Breivik shows there is no solution to 9/11

You can't help but feel our response to human atrocity is a profound test of some kind, part of a deeper purpose, albeit one that continues to be misapprehended in an unknown and surely undeserved way.

What is recognized is the importance of honesty and impartiality, even amidst agonising grief and anger.

Prime Minister Stoltenberg told his bewildered kin that the savagery of Anders Breivik would bring "more democracy, more openness, and more humanity." The relaxed, peaceful Norwegian way of life would triumph.

Similar sentiments were voiced after 9/11. Terror would not win out. Our freedom couldn't be taken, which is true, of course. Rather, Western nations have sacrificed it for the vain promise of a risk-free existence, the quintessential must-have accessory.

I get the regulatory precautions, but let's please not fool ourselves into believing they're virtuous or that we had no choice but to impose them. Deplorable violence shouldn't affect how society operates but it does, just as some marry for financial security while professing love, only to then blame others for the wretchedness that comes from yielding to your fears.

Witness the hurried, guilty rage should it be inferred a suicide bomber or mass murderer may have some insight to offer.

I refuse to debate an extremist sympathizer! How could you possibly take their side?

As Stanley Fish courageously pointed out in The New York Times shortly after 9/11, accounting for human behaviour, however appalling, doesn't amount to condoning it.

Breivik's grievances are not unwarranted. We've been at this freedom caper for some time, yet the striving and progress hasn't been liberating. "The maladies of affluence," writes Clive Hamilton in The Freedom Paradox, "such as drug dependence, obesity, loneliness, and psychological disorders ranging from depression, anxiety and compulsive behaviours to a widespread but ill-defined anomie, suggests that the psychological wellbeing of citizens in rich countries is in decline."

Western civilization is on the slide and those at the helm have no clue on how to arrest the momentum. Well-worn economic and social policy levers are increasingly ineffective, if not counter-productive. Mandated multiculturalism in Europe and elsewhere has become a basis for discord, not unity.

And we didn't need ten futile years in the war of terror to confirm there's no foolproof pre-emptive response to carefully planned, wilful aggression.

The only sensible comeback, confides Fish, is to "invoke the particular lived values that unite us." Clichéd mantras – I have seen the face of evil, these are irrational madmen – are inaccurate and unhelpful, as one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Cease arguing over the truth, complaining how others fall short of your values, and take responsibility for what is right by acting it out, unconditionally.

This is Postmodernism writ large.

If there's no formal truth, there can be no official good or evil, right or wrong, no line between us and them. While this has undoubtedly eviscerated literalistic forms of traditional meaning and identity, it's also brought Man to the edge of glory, to the West's defining ideal of a common humanity. By undermining the idolatrous misconception that a higher authority – divine or secular – can save us, Postmodernism compels each and every individual to take personal responsibility for rising above the petty demands of this material world.

This unfulfilled challenge is both unavoidable and rational.

If a knockdown remedy for our woes exists, and Fish is wrong to claim there "can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one", then free will is worthless, since all that's required of us is mindless adherence to a specified moral code.

If Fish is right, and life cannot be reduced to a state of mechanised certainty, because the truth cannot be contained within a system of human thought and language, its essential mystery grasped in the heart alone, then the only genuine moral authority available to us lies within, as Kant and others surmised.

For centuries, joyless religious leaders abused the truth about the truth, capitalising on its metaphysical element to simultaneously needle and allay our deepest existential fears. Man is alone, racked with doubt, forever ignorant of God's grand plan.

Well kind of. Actually, there's a legion of haughty men who do appreciate what's required. These esoteric rules and rituals guarantee redemption. Mission Accomplished!

Having cast off a corrupting faithlessness in Man's capacity to be good without fear or favour, contemporary Western societies still find themselves subject to the same shameful temporising and manipulative paternalism that the Enlightenment sought to free us from. Democracy may have supplanted the church, but love of power over truth continues to flourish.

At the Tucson memorial in January, Barack Obama quoted scripture to remind mourners that because "terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding" it's vital we "guard against simple explanations" for the shootings.

Feeble stuff. Either the actions of Loughner, al-Qaida, McVeigh, Breivik can be understood, in simple or complex terms, and prevented, or they can't. End of story.

Instead of hammering home how the egotistical wish to "pose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless" fundamentally conflicts with the radical message in the Book of Job, the President, unable to trust America with unsparing realism, hedged his bets, thus prolonging our confused and damaging epistemological quest.

As Hayek warned upon accepting his Nobel Prize for Economics, "If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible."

What Breivik did was inconceivable, which was partly his point, why he felt it was "gruesome but necessary." The more desperate our need for life to go to plan, the more heinous the crime required to shock us from our self-important, need-to-know stupor. Astonishing brutality from a seemingly normal citizen is a terrible reminder that control and certainty are beyond us. It also represents the ultimate test of unconditional belief in ourselves and others.

A "solution" to the carnage, a decade on from 9/11? Be brave enough to admit there isn't one and embrace absolute scepticism as our decisive, unifying non-ideology, the unsettling source of true peace and happiness.