.   The lecturing journalist made the very interesting (I thought) point that capitalism rewards the psychopathic personality.  Based on the checklist of indicators for psychopathology, he found that the business mogul to fit the profile — which are:  Glibness and superficial charm; grandiose sense of self-worth; pathological lying; cunning; manipulativeness; lack of empathy; lack of remorse; egocentric and shallow (short-lived) affect.  When questioned, these negative qualities were “reinterpreted” by the mogul as qualities of leadership and not allowing emotions and empathy to “get in the way” of his business decisions.  The implication by Ronson was that the “necessities” of capitalism completely turn human values on their head and are productive of and rewarding of psychopathic personality development or, to turn things around, that individuals with psychopathic tendencies are attracted to big business.

In a bizarre twist, the expression of real remorse by the condemned “psychopath” in Broadmoor was perceived by the psychiatric staff to be “precisely the cunning manipulativeness” that would be used by a psychopath.  Clearly, it was a "no win" situation for the inmate.  The putative psychopath had landed up in Broadmoor because at his trial he had feigned insanity to get a lighter sentence.  Had he simply confessed to the crime, he would have got 5 years rather than the 20 years he suffered in Broadmoor.  After the journalist spoke for him at his appeal, the man was eventually released and seemed to function very well (except for a one-month stay in jail for some infraction) on the outside amongst society.  Again, in the view of this commentator, the prevailing conglomerate view of the world turns human values (and accepted psychiatric diagnosis) completely on its head:  the condemned psychopath turns out to be sane and the much-exalted business mogul-type turns out to be the psychopath.

The other talk was presented by a neurologist/psychiatrist, Oliver Sacks, on hallucinations.  (“What hallucination reveals about our minds”, given July 29, 2010, TED Talks at www.ted.com.) It was interesting, but I kept coming round to the questions, “Why is there never a reference to the meaning and/or purpose of the images that percolate up into consciousness?  Why is all of the talk just about the brain instead of the mind?  Why is there no reference to or connection made with the collective imagination of humankind and the immense data repository of universal symbols and mythology?  Why is there no reference to the compensating function of the psyche?  Why does/did the doctor  not ask the question of why this image rather than another?”  He tried, rather lamely, to explain the latter (see below) by reference to brain structure.

It seemed to me obvious that the hallucinations that the 94-year-old woman, whom the psychiatrist described as completely sane and mentally functional although she was blind from macular degeneration, were on the one hand compensating for the fact that although she was physically blind that there is nevertheless still a more powerful inner vision that she still had available to her.  The psyche was showing her a powerful (and powerfully empowering) inner vision that could help her in her particular straits.  The hallucinatory images she described to the doctor were of Eastern women in veils moving up and down brightly colored staircases.  I instantly related it to visions/dreams that I and probably millions of others have had and especially to one of the seminal visions of the Old Testament, namely Jacob’s Ladder.  The Eastern women in veils represent the intuitive feminine mode of reality that was needed at this point in the 94-year-old woman’s life.  The staircase and movement up and down the staircase shows the potential for connecting all aspects of the psyche, upper and lower in a continuing conversation and dialogue. 

It was unfortunate that the psychiatrist missed an opportunity to help this woman understand her hallucination as a symbol pregnant with religious and spiritual meaning and significance.  As it was he merely allayed her fears of insanity (and the fears of staff members at the facility where the woman lived) by telling his client that she had a brain disorder, a particular “syndrome” (Charles Bonnet syndrome) caused by an overactive part of the visual cortex responding to deprivation of sensory input.  (I thought, “How nice!  By merely applying the appellation of “syndrome” to a soul problem we think we have said something and can dismiss it so completely!”)   I know I should not be so snarky, after all he is a neurologist and I am, well, just a ballet teacher with only an undergraduate degree in biology and psychology.  It’s not that I am not fascinated by brain science.  I am.  I just see some obvious (to me) limitations to a fixation on brain science without so much as a nod to ask the questions I have posed.  He (lamely, I thought) suggested that a particular part of the brain threw up images of cars.  Does another part of the brain (presumably) throw up images of staircases with Eastern women in veils?  Seriously?  That, to me, seems completely ludicrous and preposterous, and totally unscientific, so until and unless I see a massive scientific worldwide study that shows that all people everywhere come up with the same car image when a particular neuron is excited I will consider that idea rather questionable.