Kylo Ren: Mentally ill or just entitled?

[ljwrites]

Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is often held up in fandom as an example of a mentally ill abuse survivor whose prospect redemption is said to be an inspiration and hope for fans who are mentally ill and/or have survived abuse. (I have talked before about fandoms' tendency to project marginalized identities on white guy characters.) His bouts of rage seem to be a major basis for this assertion, with the reasoning being that no one would be that irrationally angry if they were sane/neurotypical. His uncontrolled temper, these fans say, must be a sign of trauma, or borderline personality disorder, or some other neurodivergence.

Or maybe it's a sign of a deeply entitled and abusive person?

I don't dispute that Kylo Ren could be mentally ill; mentally ill/neurodiverse people are people like any other, and can be evil like the neurotypicals can. We really need to decouple marginalization from any assumption of personal virtue, but that's another subject. I believe Kylo Ren very likely suffers from Perpetuation-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS), i.e. trauma from his own crimes much like the Einsatzgruppen death squads who had high rates of alcoholism, desertion, and suicide.

What I take exception to is the idea that there is no explanation for Kylo Ren's rages other than mental illness/trauma, or that his atrocities and abusiveness are the results of mental illness. Both his outbursts of temper and his violent actions are explained far more simply by a more prosaic cause: A toxic belief in his own entitlement to whatever he wants.

Lundy Bancroft's 2002 book Why Does He DO That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men tells a little fable to illustrate the abusive mindset. It is the story of a boy who is told from childhood onward that a beautiful piece of land at the edge of town was held in trust for him and he would come into possession of it when he is grown up.

However, as he grows into a man he notices other people hiking or picnicking on "his" land, and, when he tells them not to come onto the land without his permission, they refuse to leave and actually insist the land is public property. Increasingly frustrated, the young man escalates to screaming and swearing at the trespassers and even resorts to violence, booby-trapping the land and shooting at people who were not frightened away. This leads the townspeople to conclude that the man must be insane.

Of course, it turns out the land is indeed public and the man had been mistaken about his claim to the land all along. He gradually and painfully comes to accept that he had been misled and was lashing out from a false sense of entitlement.

Bancroft told this fable to illustrate how men's culturally ingrained sense of entitlement to women's love, bodies, and services leads some of them to become abusive. His point was that while these actions may seem to be the result of mental illness because they seem so irrational, the real problem with abusive individuals is not a psychological pathology but rather wrongful beliefs and values. Though mental illness can co-occur with abusive behavior and may sometimes exacerbate violent behavior, mental illness is not the root cause of abuse; entitled beliefs are.

Other types of entitlement work similarly, of course. If you are acting out of a set of beliefs that do not accord with reality, you rage at being thwarted in your entitlement may seem insane but is not actually the symptom of a mental illness. You are perfectly rational in your version of reality where your beliefs hold true: if you do have the right to a woman's love just because you fancy her, then her withholding her love and sex is in fact a violation of your rights that would justifiably make you angry. If you do have a right to deference because of your race, then people of other races not kowtowing to you would be a genuine affront. If you do have a right to know all the details of a total stranger's personal medical conditions that are not relevant to your work or interactions in any way, their failure to disclose would be a valid source of frustration.

None of these beliefs have any basis in reality, of course, meaning your anger at people asserting their boundaries and dignity is entirely baseless. If you rage at and berate them trying to get them to comply with your unjustified demand, that's not you being mentally ill. It's just you being, to use the clinical term, sort of an asshole.

Kylo Ren's seemingly irrational outbursts of anger can be understood in the same way, as can his destructive actions. He murders unarmed prisoners in his very first appearance because he wrongfully believes he has the right to take the lives of innocent people who pose no threat to him or anyone. He tortures Poe and Rey because he believes he has the right to take whatever he wants (sound familiar?) by any means, no matter what it does to a person's mind and body. He throws an adult tantrum when Finn throws a wrench in his plans because he believes someone like Finn, a mere cog in the machine, has no right to thwart someone like himself who is so superior, destined for greatness.

The consistent theme in Kylo Ren's canon character and story is not abuse or mental illness. What drives him is a toxic sense of entitlement to what he wants at the expense of others' lives and freedom. Whatever abuse or mental illness he may have suffered are at best contributing or escalating factors, because hey guess what! While abuse and mental illness don't turn people into saints, see above, they also don't by themselves turn people evil either and in fact that's a pretty ableist belief!

This widespread headcanon, held with the fervor of canon by many, that Kylo Ren is a sick and mistreated victim and not an entitled man with evil beliefs, can be understood to be part and parcel with the medicalization of white criminals in particular. People can have all the headcanons they like, obviously, but too often these popular fan theories are reflections of real-life biases because fandom is a part of society.