"There is only one good: knowledge, and only one evil: ignorance" - Socrates
My intention is to use this as a sort of semi-blog, with random thoughts or maybe even a short essay posted on occasion.
To kick things off, I wanted to write about radicalization, as it's something that's been on my mind lately.
Specifically, the question is: why do people radicalize? Who grows up wanting to be a terrorist? At some point along the path of an individual's maturation, it becomes an attractive idea. The "aha!" moment for me came in reading the excellent piece "Radicalizing the Romanceless" on Slate Star Codex. This section seemed to explain it to me clearly:
The moral of the story is that if you are maximally mean to innocent people, then eventually bad things will happen to you. First, because you have no room to punish people any more for actually hurting you. Second, because people will figure if they’re doomed anyway, they can at least get the consolation of feeling like they’re doing you some damage on their way down.
The entire article is recommended reading. The meat of the realization is this: people radicalize because they perceive that their backs are against a wall for one reason or other, and they realize that acting in increasingly extreme manners won't change the response outcome. So if a person is dissatisfied with their life for one reason or another, a rational response could be to try to fix the issue causing dissatisfaction. If you don't like your job, find a new one. If you don't like your home, find a new one. These things may be difficult, but they're doable, no need to behave radically. But what if the problem is larger? A foreign nation is occupying your country and that is making you dissatisfied, taking up arms and becoming a freedom fighter seems like a normal, rational thing to do in these circumstances.
But, of course, when we talk about extremists, we aren't talking about freedom fighters. When Al-Qaeda members hijacked two airlines and crashed them into the Twin Towers, these weren't freedom fighters trying to expel a hostile force. This was a radicalized response that wasn't inspired by an immediate dissatisfaction, as in the previous examples.
We have to ask, then: Why do people radicalize against something that isn't causing an immediate dissatisfaction? There's definitely some level of dissatisfaction there - I don't think happy, well-adjusted people with a great quality of life fit the bill for the typical radicalized extremist. My personal (uneducated) opinion is that the following ingredients are necessary:
There must be a countercultural group that is united by feelings of harm. As far as I'm aware, individuals rarely self-radicalize, there's pretty much always a group behind it, even if that individual is not strongly associated with the group (more on that later). That group must be united by a shared sense of harm-perception. If a group is not united by a sense of being harmed, then radicalization will fail as the elements of the group that do not perceive that harm will either moderate out the radical elements, or they will leave the group until unity in harm-perception is reached. They also must be united by perceived harm, specifically, as a group that is not united by a perceived harm will not be able to activate the radicalization princple (which relies on perceived harm).
That group has to argue that the root cause of the harm is some external entity. Will continue later.
Written by BaffleTrot. You can reach me at baffletrot@protonmail.com, or ping me on twitter @BaffleTrot