Part One. The Basic Human Needs, All of Which Are Absent in Frank Meeink
One. Basic trust, the foundation of human development according to Erik Erikson, which gives a child a sense of unconditional love so that he or she can explore the world without a fear of condemnation. There is no substitute for basic trust. People who don't have it spend all their lives looking feebly for compensation and these searches are often misguided. There is a film about this tragic quest for unconditional love called Citizen Kane. More recently, the film Boogie Nights is also about a boy's quest for basic trust, family, unconditional love.
Two. To love and to be loved. Again, Meeink feels hated by his parents; he feels like an inconvenience to everyone in his family. His parents treat him like a disease, an affliction, a piece of rubbish that should be tossed away. This translates into self-loathing, which results in self-destructive behavior.
Three. Belonging. Meeink feels like a misfit, a loser; he belongs nowhere. People who feel like rejects are vulnerable to joining extreme groups because fanatical groups always offer lost and lonely souls a sense of belonging. The most tragic case of this in recent history is the mass suicide at the compound headed by the Reverend Jim Jones. The more desperate one is for belonging, the more one is likely to join a fringe group.
Four. Distinction. Meeink has never found himself as he is lost in an abyss of drinking and drugs. Languishing with a sense of being a nobody, Meeink at 14 years of age becomes a skinhead and on page 58 he writes: “I was fourteen, and I was a neo-Nazi skinhead. For the first time in my life, I felt like I mattered.” Straining for a sense of significance and belonging often makes people lose themselves in a movement that promises to help them forget who they are. When you hate yourself, forgetting who you are is a gift. Forgetting who you are becomes a addiction because you constantly need to keep the demons of self-hate at a distance.
Part Two. Having never learned how to love, Meeink is fated to follow misguided paths to love, for which there are many, including:
1. Find love by shopping, honing a shopping an addiction, and becoming in essence a consumer philistine. Another example: One of my students wrote about his uncle, an obsessed hard worker who became a millionaire and died at an early age in his fifties. On his death bed he said, "My life has been a farce. I've been lonely and for all my money, I never found what I was looking for." And then he died.
This first misguided way of finding love is not Meeink’s problem, but the does suffer from the rest that follow.
2. Become an automaton or conformist, one who finds “love” by being molded by the herd, by the authority, by the clique. In Meeink’s case, he conforms to the Skinhead Orthodoxy and becomes a proselytizer (preacher) for racism and all divers forms of crackpot theories.
3. Become a perennial child; become dependent on an adult or authority figure to feel safe and provided for. The obedient child of skinhead doctrine, Meeink becomes mired deeper and deeper in ignorance and irrationality. He is emotionally a child who accepts without question the doctrine of his authority. This belief and obedience gives him a sense of comfort and reinforces his sense of belonging within the group.
4. Become a power-monger: use your talents and brute force to lord over others and become intoxicated by a sense of power. Meeink becomes a sort of skinhead warlord celebrity; he even has his own TV show that he pays for on local cable. With low self-esteem, he becomes a leader, a larger-than-life figure who rules over his disciples. Often it is those who preach with the greatest passion who are lost and use their preaching to conceal their self-doubt and self-hatred.
5. Become a vain narcissist. In an interview, Frank Meeink confessed to being a narcissist, someone with “a big ego and low self-esteem.” The lower your self-esteem, the more compelled you are to flap your wings and draw attention to yourself in order to convince the world that you are successful, happy, and powerful; however, the truth is you are the opposite of all these things: You are eaten away by a sense of failure, misery, and powerlessness.
6. Popularity is based on fashion and imitation. And Meeink does this well. In his sick social circle, his uniform and theories are considered admirable. In other circles, something is deemed cool or desirable in the marketplace of fashion for a time and then it cycles out. Therefore, popularity is like the stock market. What makes you popular today might make a nobody tomorrow. A popular red-head actress from the 1980s is now homeless in Torrance. I saw her at Penguins buying a frozen yogurt with pennies and she spilled her frozen yogurt all over my shoes while I was buying mine. Where’s all her friends now? In Meeink’s case, his popularity doesn’t last long. As soon as he wants out of the skinhead movement, his “friends” try to beat and kill him.
7. Become an addict and seek oblivion to escape the unbearable separateness and alienation that results from not being able to love. Meeink’s drug addiction is so bad that by the time we get to the book’s end, we still see him struggling with it. But let us not look at drugs as his only addiction. His overall orientation is that of addiction so that ALL of his relationships with people and things and even ideas are addictive, including his obsession with Nazi ideology.
Part Three. The Foundation of Meeink’s Conversion to Skinhead: Nihilism and the Death of Meaning
1. Frank is rejected by his parents who care about drugs more than they care about him.
2. Frank’s father, divorced from his mother, cynically and recklessly tells his son Frank that Frank’s mother will choose her new boyfriend over Frank and his father turns out to be right, so in essence Frank is rejected a second time. The constant rejection afflicts Frank with a burning hunger for acceptance, belonging, and approval.
3. Frank has sublimated rage, anger so deep he doesn’t know what to do with it and not seeing his rage with crystal clear vision, the rage goes into two different directions: inward killing him and outward in his false ideology of Nazism.
The worst kind of rage and the worst kind of despair and, yes, the worst kind of insanity are the types in which YOU ARE NOT AWARE OF THEM. When you are not aware of your psychological afflictions, you are at the highest risk of being destroyed by them.
For example, the DMV tells you not to drive a car after having a fight or an argument. You get in your car and you find yourself less patient and more easily annoyed by other drivers and not connecting your annoyance and volatility to your recent argument, you have a meltdown on the road and you end up doing something stupid that could result in an accident or even a fatality. However, if you're aware that your anger is the result of the argument, and not the other drivers, you are in a better position to calm yourself down.
Another example: Your girlfriend breaks up with you because you're needy, neurotic, and a bit of a nut. If you know this, you can be a good sport about the rejection and say to yourself: "Of course, she broke up with me. I'm crazy."
On the other hand, if you can't acknowledge that you're crazy and your girlfriend breaks up with you, you become a bad sport about it and you say to yourself: "How dare she break up with me. A man of my greatness. There must be another man, someone she's been seeing behind my back. I had better spy on her and get to the truth of the matter. I may even have to stalk her. And then of course, once I get rid of her secret lover, I can prove to her that I'm not crazy, that I am a great man and represent the best thing that could ever happen to her."
Which reaction is crazier, reaction 1 or reaction 2? You decide.
4. Frank is desperate to be loved and to enjoy a sense of belonging even if it means being cradled in the brutish arms of Nazi Skinheads and its “Identity Theology” (see page 54). You know you're desperate when you seek love from Nazis. That's profoundly sad and that Frank is blind to this sadness shows just how crazy he is.
5. Frank is desperate to find an easy to answer to the misery, rejection, and worthlessness that he feels and rather than tackle the realistic complexities behind his rage and general sense of depression he looks to a fantasy: a scapegoat (blaming innocent targets) and racist ideologies always fixate on scapegoats.
6. Being “called into God’s army [of racist degenerates]” gives Meeink a sense of mission and purpose that he never had before. See page 54.
7. To feel unified, Meeink and his fellow racist cohorts must rally against a common enemy, ZOG.
8. Sadly, we learn that thousands of young men, treated like rubbish from their parents, look for answers to explain their situation as marginalized unloved throwaways and they find these wrong pseudo answers in these racist ideologies.
9. Nihilism, the belief that life has no value or meaning, is so painful and creates a void so unbearable that gullible misguided youth will glom onto the most odious hate-filled ideology just to wipe away their nihilism.
10. The “believers” tend to come from similar backgrounds, hated or ignored by parents, and they are able to share a similar vein of rage and create a sense of togetherness and unity. No longer do they feel alone.
Part Four. The Ideology Must Fulfill Basic Needs for the Throwaways of Society
1. The hate ideology must contain an easy-to-follow narrative about the “pure” race becoming “contaminated” by the impurities of other races.
2. There must be specific groups that are hated in order to serve as scapegoats.
3. There must be members of “your tribe” who compromise their behavior by not adhering to racist ideology and as such are “traitors.”
4. There must be clear rites of passages to be initiated into the group. Cut your hair, wear a uniform, join a violent wilding spree, etc., to prove your “street cred.”
5. You must possess doctrine or teachings that present an alternative “true” teaching to the “propaganda that mainstream society teaches you.”
6. The hate group must serve as a surrogate family and provide parental figures as replacements for the ones you never had.
7. There has to be a chain of command so that everyone knows their place and can aspire to ascend the ranks.
8. There has to be a radical lifestyle change so that you can see your behavior as righteous and healthy, in contrast with the contaminated behavior of The Other.
9. There has to be a renunciation of past ties to family and friends as you become reborn in the new hate group.
10. There must be constant proof of one’s fidelity, loyalty, and allegiance to the group often evidenced by crimes, killings, or any errand given by your superiors.
Part Five. Essay Options
Option #1: In a 5-page research paper, analyze the conditions that made Frank Meeink ripe for racist brainwashing and the forces that unshackled him from the chains of his racist ideology.
Option #2: In a 5-page research paper, analyze Frank Meeink's descent into the Skinhead movement in terms of Erich Fromm's "Escape from Freedom." How, in other words, is Meeink's conversion an escape from freedom?
Option #3: In a 5-page research paper, compare the Fall and Redemption of Frank Meeink and Jeff Henderson.
Comments