Boston Marathon Bombers and the Pathology of Terrorism

A great deal will be said and written about the bombs set off this month at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the terrible casualties that resulted, and the personalities of the young men who planted the bombs.

It seems to us that the following brief remarks by Eric Voegelin come close to expressing the spiritual roots of this horror:

“A further reason for my hatred of . . . ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. “The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one’s power, optimally by killing somebody—a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost. . . . A good example of the type of self that has to kill other people in order to regain in an Ersatzform what it has lost is the famous Saint-Juste, who says that Brutus either has to kill other people or kill himself. “. . . . I have no sympathy whatsoever with such characters and have never hesitated to characterize them as “murderous swine.”

” Concerning Ideology, Personal Politics, and Publications” in Autobiographical Reflections (Collected Works Volume 34)  (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 74-75.

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