I had a three-hour ZOOM session with Scott Atran (his photo directly below) three weeks ago. He's a supremely self-confident man and therefore humble. He knows what he knows. He's lived with and studied terrorists. He does "paper and pencil tests" and other experiments with terrorists as his subjects (while the subjects of most social scientists are college freshmen).

A very brave man. I asked him if he feared dying at the hands of the terrorists he studied. He told me he was nearly killed three times. 

Scott and I have something in common: we conceive of ourselves as scientists. If one is a scientist, one believes there is such a thing as truth. One come to conclusions. You do the research, write up the results, then you have a "finding." With a solid finding, you build upon this finding. One does further research refining this finding.

In a series of LSS Newsletters, I'm going to convey some discoveries I've  made. The statements below embody my findings. 

I've read most of Scott Atran's papers. I've published many of them through the LSS Newsletter (I'll provide a bibliography subsequently).

I myself have a bibliography of 1500+ items on violent political extremism (war, genocide and terrorism). When I write a terse Newsletter (what you've been reading here), the ideas I convey are the result of many years of research, thinking and writing.

I don't identify the author of the statements below: some statements are  mostly mine; some come from Scott. I take final responsibility (I'm functioning as the "publisher" as well as a scientist).

What about "priority?" It doesn't matter. We are in the present now. Do the statements below accurately convey the dynamics of political violence?

Best regards,

Richard Koenigsberg

SCOTT ATRAIN

SACRED VALUES AS INTERVENING VARIABLES IN THE GENERATION OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

1. Sacred values generate costly sacrifices (including dying). Political violence is correlated with the depth of commitment to sacred values. Nothing to do with "biological aggression" or natural selection or survival. Political violence is a "sublime matter of moral virtue.
2. Warfare and genocide and acts of terror revolve around sacrificing one's life for some abstract ideal. Human beings are in revolt against biology. The hundreds-of-millions of young men who die in battle don't pass their genes along.
3. When a 600-pound bomb was dropped on Iraqi human beings, this bomb contained the sacred ideal (freedom and democracy). Killing human beings thus became morally virtuous. The sacred ideal transcends reality. Dropping bombs and killing people is thought of as a "supreme act of moral virtue." 
4. Actions undertaken in the name of supporting or defending a sacred ideal are considered virtuous. There is no such thing as “psychopathology” in the domain of politics. Violence appears normal or normative when it is undertaken and justified in the name of a sacred value or object.
5. Warfare and genocide and violent terroristic performances are civilizational activities. "We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world" (Hitler). Human violence revolves around rescuing a sacred ideal: Germany, America, Allah, Communism: take your pick: each society has its preference.
6. Genocidal acts are undertaken to prove the greatness or power of a sacred ideal: Germany or communism or "America." In the Sixties, young men and women  screamed: "Kill for peace." It's always a sacred ideal or object that generates political violence. A sacred value is the intervening variable. Human beings don't kill other human being like lions kill an antelopes. In warfare and genocide, human beings kill in the name of an abstract ideal. Political violence is a form of spirituality.
7. One can speak of a “law of sacrifice.” Devoted actors kill and die in the name of an entity that is considered sacred or inviolable within a their society.
8. A sacred object or ideal or value lies at the heart of  each society and is the source of political violence. The sacred ideal is an absolute that often cannot be questioned within a given society: no debate. Atrocities are undertaken in the name of this sacred ideal.  Killing one's own citizens is part of this dynamic: Mao and Stalin, Mao and Stalin, repeat after me, Mao and Stalin (and Lenin), say it again: Killing one's own people--not just the "other" who is outside of the boundaries of one's society.
9. A single dynamic: Violence undertaken in the name of a sacred ideal. Willingness to kill and die in the name of the ideal testifies to the reality and power of the ideal. The proof of the putting is in the dying and killing. The objective, finally, is not "killing"--but getting other people to die. The people who must die are those who don't fully embrace the sacred ideal. "Death to the non-believers" is a phrase from the world of terrorists, but it applies to all instances of mass-murder. But the actual objective is to get people to die (in the name of the ideal). The death of the "others" (death to the non-believers) proves the power of one's societies' sacred ideal. Warfare, genocide and terrorism function according to the same principle: death to those whose beliefs or ideas or whose very being--negates the sacred ideal.
10. The psychopathology of civilization: massive psychopathology, which is also conceived as normative--laughable. Cancer is normative, but we don't all it "normal." We know that cancer is a profound form of pathology. Millions of people are dying as a result of a virus at this very moment. Sickness and death have become normative, but still the virus generates pathology.
11. "Social anxiety disorder" the psychiatrists opine. Shyness as a disorder. How fatuous. However, millions of people being killed by other human beings, this is not considered a disorder. If it's "normative" within a society, it can't be considered a disorder. This is a "rule" psychiatrists have made. Poor Bandy Lee. She thinks that she needs the approval of psychiatrists to declare that some things are insane. 
12. A lady was entering a death camp with a child in her arms. The child smiled at the SS-man. The mother gave her child to the SS-man for safekeeping. He took the child by one leg and swung him around and smashed his head against a stone-wall. Normative in Nazi culture. Can't be considered psychopathology. What nonsense.
13. Humans define groups in abstract terms and bond with anonymous others with whom one may have no genetic relationship. People kill and die not to preserve their own lives or defend lives of family and friends, but for the sake of a transcendent moral conception.
14. Sacred values differ from material values. They drive actions dissociated from prospects of success.
15. Humans bow down to the gods they worship. Political violence = getting others to bow down to one’s own god. The sacrificial impulse is directed first toward the self and then to others. Even if a suicide bomber doesn't kill anyone beside himself, he's pleased; he's done his job; he's died for Allah. 
16. Humans strive for intellectual and emotional bonding with anonymous others and make their greatest exertions in killing and dying not to preserve their own lives or defend families but for the sake of a transcendent object.