True Believers Are Truly Dangerous

Most of us live with uncertain beliefs, never totally sure what’s right or wrong, true or false.

We can’t fathom people who feel so absolutely “right” that they’ll blow up a government building with a day-care center full of children.

Or plant nerve gas in a subway full of defenseless commuters.

Or kill doctors and receptionists at abortion clinics.

Or offer a million-dollar reward for the assassination of a “blaspheming” author.

Or hole up with automatic weapons in a Waco doomsday cult, ready to fight the outside world.

Or shoot high school girls in the face in Algeria because they aren’t wearing veils.

Or bomb the World Trade Center as a symbolic strike against “the Great Satan.”

Wednesday’s stunning horror in Oklahoma City was the latest and largest reminder that True Believers are a very real peril, even if normal people can’t understand them.

The killers obviously think the rectitude of their cause is more important than the lives of preschool tots and office workers. To them, mass murder is justified to deliver their message.

To the rest of us, it’s madness that someone would make elaborate secret plans to massacre children as a demonstration for a “noble” cause.

Now that the Cold War is over, this kind of danger has taken the spotlight as a menace of the 1990s.

A dozen car bombings have killed about 300 unsuspecting victims around the world in the past two years - and the poison gas attack in Tokyo’s subway added a new dimension. Some of the assaults were suicide missions by self-chosen martyrs.

Who are these crazies? What’s the pathology behind killing innocent strangers as a public statement? It’s perplexing that the fanatics are intelligent, and possess high technical skills. Many adherents to Japan’s Supreme Truth cult, suspected in the subway gassing, are college graduates. Yet they kissed their guru’s big toe, paid $2,000 each for a sip of his bathwater and paid $10,000 for a drink of his blood.

What’s going on here?

In his classic book, “The True Believer,” Eric Hoffer said zealots go through an emotional process of renouncing their individuality, and finding identity in a violent cause. “The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure,” Hoffer wrote. “He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources - out of his rejected self - but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace.

“This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength. He easily sees himself as the supporter and defender of the holy cause to which he clings. And he is ready to sacrifice his life.”

This explanation may be helpful to psychiatrists, but it can’t placate the shattered families of Oklahoma City.

Experts warn that America contains a surprising number of True Believers ready to kill and die. It’s horrifying to realize that the Oklahoma tragedy might be repeated many times in many U.S. cities.

America is a wide-open democracy, where all people are free to travel. Explosives, poisons and ingredients for fuel-and-fertilizer bombs are accessible. The only final ingredient required is the fanatic heart, which sees a massacre of children as an act of bravery. Federal agents will do their utmost to detect such secret murderers in our midst, but the task will be nearly impossible.

Americans can’t comprehend True Believers, but it’s increasingly clear that we can’t escape the nightmares they cause.

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