Political violence conveys the message: Death to non-believers: death to those who refuse to acknowledge the omnipotence of our nation, ideology or god. The purpose of acts of collective or group violence is to compel others to submit to the sacred ideal to which members of one’s own group have submitted. Acts of terroristic violence are performed in order to “give witness” to the depth of one’s devotion.

Acts of group violence represent demonstrations: “Now you see how powerful our nation, god or ideology is.” Collective acts of violence seek to persuade other groups that one’s own nation or god is powerful, and its ideology true. Violence functions in the name of verification: This is what happens to people who do not acknowledge the power of our god or nation. This is what happens to people who do not embrace our ideology.

Speaking in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879), the Grand Inquisitor explained that so long as man remained free, he strove for nothing so incessantly and painfully as to “find someone to worship.” The chief misery of every man individually—and of all humanity according to the Grand Inquisitor—is not only to find what one can worship, but to participate in a “community of worship.” People seek to worship, not according to their individual tastes, but according to what is established beyond dispute so that “all men agree at once” to worship the same thing.

For the sake of common worship, the Grand Inquisitor says, human beings have slain each other with the sword. They set up gods and challenge one another: “Put away your gods and come and worship ours or we will kill you and your gods!” A person in one group—who devoutly believes in the omnipotence of his god—seems unable to tolerate the idea that another group of people also possesses a god claiming to be omnipotent. It is as if two gods with claims to omnipotence cannot co-exist.

Each group demands that the other group abandon its sacred object and bow down to one’s own sacred object. Group violence conveys the message—as Dostoevsky put it—”Put away your god (or ideology or nation) and come and worship our god (or ideology or nation). If you do not worship the object that we worship, then we will come and kill you (and destroy your god, ideology or nation).” Terroristic violence seeks to compel members of the other group to bow down to the sacred object that is worshipped by one’s own group.