My fellow columnist I. M. Beck was taken aback by the inconsistency of a person who wanted to have the film The Da Vinci Code banned because it is insulting to “the Church”, but who then goes to Norman Lowell’s meetings and supports him. Inconsistency? It’s not inconsistency at all, but rather the opposite. The forma mentis is of a piece: wanting to have things, opinions and even people banned because you don’t agree with them.

Support for “the Church” does not necessarily translate into love for one’s fellow man. Plenty of people support “the Church” as an institution, which gives them an identity and a sense of belonging, without in any way understanding, or even caring, what Christianity is all about. They are the latter-day Crusaders and Inquisitors, seeing absolutely no contradiction at all in burning, torturing or maiming people in the name of God, or out of perversely misguided loyalty to their religion. This sick twist in human nature is not the preserve of Catholicism. We see it in Islam, too. This is understandable because human nature is the same the world over and throughout history, despite the belief of Mr Lowell and his sidekick, Ms Baldacchino, that the human race is made up of “different species” which shouldn’t be allowed to interbreed.

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Philip Beattie’s article last week is a perfect example of how easy some people find it to separate the institution of the Catholic Church from the Christian spirit. This founding member of the Alleanza Nazzjonali Repubblikana went on and on with typical turgidity about the various rules and regulations of the Catholic Church, and how these fit in with his great vision for a return to the Malta of the past (sorry, Philip, but if we had liked the past so much, we would have kept it, and not changed it). He thinks I am a dangerous liberal whose views threaten his dream of a Malta based on the values of the 1950s, when neither of us was born, and when women stayed home, raised 10 kids, lived off hand-outs from their husbands, Mass was in Latin, and the Curia dominated every corner of life, even the bedroom. The first thing that occurred to me on reading it – with at least five coffee breaks because it was so boring and badly written – was the spectacular irony of it all. There he is, ranting on about family and tradition. Meanwhile, we are the same age and come from the same neighbourhood, but while he has stayed determinedly single and childless into his 40s (how dangerously liberal, eh?), I am the one who took the traditional route by marrying at 20, raising a family of children, and continuing to live with their father 21 years down the road. It’s almost enough to make me laugh. I am Philip Beattie’s ideal woman – or at least, I would be if only I knew my place.

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Those who campaign obsessively in the name of God, against God, to prevent others doing things they don’t agree with, or to prevent other people from just being, have remarkably similar personality traits – at least from what can be observed at this relative distance. They would no doubt wish to shake off this suggestion as offensive, but it seems to me a fair observation.

I always think that there is something perniciously frightening about them. They start out feeling strongly about a cause, and then it takes them over. While more moderate personalities are content to go on a couple of marches, write a letter to the newspaper, or get angry in conversation with friends, people with obsessive characters behave as though they have finally found the home, the cause and the sense of belonging that they have been looking for all their lives. That is how some anti-abortionists in the USA started out with the admirable motive of saving babies and ended up killing doctors and nurses and threatening women who aborted. For me, that moment in conversation when the face of the one I am talking to twists with hate and focused obsession, as he (or she) touches on a particular subject, is the moment I go cold and back off. The topic could be anything – from mainstream politics to immigrants to an ex-spouse – but the personality type that results in that kind of obsessive rage is always the same.

Obsession blinds people to the big picture, to the evil in what they do and say, and to the fact that the harm they are wreaking, even to themselves, is far greater than the harm they perceive as being done to their cause. If you were to ask me what trait I find most frightening in human nature, I will tell you that it’s obsession. I find obsessive personalities really very scary because they are stripped of the balanced perspective that “normal” people are blessed with. The obsessed are like Rottweilers who sink their teeth in and lock their jaws. It’s not that they won’t let go; they literally cannot let go. The brakes that the rest of us seem to have to stop us spinning right out of control, no matter how strongly we feel about something, appear to be absent in people like this. That is precisely why I am so wary of them – not because they are unpredictable, but because they are entirely predictable.

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At the end of the day, these are people with low self-esteem. They need a cause to make them feel relevant and alive, and they need the reassurance of like-minded individuals to make them feel valued. Because their sense of self-worth is so low, they have to create a context of the inferiority of others so as to make themselves feel superior. They cannot look in the mirror and see a human being who is valuable and worthwhile in his or her own right. Instead, they create a class of inferior beings (e.g. Africans, Muslims, Jews, women, manual workers) and a class of superior beings (white people, men, Catholics, the professional classes) and reassure themselves that, because they belong to this “superior” category, then they are by definition relevant, superior and worthwhile. Groups of obsessive people so often come across as a motley crew precisely because they are a motley crew. The only common factor is their very poor self-esteem, which emerges as rage against something. That something becomes the cause that unites them, and from that day forward, it’s them against the rest of the world. One person with no sense of perspective is bad enough. When hundreds of them get together, they form a dangerously unbalanced group.

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I never fail to be astonished at the general tendency to take people, and what they say and do, at face value. We’re so very critical about everything and everyone, but then, when assessing people and their actions, if we agree with their broad motives and some of their views, we leave our critical faculties on the floor. When I first read about Vince Marshall and his campaign to have The Da Vinci Code banned, my reaction was: “How on earth can anyone take this man seriously?” Even if those who signed his petition really wanted to have the film banned, what on earth were they doing, rallying behind him? I and thousands of others believe that Malta needs the immediate introduction of divorce legislation, but we haven’t joined Dr Bezzina’s divorce movement. As if to prove my point about Mr Marshall, the day after my article about his crackpot campaign and his petition-burning appeared, my editor received the following e-mail message. “Lord have mercy!” it read, and then “Aritklu Da Vinci Code – You are veryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy funny Daphne Caruana Galizia yes I had to burn them coz first I don’t trust you at all even the way you write it makes me VOMIT you are nothing more then discusting”.

This is the man who is campaigning for Maltese Christians to light candles in their windows as a protest against The Da Vinci Code, after he failed to get it banned. What was I saying earlier, that the causes might be very different but the personality type of those who become obsessed is remarkably similar?

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Now please give me an explanation why normal, healthy people would want to spend their time seeking to prove, on the Internet forum run by Ms Baldacchino and Mr Lowell, that the Holocaust was a giant hoax, and getting all worked up about the “lie” that six million people were incinerated, gassed, shot, buried alive, or killed by other means between 1939 and 1945. Exactly – you said it; I didn’t.