January 24, 2011
REASON IN ACTION:
Inside the Minds of Paranoiacs: 'Loughner Acted, from His Perspective, in a Moral Fashion' (Der Spiegel, 1/21/11)
Most saw the Jan. 8 shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others in Arizona as a product of insanity. But assassination researcher Manfred Schneider told SPIEGEL that the presumed gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, did not act irrationally. Rather, his crime resulted from "hyper-rationality."SPIEGEL: Mr. Schneider, on Jan. 8 in Arizona, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the head at close range and killed six people. While the world searches for explanations, you write, in your recent book "Das Attentat" ("The Assassination"), that an assassin like Loughner is not crazy but the product of hyper-rationality. What does this mean?
Schneider: Every assassin is a perceptive observer and interpreter of signs and events. For him, nothing happens by accident. He scrutinizes the world in search of hostile intentions, and he imagines conspiracies everywhere. To us, the outcome seems insane. Yet logic and rationality are key components in the paranoid suppositions arrived at by the assassin. Paranoia is not irrationality but hyper-rationality. Loughner is a very typical example. [...]
SPIEGEL: Is paranoia always destructive?
Schneider: Not necessarily. Just think of Sherlock Holmes. He is better than anyone else at decoding random signs, and he is capable of using them to solidify the most bizarre suspicions. A snippet of paper here, a little pile of cigarette ashes there. He was a great paranoiac, but he was strictly interested in doing good.
There's a great moment in the new Sherlock Holmes series where someone calls him a psychopath and he responds: "“High-functioning sociopath, do your research!"
