Over at Dr. Frank’s What’s-it, a great post on Bad Philosophy, in the form of a commentary on an inter-blog dispute about the merits of the Baader-Meinhof gang and their buddies, the Red Army Fraction.

He takes off from a discussion of history to comment on what he saw in his Bay Area adolescence (one that I shared as well) and he comes to an important insight:

An important element of the complex, I’ve often fancied, is a general psychological condition that fetishized and aggrandized ordinary, adolescent rebellion against parental authority, and invested it with universal significance, making it and its concomitant sensations the focus of life and politics, to such a degree that experiences that do not include the sensations are found lacking, unexciting, inauthentic, suspect; the flame of sticking it to the old man had to be kept alive, and neither the absence of an actual old man to stick it to, nor the fact that one has become an old man oneself, has much bearing on the matter.

Here, I think, you find the psychological engine underlaying the Romantic attachment to (quoting Berlin) ‘…wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.’

And what could be more pure than the nihilistic act of terror that denies society’s parental power over you and at the same time destroyed the symbols of that power?

Only an act that destroyed yourself at the same time. Cody Jarrett, meet Mohammed Atta.