Roger Griffin is professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of over 100 publications and is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on Fascism. Read more about him on Wikipedia.
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Book by Roger Griffin
Terrorist's Creed casts a penetrating beam into the disturbing psychological world of fanatic violence, explaining how the fanaticism it demands stems from the human need to imbue existence with meaning and transcendence.
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A fundamental psycho-social syndrome transforms a non-violent, non-militant, ‘normal’ individual into a fanatical devotee of a creed demanding the execution of an act of destruction that sends a message wrapped in terror to a target audience.
The first premise for this model: the need of human beings to feel their lives have a self-transcendent dimension and suprapersonal purpose.
This dimension or purpose is variously described in terms of religion, culture, totalizing value system, transcendence, sacred canopy, nomos--or some other term suggesting the experience of a meaning beyond one's own brief, infinitesimally small and insignificant personal timeline.
The corollary of this need is a visceral fear of anything that threatens the coherence, vitality, or self-evidence of the nomos. Growing up in the absence of a "solid" nomos–as many modern individuals do–can make one susceptible to powerful negative emotions that may be described as dread, angst, terror, and homelessness.
The authors of In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror locate the root of Islamist attacks to the threat posed by Westernization to Muslim religion, culture, and national identities, analyzing the events of 9/11 through the lens of Terror Management Theory. TMT’s premise is that fanaticism arises from a profound disturbance in the sense of belonging to a meaningful cosmos—guaranteed by a culturally derived worldview endowing reality with "order, stability, meaning and permanence."
Culture imparts to individual lives a sense of purpose deriving from the certainty that they are capable of "transcending the natural boundaries of time and space, and in doing so, elude death." Threats to cultural integrity can create conditions for extreme violence.
Assaults on the integrity or self-evidence of the nomos—for example, the challenge of radically conflicting conceptions of reality—threaten to "release the anxiety from which our conceptions shield us, undermining the promise of symbolic immortality." This can lead to a desire to "annihilate" those who embody divergent beliefs.
Based on in-depth interviews with "religious" terrorists, Jessica Stern arrives at a similar conclusion:
Because the true faith is purportedly in jeopardy, emergency conditions prevail, and the killing of innocents becomes, in their view, religiously and morally permissible. The point of religious terrorism is to purify the world of these corrupting influences. But what lies beneath these views? Over time, I began to see that these grievances often mask a deeper kind of angst and a deeper kind of fear. Fear of a godless universe, of chaos, of loose rules and loneliness.
This line of inquiry is reinforced by Eric Hoffer’s‘ classic’ treatise on political and religious fanaticism, The True Believer, written in the aftermath of the Second World War--when memories of the mass rallies of Hitler and Stalin were still vivid. Hoffer offers insights into the intimate relationship between anomy and blind faith.
When people who see their lives as "irremediably spoiled" convert to a movement, Hoffer says, they are reborn to a "new life in its close-knit collective body." The drive to belong to a community of faith provides a sense of purpose missing from an atomized, anomic individual existence. This leads to the "selfish altruism" described by Dipak Gupta as intrinsic to the terrorist persona. Acts of self-sacrifice by members of a jihadi movement transform them into "god-like creatures, much beloved by God himself."
Hoffer relegates ideology to a secondary factor, stating that a rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises, but by the "refuge it offers" from the barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. He sees self-surrender to a political cause as a "desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoilt lives."
Janja Lalich’s study of the dynamics of fanaticism highlights the role played by the need for "cognitive closure" and personal significance. Her findings are based on in-depth case-studies of two modern US cults, the New Religious Heaven’s Gate and the New Left Democratic Workers’ Party (of which she was a dedicated member before her voluntary de-radicalization and metamorphosis into a professional sociologist).
She reconstructs the "intense reorganization" of the sense of self that transforms a "normal" person into a fervent adept, even (as in the case of Heaven’s Gate members) to the point of death. At the heart of the new-found sense of belonging lies a "world-view shift" that endows life with meaning and purpose—combined with an activist stance rooted in a "transcendent belief system."
This experiential "opening up" is the concomitant of the closing down of the "old world" of ambivalence, ambiguity, complexity and plurality. The liquid turns solid. Lalich speaks of achieving "personal closure" within a "self-sealing" system. It is a system revolving around charismatic authority emanating from a "guru-like" leader, ritualized procedures of control imposed by the cult, and an overarching belief-system—producing a transformation in world-view which may take over the lives of initiates--to the point of fanaticism and violent action.
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