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Borderline disordersDavid Glidden

Published online: 19 Aug 2010.

To cite this article:David Glidden (2002) Borderline disorders, Philosophy & Geography,

5:1, 19-27, DOI: 10.1080/10903770120116804

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PHILOSOPHY & GEOGRAPHY, VOL. 5, NO. 1, 2002

SPECIAL SECTION

Borderline disorders

DAVIDGLIDDENDepartment of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

Ring around the rosy

Pockets full of posies

Ashes, ashes

We all fall down

There are all too many victims of violence. A woman walking peacefully in New York

City is felled by a psychopath wielding a brick. A baby in LA is slain by a stray bullet

from yet another drive-by. On a crowded bus in Sri Lanka a bomb explodes, blowing

passengers to bits. Palestinian and Israeli children continue to be maimed in a warinstigated by great-grandfathers. Christians are slaughtered in Indonesia, enslaved in the

Sudan. In Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics assassinate one another, despite

a peace accord. Muslims are pursued by Hindu mobs in India, killed by tanks in

Chechnya, while Iraq and Iran slaughtered tens of thousands in brutal border wars.

Villagers in West Africa lose limbs to the machetes of adolescent renegades and

diamond smugglers. Hutus butcher Tutsis in Rwanda, while Tutsis murder Hutus in

Burundi. Serbs, Albanians, Bosnians, Croatians rape, torture, and slaughter one an-

others innocents. Ethnic hatred, racism, religious intolerance, and the fetid fervor of

righteous fury feed the violence. Where are the peacemakers? Who will heed them?

Civil wars and drug wars, religious wars and wars of ideology chiey victimize

civilian populations, easy prey too ignorant or frail to resist. From Central to South

America, across the continent of Africa, throughout the shifting sands of the Middle

East, pervading the emerging nations of far eastern Europe and central Asia, and

extending to the most remote islands of the Indian Ocean or the South Pacic, hatred

relentlessly seeks its victims. Terror on the streets, terror across the globebrutalizing,

maiming, debilitating terrorcripples generations and whole nations awash with blood-

ied memories.

The expanding waves of violence reach ever more distant shores. Middle-Eastern

terrorists blaspheming the name of Allah have hijacked passenger planes in the UnitedStates. Using civil aircraft as cruise missiles, they murdered and disabled thousands of

victims from vastly different nationalities, destroying American cathedrals of commerce

and assaulting its Pentagon of military might. Incinerated bodies falling from the sky

made cityscapes into crematoria, reminiscent of the ashes from the rosy plague centuries

ISSN 1090-3771 print/ISSN 1472-7242 online/02/010019-09 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/10903770120116804

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20 D. GLIDDEN

ago. This horric atrocity happened in a ourishing democracy that had grown serenely

unfamiliar with the random slaughter of civilians by foreign saboteurs.

Yet, America has long been intimately acquainted with astonishing homicide rates,

serial killers, violent cults, drug addictions, and burgeoning prisons. So in the dark

morning of September 11th, American lm fantasies of violence had already rendered

the terrifying collapse of the twin towers a macabre cliche. We had seen this sort of thing

before at cineplexes. But reality now lay in the rubble, fused with ctions that had

imploded on ourselves.

Evil ourishes where despair is loudest, where illiteracy is highest, where people are

poorest, malnourished, and diseased. So it is that the urban criminal murders or rapes

his ghetto neighbor rst or gathers up a gang from those who know such territory best.

In this way, coca and poppies start out as cash crops grown by rural poor so as to fuel

cocaine and heroin addictions among the urban poor, in the service of powerful and

afuent criminals who live comfortably in sequestered cities. Evil soon metastasizes and

spreads across the land, like a hemorrhagic virus born and bred on envy, hunger, and

hate. The foot soldiers of evil are recruited out of ignorance and poverty. But whom dothey serve?

Unlike goodness, the black hole of evil has no singular identity. Evil dwells within

the shadows and is seen only by its effects. Yet we might begin to fathom the

unfathomable by plumbing the souls of evils servants, by thinking more about murder-

ers and victimizers, rapists and bombers. What makes vicious criminals and terrorists so

cruel, so incapable of sympathizing for their victims? For one thing, almost all terrorists,

assassins, suicide bombers, and violent felons are men. Could terrorism be a function of

gender then? Women have certainly committed heinous crimes of violence. War and

terror are clearly not the work of men only. But the terrorist is almost always male.Whether a gangster, a cult joiner or a loner like the Unabomber, there is something

monstrously masculine about men without pity for the innocent or helpless. Who else

but a man would describe the slaughter of children at the Oklahoma Federal Building

as collateral damage? And what marks such men as different from the men and women

who resist them?

The Terror Time

A Scottish folk song, sung hauntingly by Jean Redpath, tells the tale of a migrant eld

laborer who has nished working the harvest and must face the winter homeless, now

that the farmer has no need of him. The heather will fade, and the bracken will die.

Streams will run cold and clear, and the small birds will be going. And its then you will

be knowing that the terror time is near. As the winter weather worsens, the laborer

grows hungry for the warmth of his own human kind. So, he ventures into the villages

and cities, where the sight of him is offending and the police send him on the road again.

But where can he go, where can he bide, once the terror time has come?

This is not the terror of the terrorist, but rather its mirror opposite: the terror of the

displaced, those in desperate need of caring company. For it is community that is the

hallmark of humanity. And this age-old lesson should never be forgotten. In ancientGreco-Roman antiquity Cicero remarked, as others often had before him, that human

beings are more like bees than solitary individuals. Humanity is bound together, not out

of common fears, but primarily out of a yearning to dwell together, to form communities

of families, tribes, cities, and nations. Cicero described those who lack such fellow

feeling as monsters, humans without humanity. So, in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, the



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BORDERLINE DISORDERS 21

monster becomes estranged, embittered, anguished, once he nds himself without a

companion to share his life. Human beings are bound to one another out of a fellowship

that is the foundation of community. Consequently, those who are ostracized, excluded,

exiled, can be turned into terried beasts and in turn can terrorize humanity. Crossing

over into social isolation makes the soul savage. Such are the borders that distinguish us

from them.

What Cicero regarded as monstrous pathology has at times been idealized, in the

Romantic gure of the solitary self-sufcient man who has no need of anyone. He is the

hero of Ayn Rands albeit androgynous, philosophic fantasies: the person in need of no

one, the totally self-sufcient self-made man. I suggest, such a resolute refusal to join the

all too human community marks the parthenogenesis of terrorism, just as ostracism can

transform the exile into an enemy. Spurning womens work, the care of children, the

lowly cooperative duties of community involvement are characteristic of such persons

who prefer to live on the edge and contemn the center. Gradually, a centrifugal

progression displaces the self-made man to the outer edge where cruelty abounds. Yet,

progressive alienation begins at rst in seemingly harmless phases of quiet exclusion andself-distancing, where this cancer on the soul appears to be a sign of strength. Here

ction plays a special role in shaping the imaginative ideal the self-made man is striving

for and which is also changing him.

Consider the Camel Filter man, a ctional persona who became a highly visible

symbol in France and Germany in the 1970s, through saturation advertising. In the

Paris Metro pedestrians would stream past the exact same posters of him, exhibited

repeatedly. Eyes focusing on trains and passageways would peripherally perceive that

single advertising image, sensed successively in glimpses, until the image advertised

permeated tunnel vision. In Germany this same device extended to bus stops andbillboards and nally lmed advertisements. The identical image was repeated place

after place, time after time, imprinting on collective memory.

The Camel Filter man was ubiquitous in Western Europe well into the early

1980s. He was seen occasionally in the United States as well, though never prominent

to the point of saturation. Yet, as late as 1990 the Camel Filter man remained highly

visible in the nations capital, though by then R. J. R. Nabisco was shifting to the

different image of a Toontown Old Joe Camel pufng on a smokegoing for the

kiddy crowd it was alleged by the US Surgeon General. By the turn of the century, in

the United States at least, all such advertisements were banned. So, these same materials

were remaindered for Eastern Europeans, Latin Americans, and Asians. Such is the

nature of contagion.

The Camel Filter man had aged by 1990, though. Looking at the actor playing

out his image, you could tell his hair was going gray. More than fteen years had passed

since he made his rst appearance on a poster. He was wrinkled, weather-worn,

middle-aged. But he continued as depicted: out there by himself, a self-sufcient man.

The only solace he took with him was his pack of cigarettes. Sometimes it would be a

dugout in Borneo or cruising on the Amazon. Sometimes it would be a mesa above a

desert or a precipice overlooking jungle. But wherever he might be, he would always be

the sole human, thinking thoughts only he would know, from a vista only he hadreached, after an arduous trek or dangerous adventure on his own. Sitting there, his goal

reached, he would invariably light up and muse upon the scene to which he had so

bravely journeyed. His eyes refused to focus on the territory he had explored. Instead,

he stared off into the distance with a hint of weary sadness, as he sat there all alone, a

twentieth century vision of living on ones own.



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22 D. GLIDDEN

He was what Marlene Dietrich calledein echte Mann. His self-reliance transcended

societal convention, being governed only from within, whatever the alliances temporarily

arranged with colleagues, porters, wife, and children. He stood apart from the many

because he refused to become one of the crowd. His way of life could not connect with

other living things except as their employer or superior.

Self-sufcient men have no equals, only competitors, colleagues, people to be used.

The self-made become fundamentally unloving men, not necessarily unloved. Such is

the pathology of driven, seeking, reasoning ambition as it takes its shape in real men,

pursuing a lifes plan measured out by singular accomplishment rather than communal

effort and mutual respect. Self-sufciency remains the only way to ee community.

The struggle for self-sufciency is as much against the self as toward the goal sought

or given. Self-sufcient men seek victory over intimations of frailty. Melancholy in-

evitably results from this pushing, pulling. So, the mountaineer struggles against the

shame of cowardice. Accomplishment requires risk, which precipitates a fear of failure.

And the stakes are always being raised. Those who choose this way of life often do so

out of an inherent sadness that grew up with them from childhood as they turned awayfrom others, keeping to themselves, acting out their lives in black and white, instead of

living color. Explanations multiply. A fathers love is missing. A child loses out in

rivaling with siblings. His parents might be alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional.

Whatever the reasons, the Camel Filter man prefers solitude to company.

Whatever concessions the solitary agent might extend to those he lives and works

with could, of course, produce for them the illusion of a community in which he plays

a part, one in which he even seems to cherish the warmth of companionship. Yet, it can

never be a real meeting of minds, since authentically belonging to a group betrays

autonomy. The Camel Filter

man is not a family member, even if he has a family. Sothe Camel Filter man stares off into the distance, vaguely wary of the future. His

posters show this well. The solitary way of life cannot be imagined without this sort of

self-deception, as if there were no communities at all, as if we had no parents, no social

history, as if we ourselves were gods. Whatever his delusion, the Camel Filter man is

not yet a criminal or terrorist, although he could become one.

Alienation

Consider another ction of self-sufciency that comes closer to criminality, a tale by the

Brothers Grimm, called Iron John, an Erziehungstory dealing with what it is for a man

to come of age. The poet Robert Bly regards this story as a vision of redemption. I

would compare it to the second stage along the developmental path to terrorism.

After mysterious disappearances of huntsmen in the woods, one day a solitary hunter

bravely enters the forest with his hunting dog and comes upon a pond, from which a naked arm

reaches out, grabs his hound and drowns it. Returning with three other men, the hunter drains

the pond and nds a Wild Man living on the bottom. They capture him and take him to the

King, who cages the Wild Man in the courtyard. The King gives the cage key to his wife, who

hides it in her bedroom.One day her eight-year old accidentally rolls a golden ball into the cage and wants the ball

returned. But the Wild Man refuses unless the boy unlocks him. After hesitation, the boy steals

the key from under his mothers pillow, releasing Iron John. Fearing punishment, the child goes

off with him into the woods, abandoning his parents who mourn him as he disappears without

a trace. In the forest the boy is required to prove his mettle by guarding a golden spring, to



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prevent anything from falling in, polluting its magic waters. Unfortunately, while staring like

a woman at his reection in the water, he lets his hair dip in. Instantly, it becomes a brilliant

golden color and a stigma of disobedience.

Iron John expels the boy, casting him out into the world. The Kings son becomes a pauper,

wanders in the world all alone, a runaway, nally nding menial work in another kingdom,

as cooks helper and then as assistant to the royal gardener. There he attracts the attention of

the princess, who discovers quite by accident that his hair is golden.

Shortly after this, the kingdom is at war and facing a disastrous defeat. So the young man

goes back into the woods to call for Iron John, who provides him with a war-horse and sufcient

infantry to win the battle and slay the kingdoms enemies. The youth returns the horse and

infantry to Iron John and tells no one of his exploits. To entice this anonymous knight to show

himself again, the King hosts a three-day tournament, awarding a golden apple each day of the

contest. And each day the gardeners assistant wins the golden apple, riding off into the distance

in disguise. On the third and nal day, the Kings men give chase. Although the youth escapes,

his helmet is displaced, revealing golden tresses.

The Kings daughter inquires of the gardener about his worker. And the gardener reportshis assistant had given to the gardeners children three golden apples he had won. The young

man is then brought before the King who wishes to reward him. The youth requests the Kings

daughter be handed him in marriage, revealing his own nobility before making this request.

Finally, on their wedding day, a royal stranger appears, who embraces the bridegroom proudly.

He announces he is Iron John, who had been turned into a Wild Man by enchantment, from

which the youth had saved him. In return, Iron John gives the youth his treasure. So the story

ends.

Weaving Jungs imagery with the tale of Iron John, Robert Bly suggests real men

must turn against their mothers and their families and go off into the world friendless,except perhaps for some older mentor stranger. Communal bonding is too feminine for

men. In the course of living, self-made men inevitably must suffer, going through a fall

from grace, enduring considerable depression, in order to grow worldly and wiser, in

order to mature from boys to men. In this way men can bring the warrior within to life,

the riches of the world can be theirs for taking, they can enjoy the nal glory of

autonomy and power over others.

Parental grief or abandoning ones family cannot matter much within the story.

Presumably the boy never sees his parents again. Notice, too, how women in the story

gure in as chattel: the queen who guards the key, the daughter given to the youth as

his reward for bravery. Riches gure prominently as well. These are often the self-made

mans ambitions: to own the one they marry and be wealthy. But the love of other

humans is not found within the story, only glory. After all, the Wild Man is using the

child all along to escape the spell cast over him.

The landscape of this story is familiar to homeless runaways, alcoholic derelicts,

unwed fathers who never see their kids again, workaholic obsessives who only connect

with what they can control. It is the world of drifters and grifters who will not listen to

their mothers, because they are not supposed to heed them. It is the world of the blues

and twisted souls.

The essence of the story is that of not connecting, except from a position of strengthor self-sufciency. The tales happy ending suggests how men can triumph over

whatever adversity has fated them. In the course of praising such a journey, Bly attacks

eternal youths and the naivete of gentle men who suffer from sincerity or too much

community with women.

Yet, the fables happy ending only comes because of enchanted intervention. Iron



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24 D. GLIDDEN

John provides the youth with what he needs to win. The golden boys victory is not

deserved or won by sole effort on his own. So, most such men prove failures, acting out

solitary visions of their boyhood, without the blessings of enchanted grace or the support

of allies to help them. The story of Iron John could just as well have been blue, instead

of golden, where the Wild Man takes the child out into the woods and rapes him.

Youths in search of autonomy often leave women pregnant on the way. The

homeless pauper working odd jobs for survival is less sufcient than he would admit,

dependent upon charity or social services for handouts, clothing, shelter, welfare. Many

derelicts are addicts, apprenticed to a Wild Man. Theirs is the image of the Camel

Filter man taken to another level, a man with no community to speak of, no means

of connecting with his fellow human beings. It is this abjection of our selves as social

persons that is at the very heart of Iron Johns autarkic, male heroism.

Iron Johns vision of what it is to be a man dates back to anarchic days of ghting

for survival. Perhaps the survival of the human race needed self-made men back then,

though ancient Greco-Romans doubted this. It is never wise to release the warrior-

within. Cooperation is far more central to survival, than becoming predator or prey. IronJohns runaway child stands too close to dereliction, depression, drug abuse, and

violence. The prince who left his parents is the all too common tale of a criminals

metamorphosis, lacking fellow-feeling but lling with resentment.

Vengeance

It is not at all surprising that self-made men suffer fantasies of violence. They seek to

conquer. Because the modern means at their disposal, to give expression to such urges,

are constrained through the civilizing trappings of society and law, frustration mountsfor would-be manly men, who turn privately to thoughts of mayhem. Their sense of

community is readily displaced by the desire to dominate, a desire that grows more

dangerous the more it is suppressed. So, self-made warriors pursue occasions to unleash

the violence nurtured silently within, by acting in the name of righteousness.

American action movies of recent decades portray such righteous fantasies of

violence vividly. Although the ofcial line expressed by typically moralistic plots ex-

plicitly abhors the necessity for violence, the thrill, especially for male viewers, lies within

the violence so explicitly necessitated and cinematically displayed. Boyz N the Hood

expressly condemns the desire for revenge it so embraces, as did the Road Warrior

movies, depicting a time when civilization had crumbled, thereby allowing heroes to

become cavemen once again. Clint Eastwoods Unforgiven is said to condemn the

violence of the Wild West, but that is not how the movie played to audiences hooked

on sadistic scenes.

Time and time again, throughout this genre of action movies, the self-sufcient

hero, when cornered, strikes out violently. Acting in the name of righteousness, he

commits atrocities. After all the blood is shed, he would return to civil life and being

loved again. In the nal scene of Hollywoods rendition of Tom Clancys Patriot Games,

our hero is having breakfast with his wife and daughter, as if the violence which

immediately preceded carried no further burden on their souls. This is not how it wentwith Vietnam veterans of jungle warfare.

Releasing the warrior within carries with it the potential to destroy community

entirely. It engenders the illusion war and peace can live together, one leading to the

other with the self-sufcient warrior supposedly protecting the community, the way a

father would his family. One way to dispel this grand illusion is to follow the fantasy that



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harmony with the community can be restored, once the warrior is victorious and the

violence stops.

A recent lm, directed by Walter Salles, Jr. illustrated this illusion well. Exposure

was adapted from Rubem Fonsecas novel, High Art. The lm starred Peter Coyote and

Tcheky Karyo, of La Femme Nikita fame. It was distributed by Miramax in 1991,

and carried with it some pretensions, thanks to its cinematography and the exquisite way

the scenes were laid. The lm was prefaced with a quotation from the ancient lyric poet

Archilochus praising the high art of vengeance.

Mandrake, the photographer, is a gentle yet detached observer of life in Rio de

Janeiro. A prostitute he has befriended is brutally murdered for a computer disk she

came into possession of, containing the nancial data for a Bolivian drug cartel. Before

she dies, she gives the disk to Mandrake for safekeeping. In the course of things,

Mandrake himself is beaten, his own girlfriend raped by the Bolivians. Mandrake is

ashamed, enraged, and seeks revenge, in a radical change of character for the gentle

photographer. Once his girlfriend (an archaeologist) expressly declines the necessity of

his avenging her, Mandrake takes on vengeance for himself and loses her.To acquire skill at martial arts, Mandrake is trained in the use of knives by the

underworld gure Hermes, who warns Mandrake he will be transformed by assimilating

the art of violence to himself. Mandrake learns his lessons well and relentlessly pursues

his enemies into desolate Bolivia, where he kills them one by one. In a violently

extended battle, Mandrake nally murders his instructor, Hermes, who, it happens, is

the chief assassin for the drug cartel.

In the nale of the lm, Mandrake returns briey to Brazil, to see the archaeologist

once more, as he prepares to leave for the desert in North Africa, to work as a

photographer again. Although her heart had hardened toward him, she accepts hisforwarding address, once she recalls his softer side, from having reviewed his latest

portfolio of photographs, tenderly depicting friends and lovers embracing. As Mandrake

heads off for Africa, the possibility for reunion is reopened, should he recover from the

violence he embraced within his soul.

Exposure questions whether men can recover gentleness after having hated,

murdered, and shed blood so violently. The life of violence appears incompatible with

the life of love. The man who would be warrior king cannot love anything, though he

might fool lovers and perhaps himself as well into thinking that he can. And one who

would belong to a community, if only to love another, must renounce the face of the

solitary avenger and forswear the ambition for self-sufciency entirely. I suspect, the

sense of community cannot sustain itself even if some of its members only temporarily

suspend their membership, to be warriors avenging on their own. In doing so, they

cannot come home again. And those who would accept them back would be fooled into

thinking violent men can love. The autonomous violence of the self-righteous quickly

reaches the border of evil, where the self-sufcient warrior can, in a ash, turn terrorist.

Terrorism

In Joseph Conrads 1907 masterpiece, The Secret Agent, a bomb-making anarchist

known as the Professor is sitting in the beer hall of the Silenus Restaurant drinking with

a political radical. The Professor has little patience for politics and instead is yearning

to construct the perfect detonator. He contrasts himself with ordinary people:

Therefore they are inferior. They cannot be otherwise. Their character is built



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26 D. GLIDDEN

upon conventional morality. It leans on the social order. Mine stands free from

everything articial. They are bound in all sorts of conventions. They depend

on life, which, in this connection, is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of

restraints and considerations, a complex organized fact open to attack at every

point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be

attacked. My superiority is evident.

This philosophical bomb-builder emerges from the shadows of the self-made man.

The transition from Camel Filter man to terrorist may seem strained, but the

contemporary concept of self-sufciency is stranger. Even when the concept of auton-

omy rst came into its own with ancient Stoicism, that concept was, all the same, a

socially dependent one, where self-sufcient autonomy was limited solely to thinking for

oneself. The Stoic autonomous agent remained bound by fate and necessity to the local

community, as well as a global community he would be forever obliged to, wherever he

might live. All humanity was his family. It was his foremost duty to respect every human

being. Consequently, independent thinking was never intended by the Stoics to lead toa form of life that excluded community dependency. The virtues of wisdom and

practical reasoning were continuously situated within a life of civic virtue and social

responsibilities. Self-sufciency came alive in shaping strategies, to adapt the roles fate

would have us play in the communities we lived within, so as to live the life of a good

person and a dutiful global citizen. Emperor or slave, Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus,

shared this same allegiance to community.

Not even the Epicureans, who disparaged civic virtue, praised self-sufciency as

moderns now conceive of it. The Epicureans argued that the road to happiness led

outside the polity only because it led into the Garden, where Epicurean communescould be found. There disciples of the atoms gathered to share their lives together in

praise of pleasure and contentment.

Time wears away philosophical distinctions. The ancient Stoic concept of self-

sufciency has acquired an entirely different cultural identity, divorced from the social

context that rst created it and gave self-sufciency its originating meaning. And so

autonomous self-sufciency is seen, today, to be an alternative to community. Under

such a new construction, autonomy is pathological. The links between the Camel

Filter man, Iron John, Mandrake the Avenger, and Conrads terrorist suggest a

psychological disintegration that comes with antisocial autonomy: detachment, de-

pression, a growing proclivity for violence. The inner self-driven image of the would-be

self-made man precludes him from recognizing this danger lurking within his psyche,

once he abandons his loyalty to the love of humanity.

So, the terrorist glories in superiority, in the distance between the autonomous

agent and the masses. Even a suicide mission seems glorious, because the terrorist, like

the Professor, sees himself as if he were already a god who has no need of others. The

common good is inverted into evil.

Consider our Professor once again, talking in his beer with the anarchist Ossipon:

Do you understand, Ossipon? The source of all evil! They are our sinistermastersthe weak, the abby, the silly, the cowardly, the faint of heart, and

the slavish of mind. They have power. They are the multitude. Theirs is the

kingdom of the earth. Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of

progress. It is! Follow me, Ossipon. First the great multitude of the weak must

go, then the only relatively strong. You see? First the blind, then the deaf and



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the dumb, then the halt and the lameon so on. Every taint, every vice, every

prejudice, every convention must meet its doom.

And what remains? asked Ossipon in a stied voice.

I remainif I am strong enough, asserted the sallow little Professor, whose

large ears, thin like membranes, and standing far out from the sides of his frail

skull, took on suddenly a deep red tint.

Such is the terrorists holy mission. The resentment he feels toward the society that

still masters him points the way to suicidal solipsism. And in the ignorance of

self-preoccupation it falsely seems that there could be an alternative to community

entirely. It is, sadly, no coincidence that, like the ctitious gure in Conrads novel, a

philosophy professor led the Shining Path to terrorize Peruvians; yet another ideologue

orchestrated the genocide of Cambodians. Indeed, the Unabombers manifesto was

a treatise Conrads sallow little Professor would have applauded. The enemies of

humanity, like Osama bin Laden, replace native fellow-feeling with apocalyptic

ambition, to release resentment against a world they despise.

Those who fail to see that they live within the boundaries of humanity fail to

recognize where the dark ambitions of their souls terminate and where inter-subjective

reality begins. They suffer from what psychiatrists call borderline disorders. And so

terrorists search for whatever ideology, religious dogma or self-righteous cause that

would invert value and depict evil as goodness. Cut off from community, they become

the monsters of humanity.



er2013

borderline disorders.pdf

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