The Anarchist Cookbook

I am a child of the 1970s and I am still trying to figure out what happened back then.  Most people think that the history has already written, but that is not what generally happens in the USA.  The real history isn't typically written until after the major players are dead.  Usually until they are dead for a long time.  It was in that spirit that I watched a Netflix documentary about William Powell a few days ago.

William Powell wrote The Anarchist Cookbook in the 1970s when he was 19 years old.  In the documentary that single act was a thorn in his side for practically all of his adult life.  The documentary is set in the home of Powell and his wife Ochan Powell.  Ochan participated in the interviews.  They were living in France and Powell had no inclination to return to the USA but his wife did.  The interviewer asks Powell about his early life, the writing of the book, how his authorship had plagues him at times in his life, his knowledge about how it had been used and whether or not he had any regrets. Powell is introspective to a fault.  In many cases it is clear that he is trying to find the correct words and I think it is natural to speculate about whether or not he is being defensive.  He is confronted by the interviewer who is asking him tough questions about widely known incidents like terrorism and school shootings where someone happened to find a copy of the Cookbook in possession of the perpetrator(s).  The New York Times obituary is a summary of the Netflix documentary.  Please read that to determine if you want to see the film. I will focus on a few points in it that were under emphasized.

The depiction of his early life, emphasizes a pathway to alienation.  A Long Island born boy goes to England due to his father's occupation where he is viewed as an outsider.  The family then returns to the US where he is viewed again as an outsider and mocked for having a British accent.  He is sent to boarding school where he is molested by a teacher and at that point leaves and goes to New York City where he decides to write the Cookbook.  In journalistic (and documentary) style these conditions are all presented as sufficient for him to write this document.  I think an argument can easily be made that a large number of boys and men are alienated from society for various reasons and they eventually find a way to join the rest of the herd.  I would not find it too surprising that at some level it is related to brain maturation processes that we now know extend into the 20s.  There is another group of boys and men who are fascinated with weapons and explosives.  The vast majority of these boys are not dangerous in any way to other people.  Some of them are dangerous to themselves and end up getting killed or disabled by some of their experiments with explosives or setting up explosions.

Powell's description of how he wrote the Cookbook, by going to a public library and sitting in the military section that contained all of the material he needed is totally plausible.  I have some of these very books in my library and they were purchased off of Amazon.  As early as elementary school, I was being taught to use the Encyclopedia to write reports and a good deal of technical information was available in those general volumes.  You could find the general recipes for gunpowder, nitroglycerin, and even a detailed drawing of the inner workings of an atomic bomb.  All of this material was openly available in 1960s Encyclopedias.  Powell makes this argument a couple of times in the documentary as well as the disclaimer in the Cookbook that what he is presenting is general information.  At no point does he or the interviewer touch on the notion that putting generally available information into the political context of anarchism and revolution, although the interviewer does consistently push for some level of accountability.

At some point in his early life Powell found a calling - teaching emotionally and developmentally delayed children and teaching teachers about how to engage those children. There seemed to be a brief thread about how some of the school shooters may have had these problems.  In the course of his career he was boycotted for various positions when parents discovered that he had written the Cookbook.  He described a scenario where there was some initial concern and he e-mailed every parent to let them know that he had written the manual and was willing to answer any questions about it.  They did not have any additional questions.  During some of the interviews, his wife commented that he went through difficult times because of his association with the Cookbook.  Like most documentaries, editorial license is involved.  In the final shot Powell is asked a questions about some of the parallels between his life and some of the alienated people who read his book.  The scene fades at that point and we never hear his response.  I am sure that he had one.  The final announcement was that he died unexpectedly on July 11, 2016.

The central point of the documentary from the interviewer's standpoint was the effect that knowing the book was found in the possession of some infamous perpetrators of violence had on him and whether he felt he had any responsibility.  He was very clear that he was responsible for writing the book but not how people used it.  He acknowledged that he did feel badly about these associations and it did cause him to try to take action to get it removed from print.  On Amazon, he has published a detailed letter about how he came to write the book and the fact that he no longer believes that violence is an acceptable way to cause political change.  He refers to it as a "misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print" after discussing how he attempted to get his original publisher to take it out of print.  He also wrote a detailed letter to the Guardian on December 13, 2013 that was apologetic requested that the book go out of print and that is available on their web site.    

In the end I was left with the impression that William Powell had done something that he regretted at age 19 and spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it.  Unlike those of us who made similar mistakes, he was able to find a publisher that resulted in his big mistake being put into print.  If I look back on those times, revolutionary rhetoric was commonplace and only rarely acted upon.  Rebellious youth found no level of public support for a wide scale revolt.  Most Americans then as now just want to put in a day of work and go home to their families.  The other interesting aspect of trying to hold an adult man far removed from his rebellious teenage years accountable for that person is that it is developmentally incorrect.  At a wider philosophical level, much more dangerous information is now available both in books and over the Internet.  Anyone still reading the Anarchist Cookbook has not done much research.

For me the developmental questions always linger.  Why the fascination with explosives and violence?  It seems to be an area that is consistently ignored.



George Dawson, MD, DFAPA




References:

1:  American Anarchist. Netflix documentary: https://www.netflix.com/title/80143794

2:  Richard Sandomir.  William Powell "Anarchist Cookbook" Writer Dies at 66.  New York Times March 29, 2017.

Is Susceptibility To Terrorism A Developmental Risk?

I think it was about 1967 when I was playing football with my usual group of friends.  We played football every night for about 8 years.  One of them put on his Army jacket after the game and I noticed that he had a small solid blue button affixed to the lapel.  I asked him what it meant and he said "Students For A Democratic Society."  That was the very first time I had heard of the SDS.  In those pre-Internet days, the only access to radical literature was filtered through popular press in articles that were intended to sell copies.  There were some counter culture approaches like the Whole Earth Catalogue that advised on how to access non-mainstream forms of writing.  It was also possible to travel to one of the universities at the time that were the sources of radical thought and listen directly to what some of the student leaders had to say.

As I pondered that blue button, my next contact with radical thought occurred in the freshmen philosophy course of my liberal arts college.  I ended up in that class like several of my football playing colleagues.  The only reason I went to college was to play football and eventually become a football coach and physical education instructor.  My only disappointment so far was that the college did not have a PE major.  One of the texts for the philosophy course was Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice.  The only thing making my life more complicated at the time was that the instructor graded on class participation.  If you didn't speak up, he would scan the list of names and call one out.  It happened that day in the fall of 1969 that he called my name and asked me what I thought of some aspect of Cleaver's radical text.  I was seated in the back row as 44 sets of eyes turned to stare at me.  My voiced cracked a little bit as I delivered a several minute interpretation.  I wish I could recall what I said that day because it was one of many turning points for me in college - but I can't.  All I can recall is the Professor's response:  "That is good Mr. Dawson.  That is very good."  From that point on, he knew I read the stuff and and could be counted upon for reasonable commentary.  When I sat down the introverted football player seated next to me - gave me a thumbs up.

The 1960s and 1970s were turbulent times.  The same guys I played football with - every day for years - were enlisting in the Marines and going to combat in Vietnam.  One of our group died over there and his name is on the Vietnam Memorial.  It was a very unpopular war and in those days protesting unnecessary wars was popular and became more popular as time went by.  My overall recollection was that information about the war was much more tightly controlled in those days than it is now.  That may have been part of the backdrop for protests, but there was more.  My home state of Wisconsin was a hotbed of radical political thought centered at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.  There were protests in the street and riot tactics used against the protestors.  At one point the windows were broken out of the stores so often on State Street that there were replaced with wood.  One of the retail pharmacies there eventually replaced their windows with bricks and mortar so that the store resembled a bunker with small windows up at the top.  It was an exciting place to visit due to the activity on campus and high level of emotion.  There are detailed descriptions of the history of what happened in Madison available around the Internet and I am not going to excerpt them here.  One of the references suggests that the three radicalized university campuses of that era were Madison, Berkeley, and Columbia.

The protesting in Madison seemed to peak on August 24, 1970 when 4 men blew up the East Wing of Sterling Hall.  That explosion killed a 33 year old physics researcher, injured 3 others, and destroyed years of research - in one case 25 years of research.  The apparent target was Mathematics Research Center because it was funded by the US. Army and the motive was to protest the war in Vietnam.  The 4 men involved ranged in ages from 19 to 23.   The same group was involved in an earlier attempt to bomb the Badger Army Ammunition plant in Baraboo, Wisconsin just down the road from Madison.  Depending on who you read, this bombing changed the course of war protests in Madison.  Many people left the anti-war movement when they realized it contained an element that were not concerned about the lives of others.  Even though many seem to agree that the incident seems to be forgotten, I think there are questions about whether the almost total lack of protests and radicalization today is not in part due to this lingering concern.  In his book Days of Rage, Bryan Burrough described the Sterling Hall bombing as having a transformative effect in that it refocused conversation from the Nixon administration to the bombers and assigned a larger responsibility to anyone who encouraged violence either directly or indirectly.

Burrough goes back and does a good job of making sense of what happened in the 1960s and 1970s.  He covers all of the main radical groups and points out that terrorism (of a domestic kind) was much more widespread then than terrorism of all forms is now even though it was less lethal.  To cite a few examples, in 1972 there were 1900 domestic bombings in the United States.  Bombings were occurring daily and an FBI agent in the book referred to it as "commonplace".  One of the commonest sources of explosives for bombs was dynamite stolen from construction companies.  A Senate investigation in 1970 showed that the amount of dynamite being stolen from quarries and construction sites went from a total of 12,381 pounds in 1969 to 18,989 pounds in the first 5 months of 1970 (Burrough, p151).  By the end of that year most states had passed or were considering new laws limiting the sale of dynamite.  Radical groups also targeted police officers in their activity with several municipalities reporting several fold increases in assaults and homicides of police officers.      

Although Burrough's book is not written from the perspective of developmental psychiatry, there are important themes there that highlight what I think is the most plausible answers to both the recruitment of terrorists and some mass shootings that involve men in this age group with no clear mental illness.  First and most primary is emotional maturity.  Emotions  are both necessary for optimal decision making and at the same time can obscure clear decisions.  The factors that result in that optimal decision making are under delineation but brain maturity, the absence of intoxicants, and appropriate social context and boundaries are all important  aspects of the process.  It is clear from reading Days of Rage that the terrorists of the 1970s like many of their peers - lacked a lot of this.  Burroughs documents disagreements based on boundary issues within some of these groups and in some cases naive approaches to building solidarity within the group that was nothing more than sexual acting out.  Envy was a notable dynamic.  Many of the Weathermen were described as being envious of the Black Panthers.  Some of the radicals most notably the Weathermen were so naive in their quest to recruit and save the working class, that they did not realize that the working class did not want to be saved - at least by them.  The violent activity seemed to be driven at times by narcissism more than anything else.  Being the most violent person in a group of otherwise ambivalent terrorists conferred a certain status that seemed to last a long time.  Late adolescence and early adulthood is also the last great moment to be bonded to a group of your peers.  The next life stage for most people involves family units taking priority rather than peers.  Bonding around a life changing event like a revolution or even much less visible military service can be a powerful experience if it really happens.

History tells us that the revolution did not happen.  Several of the radicals from that time are interviewed and talk about being convinced at the time that it would.  The author refers to this thought as delusional at times, but it is more likely quasi-delusional - shared with such emotional intensity that a very low probability event seemed likely.  Some ponder their sparse legacy or rationalize a lot about what happened.  One interesting twist is that many of the radicals who were never convicted and even some who were completed their college degrees and even went on to professional school.  Some became lawyers and teachers.  One became a prominent psychiatrist.  That aspect of their transition from advocates for a violent overthrow of the system to being an integral part of it separates domestic terrorists from those who are involved in countries without that opportunity.  That may be what separates countries who may transiently have several hundred terrorists who fade away in a fraction of a generation to generations of terrorists living in an abandoned country like a revolution has happened.

There are experts in this area who have different ideas about classifying terrorists - but they are generally based on stable adult personality structures.  I  think that there is a lot to be said for a model that looks at susceptibility to recruitment into terrorist organization as a developmental predisposition and one of many decisions that needs to be made in the transition to adulthood.  That transition is fraught with bad decisions that are the product of the highly variable judgment that can be readily observed in adolescents and young adults.  That includes a prominent bias starting in adolescence that you are making the same decisions that adults would make or that you would make if you were slightly older.

What happened to the domestic American terrorists in the 1970s and how quickly they were forgotten is probably a case study in the problems with this process.  It is very likely that process continues to this day when young adults are recruited to work as foot soldiers in organizations that have similar violence-based ideologies that appeal to very few people.


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA     


Reference:

Bryan Burrough.  Days of Rage.  Penguin Press.  New York, 2015.

Note on the reference: If you lived through this time like I did,  this is the best reference I have found to help you figure out what really happened.

        


















Attribution:

FBI wanted posted image at the top of this post uploaded by Magnus Manske, via Wikimedia Commons - on April 12, 2012.


The following photos were taken of some of the historical locations mentioned in the above post in Madison, Wisconsin on Thursday October 22, 2015. 

Sign to commemorate Reform and Revolt just east of Sterling Hall. 

Sterling Hall Sign

Sterling Hall Main Entrance

State Street from the foot of Bascom Hill.