People attach to sacred objects conceived as more significant than the self. Collective forms of violence arise based on identifying  an “enemy” imagined to be acting to destroy a sacred object.

Acts of terror allow people to demonstrate devotion to a sacred object. A terrorist may die and kill for Allah, for a Palestine homeland, or for the Caliphate. Waging war, similarly, allows societies to demonstrate devotion to a sacred object. In the 20th Century, Western human beings died and killed for sacred objects called Germany, France, Great Britain and America. “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

Atran observes that devoted actors in the Middle-East commit to a sacred cause and make “costly sacrifices,” including dying and killing. These devoted actors die and kill in the name of moral imperatives “independent of concrete material goals.”

In light of contemporary acts of violence--together with the tens-of-millions of people that were slaughtered in the 20th century--it is astonishing that historians and political scientists cling to a model of “rational choice” to account for political behavior. 

Jay Winter—one of the most prominent historians of the First World War—concludes his magnificent eight-part video series (The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, 1996) in a tone of baffled bewilderment, summing up as follows:

The war solved no problems. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.

The way the First World War was fought clearly “defied cost-benefit calculations.”  Actions undertaken by participating nations were “all out of proportion to prospects of success (Atran)." People died and killed in the name of sacred objects conceived as more valuable than life itself.

Nazism, similarly, is a case study of how sacred values may generate death and destruction on a vast scale. Heinrich Himmler—speaking of the extermination of the Jewish People in a speech delivered to SS officers and Nazi officials at Posen in October 1943 declared: “We had the moral right, the duty to our own people, to kill these people who wanted to kill us.”

Speaking of the Final Solution, Himmler declared: “We can say that we have carried out this most difficult task out of love for our own people.” Just as a terrorist claims that he carries out acts of violence for love of Allah, Himmler claimed that mass-murder was undertaken out of love for the German people.

Hitler framed the moral imperative as follows: “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.”

Think of any case of political violence with which you are familiar. Doesn’t Hitler’s logic apply?

Political actors are  aware that their acts generate death and destruction, acts which--under ordinary circumstances--would be considered inhuman and inhumane. When undertaken in the name of a sacred object, however, ordinary morality is abandoned. Whatever is done must be done--to rescue the sacred object.