The desire for extreme control is both sad and frightening.
It is sad because it reeks so much of insecurity. If I am insecure I have no confidence that any difference will not threaten or destroy me. I have to control every aspect of my universe - know where everything is, know what everyone is doing. There can be no uncertainty, no surprises. I cannot risk being confronted with difference or uncertainty as they would be seen as an attack and may destroy my fragile self.
If I am in control, if I know where everything is and what everyone is doing, I can minimize the threats. I am hollow inside. I fear the world. The lie I tell myself is that it may penetrate my defences and wipe out my core. I need to be very vigilant. I need to make the first move. Attack first, ask questions later. It is better to be wrong rather than destroyed.
It is so sad, because it takes up so much of my mental energy. My radar is constantly switched on and scanning for threat. And it ruins my relationships. I have to control or attack or keep at a distance. I rarely, if at all, let anyone close enough to discover me. I prefer them to see my hard and efficient exterior.
Insecurity is dangerous because it damages me. It keeps me isolated. It keeps me from intimate closeness that helps me see myself differently and grow as a person. It protects me from learning from the rich mess of humanity.
And insecurity that picks up an ignorant, fundamentalist, religious justification for the attack is so, so very dangerous. It somehow gives the rigour and violence divine sanction that it enables it to be pushed way beyond sense and humanity. It enables the out-crowd to be defined more easily and attacked more vigorously. All the thousands of the witches of the world who, down the centuries, have been burned or drowned simply because they were mentally ill, or because they did not conform, know the danger of this insecurity too well.
And so it continues. I was saddened this week to read of two groups of outsiders (independent women, and homosexuals) again being killed by insecure religious fundamentalists, because of the latter’s inability to tolerate threatening difference.
In Basra, women who do not wear strict Islamic attire are being threatened and murdered. Forty-two were killed between July and September this year. Some bodies have been left of the streets with pieces of paper attached explaining their ‘crime’. Others are killed and then dressed in indecent clothing in an attempt to make a not so subtle point. In one case, a woman was killed in her home along with her six-year-old son, who was rumoured to have been conceived in an adulterous relationship. Successful professional woman have been told to stay at home and stop working and threatened with rape and death if they continue their careers. One woman who was not dressed ‘properly’ had a motorcycle driven at her as she stood in a queue at a bus-stop. Some clearly have a fanatical desire to control 50 per cent of humanity.
Not only is free humanity threatening to insecurity, these women represent the fundamentalists’ worse nightmare - female humanity. Different gender is so powerful and therefore extremely threatening to extremists.
In Iran, the torture and execution of ‘moral criminals’ continues. A series of reported executions of gays, including two underage boys whose public hanging was posted on the internet, has alarmed human rights campaigners. In 2005, Mahmoud Asqari and Ayad Marhouni, who were hanged in Justice Square in Mashhad.
British MPs raised these deaths with a group of Iranian MPs at a Peace Conference in May, but the leader of the Iranian delegation, Mr Yahyavi, a member of his parliament’s energy committee, was unflinching. He “explained that according to Islam gays and lesbianism were not permitted”, the record states. “He said that if homosexual activity is in private there is no problem, but those in overt activity should be executed [he initially said tortured but changed it to executed].” Mohsen Yahyavi is the highest-ranked politician to admit that Iran believes in the death penalty for homosexuality after a spate of reports that gay youths were being hanged.
Another cause for concern involves a woman hanged this June in the town of Gorgan after becoming pregnant by her brother. He was absolved after expressing his remorse.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office released papers about the death penalty being used in Iran for homosexuality, adultery and sex outside marriage. Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Nigeria also apply the death penalty for homosexuality.
If you and your religion are secure you have nothing to fear from people with different attitudes to sexual practice than you. Such insecure attempts at control are sad and frightening. They are hideous and will ultimately fail.
It’s a neat hypothesis that such abuse as you describe arises from insecurity on the part of the perpetrators and for me, that is the problem: it is just too neat.
I don’t think there is a single reason for such behaviour - rather a complex of reasons ans motives - but the one that gets my vote as the dominant force is what you might call “power intoxication”. Do you remember those famous experiments where ordinary members of the public were given reasons for inflicting punishment on experimental subjects? The power went to their heads and they started behaving like crazed sadists. One experiment where a group of people was divided randomly into “prisoners” and “warders”, the experiment had to be terminated prematurely when the behaviour of the warders (just ordinary people, remember) towards the prisoners became too sadistic.
There is surely nothing more conducive to a power trip than to believe you are acting with the authority of God, that whatever you do is not only permissible but is divinely approved and will be highly rewarded in this life or the next.
I don’t think those kidnappers who filmed themselves cutting off the heads of their victims with a kitchen knife showed any insecurity whatsoever. They were mad: mad with righteous blood lust.
Serial murderers like Hindley and Bradley speak of the tremendous feelings of power they get from breaking through the social and psychological taboos. This “high” is its own reward and is no doubt addictive: hardly have you hanged one teenage gay when you feel like hanging another one.
Killing in the name of god is the ultimate sycophancy: the killer gets the attention of the god and reaps the ultimate reward.
Re: Serial murderers like Hindley and Bradley…: oops, I meant Brady, of course.
Yes, I agree. It is too neat. And in highlighting insecurity, I have, perhaps, overstepped the mark. I certainly wouldn’t want to exclude other factors. Your power-addiction point is very interesting.
However, if I wanted to dig myself out of the hole, I might be tempted to argue that there is a case for at least exploring the notion that insecurity may be behind everything else, whatever the other factors. From my perspective, the power trip and its addiction is just another manifestation of insecurity. You need to be secure in order to relinguish power, allow others to have it, and to restrain your desire for it. But I wouldn’t want to argue that too closely. Just an observation.
I also think that in arguing insecurity in society, I was wanting to use it in a general sense, rather than say it was necessarily behind every act of fundamentalist atrocity.