HEROES takes as its starting point the various massacres which have been carried out by European and North American young men in their schools and workplaces in recent years.

But it seeks to situate these apparently random acts of aggression in the context of the world order which produced them — like RD Laing, Sigmund Freud and all the other great psycho-analystic thinkers, Berardi believes the contemporary social structure can best be understood from the extremes. The psychopathology of any particular epoch, from this perspective, is not so much a deviation from the zeitgeist in which it emerges as its logical conclusion.

Take Anders Breivik, who massacred 77 people in Norway in 2011. Breivik’s obsession with how Christian, European values are being undermined by the enemy within — be it Muslims, feminists, or what he calls cultural Marxists — is, Berardi notes, “shared by a significant segment of the public in the West. The ideology and the sentiments that Breivik has expressed in his disgusting manifesto are largely the same as those held by the supporters of George W Bush in the United States, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or David Cameron in the United Kingdom.”

This is not to say, of course, that those politicians condone Breivik’s actions — but if there is, to quote Cameron, a “poisonous ideology that is driving terrible actions” such as these, it is one he himself shares.

Indeed, the professed ideology of the killers is often little more than a particularly pure form of neoliberalism. Pekka-Erik Auvinen, who killed nine of his fellow high-school students in November 2007, issued what he called a “Natural Selector’s Manifesto” of which the focal point, says Berardi, “is the perfectly neoliberal emphasis on a misconceived notion that is mistakenly called natural selection, which has to be restored against the socialist protection of the weak against the strong.”

Of course, not every neoliberal becomes a mass murderer. Rather, this type of suicidal rampage is the product of a particular combination of a wholehearted belief in the social-Darwinist credo of the strong’s right to wipe out the weak, with an awareness that oneself is not among the strong.

It is the credo of cynicism combined with the awareness that one is a loser and, as Berardi puts it, “the cynical loser is subject to extreme danger.” The rampage is the way out of this psychic impasse because, according to Berardi, the mass murderer is someone who believes in the right of the fittest and the strongest to win in the social game.

But, crucially, “he also knows or senses that he is not the fittest nor the strongest. So he opts for the only possible act of retaliation and self-assertion: to kill and be killed.”

A fascinating read.

Review by Dan Glazebrook