I deliberately infected myself last Monday. I was in a sort of daze, but also curiously aware of the daze, like when you’re dreaming you’re awake. Reality and fantasy weren’t separate enough. I had a hangover, I was a bit ropey and at a loose end, unable or unwilling to focus, to get a grip. I knew it was dangerous, I knew I could lose everything, and I watched myself do it. As if overtaken by a mysterious force, with a dull, pleasurable horror, I could feel my jaw clench as I put myself at risk to a new strain of virus.

I clicked on the attachment. All my experience told me not to do it. Part of me knew my outdated anti-virus software couldn’t have caught up with it yet, I hadn’t seen anything like it before. Another part of me just wanted to see what was going to happen, like lighting a fuse and standing back. The excitement of placing my fate in the hand of a mysterious other, to allow myself to be invaded, corrupted, probed, exposed, damaged, as he wished. The anonymity of it, the thrill of inspection and destruction. Beyond safety and common sense. Everything I’ve ever known about e-mail, in all my years of being a webmaster and running mailing lists, went drifting out the window. Something was making me stop playing safe. I had to be reckless. I had to live a little. Correction: I had to go to the edge to feel stimulated and alive, which is not the same thing. The edge of what is known. The edge of what is proper.
My hard drive started straining at the leash. But the screen didn’t disappear. No obvious destruction. The virus started replicating itself, infecting other files; it tried to go online, and began raiding my address book. I knew enough about computers to be able to pause it, to stop it in its tracks – then I did the research to find out what type it was, to ascertain the precise level of my stupidity. It had only been discovered the day before, and the anti-virus people had only uploaded their report on it a few hours earlier. A “medium risk worm”. It took me three hours to extirpate it from my system. And another hour to buy and install the latest anti-virus software.
So now I’m safe again.
That’s alright then.
Isn’t it?
I sometimes think the urge to destroy is as prevalent in our psyches as the urge to survive. Freud certainly thought so, with the concept of thanatos, the death wish, which he posited worked in dynamic opposition to eros, the creative life force. He was writing in the dark interwar years in the middle of last century – and as the beginning of this century seems to be matching it in foreboding, with Madrid licking its wounds and London actively preparing for the worst, I wonder, not for the first time, whether Freud was right.
The solutions, then and now, lie in psychology: in understanding, especially, the minds of young men: to understand rage, pride, hurt, vengeance. There is a shocking lack of awareness in our political leaders of the circumstances and motives that propel a young man into a life of destruction, be it an obsessive virus-writer causing havoc in the word’s communication systems, a man sleeping around refusing to use condoms, or a suicide bomber, devoted to a cause, filling his need for the certainty of a belief, a faith, the promise of glory and redemption. A fair amount of the world’s ills are caused by these men, and yet I have yet to hear a politician seriously attempt to understand or alleviate the conditions that created them. This is not to excuse anyone – I do not believe people should escape justice if they’ve chosen to destroy – but unless we start creating a world in which such states of mind are less likely to ferment and spread, it’s going to continue. By remaining deliberately ignorant, we are unconsciously ensuring that evil remains. Do we like having enemies, scapegoats? Does it make us feel better to name the monster outside, to remain whiter than white ourselves?
As we in Ireland know, a terrorist is someone down the road, someone’s son, brother, cousin, uncle. Someone who is probably grieving for someone they cared for, who was attacked/ imprisoned/killed by the other side. But the grief has been twisted into something powerful, menacing. Men can do that, in a particular way, if we are left to our own devices. It is no coincidence that the current wave of terrorism is inspired by the segregated, misogynist Saudi Arabian/Taliban culture. Nazism too, with its homosexual-influenced stormtroopers, depended on keeping women at bay, to enable the language and practice of violence to become commonplace. The absence of women in the body politic has disastrous results. Leave women out (either by hiding their eros behind a veil or transferring the erotic to the male) and you invite thanatos at its most extreme. This is not to say that women cannot be fascists or suicide bombers or bugchasers, but a culture that supports extreme terror is always male-dominated.
We need to understand men more. It seems self-evident to me, obvious. Common sense. But who speaks like that in politics these days? Why is politics so adversarial, so thought-less, so manipulative, so simplistic?