A zombie – in other words, the living dead. Here Breivik apparently summarizes his life in the noughties before he moved back to his mother's home in 2006, giving up the ‘rat race’. He appears as the consumer incarnate, restlessly looking out for his ‘next dopamine fix’ in the form of a new piece of clothing or some plastic surgery. Dopamine is a pheromone at the centre of the brain's reward system – nature's own drug, you could say. It is activated by love, for example, but also, as with Breivik, by shopping. Breivik describes himself as a monomaniacal addict, as he was addicted to the bottle of red fruit-juice drink which allegedly went everywhere with him as a little boy. He is a child, as he says, not a grown man. Beneath his well-groomed exterior is a personality with no depth or substance. He is a puppet in the hands of forces that want him to work more, buy more and not waste time on other things.
Lurking in the background is his notion of sexually and physically aggressive immigrants, Somalis who gang-rape a girl, who represent not only a threat, but maybe also a fantasy of a different and more direct form of masculinity. The gang-rape represents the promise of fellowship in a group, the need for a violent reaction and an unaffected, sadistic hatred of women. Breivik's compendium portrays the process of the consumer zombie being cleaved open, giving rise to a violent, terrorist monster.
‘I'm Going to Kill You!’
Either Breivik did not pick up the signals from the two women at the Palace Grill that his presence was no longer desired, or he did not care. He stayed sitting there, jovial and smiling.
When the third friend turned up, a beautiful, blonde, Nordic-looking woman, it was as if Breivik changed gear. He became insistent. He started off generous and courteous, although the group of friends made it clear that was enough. Breivik realized that being chivalrous was not working and began to boast. He ignored the first two women and repeated that his book was a masterpiece, but the blonde was not impressed.
Although he was talkative and generous in a calculated way, there was something strange and aloof about him. An icy shudder. Even though he was neither entirely ugly nor completely out of it, the chance of him chatting anybody up was out of the question, no matter how much he hassled them. The fourth friend arrived and, in an attempt to get away from Breivik, the friends went out into the courtyard.
Skaugum was closed and dark, but Breivik followed them. His positive chat-up techniques had been unsuccessful, and he now followed the blonde with an air of menace, stalking her. He went up close to her and glowered at her fiercely and intensely. It looked more strange than frightening. The fourth friend started dancing round him in the dark courtyard, waving her shawl and her dress, like a torero around a bull – or perhaps like a windmill in front of a knight? It was a comical scene.
‘I'm going to kill you!’ Breivik shouted.
The friends laughed and went back into the warmth and light of the Palace Grill. They spoke no more about the would-be author. If he had been a foreigner, they might have thought about his threat, but since he was just an unsuccessful white guy they laughed it off. What a freak. He did not really seem amorous either, just strangely obsessed with the blondest member of the bunch.12
Once again Breivik had been involved in an episode typical of Oslo's social life. Only someone who had read his compendium would have sensed a connection between Breivik's behaviour and a deeply ambivalent relationship with women, and especially with blondes who resembled his own sister and mother. This time, he was angered by rejection. He clung to famous men too, but it was women he threatened to kill. ‘Traitor whores,’ Breivik growled in the compendium.
In his diary entry from October 2010, which was a part of the compendium, Breivik gave a slightly different version of the incident: ‘As for girlfriends; I do get the occasional lead, or the occasional girl making a move, especially now a day [sic] as I'm fit like hell and feel great. But I'm trying to avoid relationships as it would only complicate my plans and it may jeopardize my operation. And I don't feel comfortable manipulating girls any more into one night stands. I am not that person any more.’13
Perhaps this is the chaste knight Berwick talking, or maybe Breivik saw that it would be difficult to take girls home to his mother's flat? In the compendium, unseen by the outside world and surrounded by his cover story, Breivik lived out his fantasies. Dream and reality blended into one. His operation was no dream about a blonde-haired woman, but a nightmare of violence. ‘Violence is the mother of change,’ he wrote.14
A similar development from a lonely life of consumerism to a split life and terror is depicted in Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel Fight Club and in David Fincher's film of the same title from 1999. Palahniuk's protagonist is nameless, a sign of his fundamental lack of identity and of the notion that he is not an individual in a traditional sense, but a new type of subject: born of money and brought up with a life of shopping.
Although he does not realize it himself, Palahniuk's nameless protagonist develops an alter ego by the name of Tyler Durden, who is a free, active, politically subversive and alert character, just like Breivik's Justiciar Knight. ‘We are a generation of men raised by women,’ says Tyler. When Tyler eventually tells the protagonist that they are the same person, he also points out all the advantages of this fantasy – in other words, the advantages of himself: ‘I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I'm free in all the ways that you are not.’
Breivik's many aliases and online nicknames might also be expressions of ‘a confused identity perception’,15 just as his many cover stories suggest a confused perception of reality. A loved child has many names, according to a Norwegian proverb, but so does a person with no clear identity, as he or she can change his or her name at any time. Fight Club ends with the divided protagonist carrying out a massive terrorist operation, eventually bringing buildings down around him like a house of cards. The aim of the 950 kg of homemade explosives in Breivik's van was to topple the H Block, but, even though the bomb shook the government district, it did not manage to move the foundations.
Breivik's hedonistic past as a ‘career cynic’ resembles the background of many European jihadists, including some of the men behind 9/11. It is worth pondering whether it is easier for such zombies in consumer society to be radicalized, whether they have fewer aversions and are more open to buying into extremist and violent ideas online. The technological shrinkage of the world and the collapse of old value systems and symbolic narratives (such as religion, family and the nation-state) create a new man in Palahniuk's novel, not unlike the way in which totalitarian ideologies attempted to make a new communist or fascist man. The methods are softer and more subtle, but they still involve a form of invasion of or encroachment on the individuals who end up in the melting pot of consumer society.
This leads to a reaction, to rage, but there is no father to kill, no ideology to overturn or state to oppose. The consumer zombie's prison has no guards. This rage, then, either finds its expression in purposeless acts of terrorism and aimless urban vandalism or is turned inwards in the form of depression. Even if consumer zombies have no feeling of guilt towards others and are not troubled by conscience, they are still ashamed of themselves, in a kind of frustration about their own inadequacy in the marketplace. This shame is difficult to deal with because it cannot be relieved by confessing to others, and the solution is either another ‘dopamine fix, through [an] endless spiral of feeding your own ego’, as Breivik put it, or, as in Fight Club, carrying out a personal crusade.