THE ARMY OF DAVID'S:

Seven Deadly Traits: Decoding the confession of the Austin plane bomber. (Dave Cullen, Feb. 19, 2010, Slate)

I spoke with several experts in mass murder Thursday, and we identified seven deadly traits of impending danger in Stack's manifesto.

Narcissism/egocentricity: Joseph Stack ended his life with a supreme act of narcissism, and that quality leaps out of every line of his rationalization. It's all about him. Through 30 years of his torture, "thieves, liars and self-serving scumbags" in Congress continually targeted Stack personally. The IRS and his own accountant joined in to make him their personal whipping boy. When the Senate redrew the tax code in 1986, "they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d)," Stack writes. [...]

Superiority masking self-loathing (projection): Stack lashes out at "the incredible stupidity of the American public": "brainwashed" "zombies" who follow along dutifully, incapable of his keen insights to look right through the horror of "the real American nightmare." It's a feeble claim of superiority, when the entire treatise reeks of self-loathing. Stark ends with an attack on capitalism—"From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed." But this is not a man who rejected the system. He only rejected the idea of paying his taxes. He spent his life creating businesses, working the system, and constantly keeping score with his bank balance. Stack embraced capitalism and then convinced himself he was a dismal failure at it.

There is a strong hint of projection in Stack's thinking. When he complains of moving to a better life in Austin and discovering "a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance," he might as well be describing the document he's composing. Projection is common among depressed people, who take a personal trait they despise in themselves and apply it to something external to bat around and ridicule. The televangelist who decries immorality in the midst of an affair is a classic example. It looks to us like conscious hypocrisy, but it's really just a dirty little reusable tool for him to beat up on his own sins.

Isolationist thinking: This served as an aggravating factor for Stack. He presents himself as battling a monolithic series of adversaries: big business, big government, Big Brother, big religion. He sees himself as a shrunken David unable to match this Goliath. There is a suggestion of paranoia here. Stack is a supremely unreliable narrator of his own story, but he does seem to have created real financial hardship for himself. When he repeatedly chose not to pay his taxes, one or more of his business licenses was suspended.

That seems to be at the heart of Stack's whole mess. Unnamed, but ever-present in his commentary, is his immersion in a fringe group or groups who believed they were exempt from the federal income tax. By his account, Stack devoted enormous time, energy, and possibly money to this cause.

Stack made some awful choices on his taxes, but surrounding himself with like-minded zealots may have been just as dangerous in the long run. In his insightful FBI study "The Lethal Triad," Dr. Kevin Gilmartin describes intellectual isolation as a key factor when extremists lash out violently. It's counterintuitive, but joining certain groups can be more isolating than living alone. Stack found a group that encouraged and validated the idea of avoiding taxation, which might have been difficult for him to sustain on his own. The moral support he found appears to have helped him sustain a rather nutty concept for 20 to 30 years, in spite of the economic distress it inflicted on him.