Illustration: Caroline Villard
THERE ARE MOMENTS IN MY LIFE WHEN I KNOW I AM RIGHT, and my rightness gives me strength. When I feel as deeply as I can feel anything that others must agree with me or bring suffering on themselves. That my cruelty is a necessity because my cause is nothing less than objective justice. If only everyone would understand, dystopia would become utopia.
In those moments I am woke. I am MAGA. I want to ban books that are racist, and books that are anti-racist. I am Hamas. I am Netanyahu. I'm Luigi Mangione, Brian Kohberger, al-Qaeda, Stephen Miller, the Ayatollah Khamanei and Kim Jong-Un. I cancel those who cancel and see no contradiction.
I'm every sad boy who ever worked himself into a state of incandescent certainty staring at a screen. And that is what Bungalow's second series is about. Sad boys. (I understand that women are also sad, but that's another story.) Because, looking around, every hell at this moment on earth begins with either a disaffected, disconnected boy, or groups of them arguing.
The phrase comes from the start of my career. In 2010 I was working in the London bureau of the New York Times, during a spate of Al Qaeda bombings. It was my job to write profiles of the terrorists, to run alongside the main story of the violence they had wrought or sought to wreak. What I found as I reported was weird and unsettling.
They were not the terrifying, strong, violent forces I saw described by politicians and theorists. They were silly and baffled. One of them had liked three things on his Facebook page: Al Qaeda, National Geographic and the Apple iPad. More than one of them had posted a version of the same question on some Islamic forum or another: is masturbation haram?
After one bombing, I visited a mosque in London which had developed a reputation as a hotbed for extremist recruiting. I spoke to an Imam, who sighed when I asked him why some of his flock had strayed. He said: “They never come for the strong ones. It's always the weak ones. The ones they can show a video and make cry about the plight of Muslims. The sad boys.”
The London bureau chief was one the great foreign correspondents, John Burns. He'd spent 40 years writing beautifully of the unhappiest places on earth. Soviet Russia. Mao’s China. Apartheid South Africa. Sarajevo during ethnic cleansing. Taliban Afghanistan. He’d seen sad boys before.
He recommended three texts that he felt were necessary to get to the heart of the matter. One was the Bible. The other was the complete works of Shakespeare. The last was a photocopy of an out-of-print 1950s essay by Arthur Koestler from a collection called The God That Failed, about Communism. He told me to disregard the subject, but to focus on Koestler’s very honest description of why he had fallen into the cult. It opens with this:
“A faith is not acquired by reasoning. One does not fall in love with a woman, or enter the womb of a church, as a result of logical persuasion. Reason may defend an act of faith — but only after the act has been committed, and the man committed to the act. Persuasion may play a part in a man's conversion; but only the part of bringing to it full and conscious climax a process that has been maturing in regions where no persuasion can penetrate. A faith is not acquired; it grows like a tree. Its crown points to the sky; its roots grow downward into the past and are nourished by the dark sap of the ancestral humus.
Devotion to pure utopia, and revolt against a polluted society are thus the two poles which provide the tension of all militant creeds. To ask which of the two makes the current flow—attraction by the ideal or repulsion by the social environment—is to ask the old question about the hen and the egg.”
After that, I saw this sadness-into-ideology arc in many stories I covered. In the far-right killings at Utoya, in Norway. At Occupy protests, where expensively educated boys told me I had been brainwashed into working as an agent of the Illuminati. (I told them what my days looked like, and that there was no conspiracy. They just said there was and stood silently staring at me.) At the birth of the modern right-wing conspiracy-verse, a website called World Net Daily, where they informed me that Hackney in London was now subject to Sharia law. (I lived in Hackney and told them it was absolutely not. They just said it was and stood silently staring at me.) In Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter. In the people who said Sandy Hook was a government conspiracy. In a strange episode involving Donald Trump and an ice cream shop in Jersey, and another strange episode involving Gay Talese and a manicure. In a quote from Adolf Hitler about the extremist mindset that a white supremacist in my book had cited: that Communists made great Nazis where moderates never did.
Eventually I came to the same conclusion as Koestler and Burns. Extremisms are all the same. They're all built of the alienation of boys. And against all their charismatic, seductive hatred, we have only dowdy truisms.
The end justifies the means only within very narrow limits. Every person deserves their dignity and integrity. Kindness and tolerance are not just naive sentiments of the privileged, but the gravitational force which keeps civilisation in its orbit.
The main story of the series, which will be published soon in collaboration with the Financial Times magazine, contains both ends of that spectrum — the horror and the hope — in a tense real-time narrative that takes place across one night, with dozens of lives at stake.
It's about a lost, self-radicalized man who idolized ISIS and brought a bomb to a hospital. At 2:14 a.m., he was on his way inside to detonate it when he ran into another patient who noticed that he looked sad and asked him if he was OK. The astonishing, moment-by-moment details of what happened next have never been reported until now.
Over the following weeks, we’ll dive into the issues that emerge from that story. I hope you'll come along. I promise it'll save the world, remove all ambiguity from your lives and bring us all to utopia. ⸭
RAVI SOMAIYA is the founder of Bungalow. You can email him here.
