Christopher Dorner's Toxic Manifesto

As the drama unfolds behind the murders in California, alleged cop killer Christopher Dorner’s manifesto gives us insight into a very flawed individual with personality and character disorders. The manifesto first and foremost attests to this individual’s grandiosity and overvaluation of self while he devalues others. Only he has the answers and the truth. This is pathological narcissism. We also see his rigid morality and sense of entitlement – he can take a life to make a point. This is coupled with ample evidence of paranoia – hatred of lesbians, gays, Latinos, anyone not perfect like him, and we have a very toxic admixture. What throws him into the special realm of dangerous personalities is the fact that he is a “wound collector.”* He sees social slights, indifference, human imperfections, diversity and he catalogs them (the manifesto is proof of that) and nourishes those wounds he has collected so that he can justify his actions. This individual then becomes supremely dangerous because he has collected wounds as part of his paranoid ideation and fear of those who are inferior or not perfect like him. As a narcissist who sees himself as perfection and having all the right answers, violence then becomes a justified remedy for those that do not subscribe to his worldview and who have ignored his pedantic pleadings; Not unlike the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski.

Manifestos such as this once again remind us that this is an individual with a flawed character (lack of conscience, morality, and ethics) and that the trajectory we can anticipate from him will be a spectacle of violence.

By Joe Navarro Copyright © 2013

Joe Navarro, M.A. is 25 year veteran of the FBI and is the author of What Every Body is Saying, as well as Louder Than Words. He is on the adjunct criminology faculty at Saint Leo University. For additional information and a free bibliography please contact him through www.jnforensics.com or follow on twitter: @navarrotells or on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Joe-Navarro/236255193080893 Additional articles by Joe in Psychology Today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher

*The term "wound collector" was copyrighted © by Joe Navarro in 2004. All rights reserved.