For example Sayyid Qutb goes so far as, portraying all nonfundamentalist-‘Muslims’ as Jewish agents. “Their genius lies precisely in their appearing to be Muslim: And so are they Muslims!! Do they not carry Muslim names? ''(Qutb, Ma'rakatna ma'a'l-Yuhuo, edited by Zayn ad-Din ar-Rakkabi, in, Path Trials and Present Tribulations, Oxford, 1987, p. 77.) According to Qutb they amount to "a massive army of agents in the form of professors, philosophers, doctors and researchers - sometimes also writers, poets, scientists and journalists - carrying Muslim names because they are of Muslim descent." (Ibid., pp. 76-77.) To complement this research however it is necessarry next, to take a look at suicede bombing and the like.
There are those who argue that suicide terrorists are motivated not by conspirational thinking and fanaticism, but by strategic objectives. The most persuasive argument for this school of thought comes from Robert A. Pape, a political scientist, who wrote a well-circulated article for the American Political Science Review entitled "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism." There would appear to be much truth to Pape's thesis. Hezbollah, for example, was able, through a series of calculated suicide attacks, to get the United States and Israel to leave Southern Lebanon. Similarly, the Tamil Tigers - the terrorist separatist organization seeking the independence of Tamil Eelam from Sri Lanka - were able to bring Sri Lanka to the bargaining table.
There are, though, certain anomalies that would appear to qualify the validity of Pape's theory. Take, for, example, Pape's well-documented argument to prove that the various Palestinian terrorist organizations were able to get Israel to make concessions, which consisted in letting go of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Here is where the rationality thesis gets strained. Israel finally agreed, in 1993, during the Oslo Accords, to allow the Palestinians to be given the Gaza Strip, ninety-five percent of the West Bank, and half of Jerusalem. That would, in essence, have given the Palestinians just about everything that they had demanded. But to the surprise of everyone - including President Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack and, no doubt, many of the Palestinians Yasser Arafat, who represented the PLO, rejected the deal. Hamas then launched a fierce infitada of suicide bombings.
In his essay, Pape does not explain how the PLO's rejection of the peace treaty with Israel served their strategic objectives of establishing a Palestinian state. But in The Case for Democracy (2004), Natan Sharansky - who was then serving as a member of the Israeli delegation at the Oslo accords - offers his opinion on what was Arafat's primary, but unstated, objective in turning down Israel's generous deal: "Arafat rejected countless projects Israel proposed that would have served to decrease tension between Israelis and Palestinians and release his hold on Palestinian economic life" (2004, p. 181). Sharansky then explains that it was necessary to keep Israel as an enemy. Infact as we have seen, an enemy has always been the cynical method used by autocrats to maintain control over a group of people. Creating an enemy creates a scapegoat for their nation's social, economic, and political failures, and deflects criticism from their own corrupt regime. The suicide bombings served to keep the tensions with Israel at a feverish pitch. But would the suicide bombers have sacrificed their lives had they deciphered Arafat's real objectives? If Sharansky is correct - that it was all about Arafat maintaining power and control - then does it make sense to talk of the suicide bombings as fulfilling a strategic objective?
Do the car bombings in Iraq have a strategic objective? In last years article in the New York Times entitled "The Mystery of the Insurgency" (May 15, 2005), James Bermet interviewed a number of counterterrorism experts, in an effort to make sense of the insurgency there. Most of the experts interviewed are more than a bit puzzled, hence the title of the article. They are puzzled by the fact that the widespread murdering of civilians is not wirming hearts and minds. Indeed, it is having the opposite effect. Bermet also reminds us of something that Che Guevara believed. Quoting Guevara, Bermet states:
"Where a government has come to power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality," he wrote, "the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted." (2005, p. 2)
Hence, if Guevara is correct, because of the free elections, the insurgency carmot win in Iraq. But Bennet quotes Bruce Hoffman who, like Pape, is convinced that terrorists have rational motives. Bermet contends that the motives of the Iraqi insurgents is like that of the IRA in Ireland; it is to get a foreign power to leave their country. Of course, the suicide bombings are also the result of a civil war, of Sunnis seeking to regain supremacy. In any case, as Bennet points out, after many years, the IRA is no closer to driving the English out of Ireland. As a matter of fact, an article in The New York Times not to long ago read, "I.R.A.Renounces Violence in Potentially Profound Shift" (July 28, 2005).
Anthony James Joes, an expert on guerilla warfare, leaves open the possibility that we simply do not understand the insurgents' strategy, but suggests that what is going on is "wanton violence" (Bennet, 2005), and that the insurgents are simply"losers." Bennet also interviews Steven Metz, of the Army War College of Strategic Studies Institute. Metz believes that most insurgencies do have a certain goal, and so agrees with Pape on that point. In regard to the Iraqi insurgency, on the other hand, he states, "It really is significant that even two years in there hasn't been anything like the kind of political ideology or political spokesman or political wing emerging. It really is a nihilistic insurgency" (qtd. in Bennet, 2005, p. 1). If nihilism is what is motivating the insurgency, then sending one's recruits to blow themselves up in a car bomb that indiscriminately kills as many civilians as possible is not a strategic plan. Pape's thesis is, of course, only about suicide terrorism. Certainly, terrorism, in general, is primarily driven by strategic objectives. Or is it?
After all, what was the political motivation for Timothy McVeigh for destroying the Federal Building in Oklahoma City? It would appear that he was motivated by vengeance for the disaster at Ruby Ridge and was on an apocalyptic mission inspired by his reading of the notorious book The Turner Diaries. For that matter, what was the strategic motivation of Aum Shinrikyo - a cult regarded by the United States government as a terrorist organization - for having released the poisonous gas Saran into the Japanese subways? Their motivation was similarly part of an apocalyptic fantasy.
This is not to deny the obvious fact that terrorists are often strategically motivated. It is just to suggest that non-strategic motives also play crucial role, and it would behoove us to examine some of these motives, for they may help us not only to understand terrorism, but also to more deeply understand Islamism and, more ultimately, the paranoid vision.
In 2002 , Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister of Israel, gave a speech entitled "The Root Cause of Terrorism is Totalitarianism." This is certainly an intriguing hypothesis, but was Netanyahu correct? After all, terrorism, at least as it is being defined here, is not state sponsored. Organizations like Hamas and AI Qaeda act independently. Is it fair, then, to connect terrorism to totalitarianism?
There may, though, be some truth to Netanyahu's statement. After all, Middle Eastern terrorists are radical fundamentalists and, as such, are foes of individual freedom, human rights, and all else that one associates with liberal Western democracy. For example, it is clear that Osama bin Laden has been profoundly influenced by the above mentioned Sayyid Qutb, whose writings clearly espouse authoritarian and totalitarian values. Bearing this in mind, what then might be the connection between totalitarianism and terrorism? As Netanyahu sees it:
[For terrorists], the cause they espouse is so all-encompassing, so total, that it justifies anything. It allows them to break any law, discard any moral code and trample all human rights in the dust. In their eyes, it permits them to indiscriminately murder and maim innocent men and women, and lets them blow up a bus full of children. ( p. 1)
This totalization, or absolutizing, of one's cause may make one a true believer, and perhaps a fanatic, but does it make one a totalitarian? It mayor may not. And it mayor may not make one a terrorist. But we would contend that fanaticism is a cause of terrorism, if "fanatic" means a person acting solely out of an end justifies the means ethics, i.e. a person who has lost all sense of proportion. It became evident, from the three previous case examples, that there is a connection between teleological ethics and antinomianism, nihilism, and the paranoid vision. One can, then, discern a common theme here. Needless to say, fanatics are dangerous, for their all-important cause vindicates any sort of action, including terrorism.
This brings us back to Pape's essay, "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism." Pape states that, "all suicide terrorist campaigns in the last two decades have been aimed at democracies, which make more suitable targets from the terrorist's point of view" (2003, p. 5). Pape is making an interesting point here, but one must ask: What about nations like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Sri Lanka? They have experienced terrorist attacks, and they are not democracies. Russia, too, as suffered terrorist attacks, and it is barely a democracy. Each of these cases are different, but it would seem that a recent phenomena are nondemocratic countries that have dealings with democratic counties being attacked by terrorists. The July 26th 2005 terrorist attack in the Egyptian city of Sharm elSheik, Egypt, where there exists a vacation resort that caters to English tourists, and has been the site of meetings of international conferences, would be an example. All the same, Pape is mostly correct in his assessment. Why, then, do democracies make good targets? According to Pape:
.. .democracies are often thought to be especially vulnerable to coercive punishment. Domestic critics and international rivals, as well as terrorists, often view democracies as "soft," usually on the grounds that their publics have low thresholds of cost tolerance and high ability to affect state policy. Even if there is little evidence that democracies are easier to coerce than other regime types this image of democracy matters. (2003, pp. 7-8)
This seems unconvincing as an explanation of why democracies have been most frequently targets of terrorists. It could be argued, though, that the essential reason is not practical, like Pape contends, but ideological. If democracies are a target for terrorism it is because democracies, quite naturally, stand for democratic freedoms, liberty, individualism, hwnan rights, the separation of church and state, and all else that terrorists, who are invariably totalitarians, reject. Terrorist fear that such liberal values will invade their nation. This fear, and all else that follows from it, is a paranoid reaction to the dread of modernity.
The notion that what is really dreaded is democracy and liberty could explain why democracies are by far the most prevalent targets for terrorism, but how can one explain the act of terrorism itself, now that we have rejected Pape's rational motive thesis? A frequent thesis is that suicide bombing, terrorism in general, and genocide, are part of a cult of death, i.e. a perverse mythicizing, glorification, and worshiping of death. Where as frequently seen in Islam, death is idealized as a desired goal and not a necessary evil in war. At its most extreme, nihilism is not just a doctrine advocating the complete destruction of social and political institutions, which is what some revolutionaries have sought, but the negation of all values. (See Warrant for Terror: The Fatwas of Radical Islam, and the Duty of Jihad by Shmuel Bar, 2006.)
But in radical Islam, suicide plays an absolutely indispensable role, and is not a means to an end but an end in itself, transformed into an act of martyrdom - martyrdom in all of its transcendent glory. Indeed, a third thesis is that apocalypticism. is what motivates the terrorist. In fact terrorists have repeatedly attacked those who seek to find negotiated and non-catastrophic solutions to difficult problems. See for example Anwar Sadat who was assassinated by the forerunners of Al Qaeda, and Yitzak Rabin by a Jewish fanatic, because these political leaders sought out solutions to conflict by means of diplomacy and compromise, the type of solutions that lie at the core of liberal Western democracy. In the minds of fanatics, such compromises prevent the apocalypse from coming, and ultimately forestall the arrival of utopia. Furthermore, they remove the terrorist's raison d' etre, the logic of terrorism that compromisers are counterrevolutionary and must be killed.
But which view, then, is correct? Is terrorism all about nihilism, or is it about martyrdom, or is it about apocalypse? It would seem that all three views are correct, if one adds a few qualifications. First of all consider the notion that the desire for martyrdom is what is motivating terrorists. If this is martyrdom, Islamists are defining it in a strange new way. After all, the notion that a martyr is a person who, through the act of suicide, kills as many innocent civilians as possible, is outrageously absurd. If anything, martyrs recognize the sanctity of human existence. Furthermore, elsewhere the Qur' prohibits suicide yet potential suicide murderers are bolstered in their belief that they will be martyrs by belonging to societies, that interpret suicide-murder as a glorious act of selfsacrifice.
It may be that the desire for complete destruction, for a tabula rasa, is itself prompted by a paranoid purity-seeking. The hope is that terror will precipitate the Gotterdammerung, and then the world, having been cleansed through destruction, will be ready for renewal, and for utopia. Underlymg nihilism, then, may be apocalyptic fantasies, which would suggest that the nihilist is under the sway of the paranoid vision.
Then, there is for example Osama bin Laden's opinion about who are the real terrorists: "The truth is that the whole Muslim world is the victim of international terrorism, engineered by America at the United Nations"
Putting it all together, the murderous martyrdom that terrorists seek might be called, for want of a simpler term, and a more parsimonious explanation, "apocalyptic, nihilistic, sadistic, envy-inspired, pseudo-martyrdom."It can be concluded, then, that terrorism is not fundamentally strategic, even though, on a surface level, it appears so. It is, on the contrary, the product of a number of un-strategic elements, all of which are under the sway of the paranoid vision, combinmg together. Ironically, the most world-treatening forms of the malady of tirrany and totalitarianism have coincided with the rise and spread of liberal democracy, giving rise to an opposing ideal that seeks to control every thought and act.
For example how is it that Athens, as the advent of liberal democracy, and Sparta, as the advent of totalitarianism where mutually arising? Could the purpose of totalitarianism be, to combat the 'anxiety' that is aroused by the lure of other, better ideas ?
Nevertheless, if ideas cause anxiety, it is not necessarily because they are seen as better. It is because their very existence relativizes the supposed absoluteness of one's own ideas. Furthermore, new ideas suggest the perspectival quality of one's worldview, unmooring one from the solidity of the familiar. Thus is totalitarianism a flight from openness, freedom, and possibility? One might say that in each person there exists an inner Peloponnesian War, a series of battles between freedom and psychological control. Indeed, totalitarianism - of which Islamism is a form - is a desperate effort to quell those anxieties. Anxiety need not result in desperation, reactionary closure, and social and political malevolence. It can spur a people on to new learning, to an expansion of self-awareness, the result of which is a more conscious and more creative relation to the realities of human existence. It can, indeed, lead to a cultural renaissance. But if the "opportunity knocks card" of new learning is rejected, this anxiety will find release in outlets that are pernicious, including conspiracy thinking, the major force that is against us.
Some moderate Muslims, have interpreted the call to Jihad to mean the call to spiritual warfare, i.e. the conquest of one's weaknesses. A spiritual Jihad is, indeed, necessary if the temptation to accept the facile answers proposed by Islamist totalitarianism, and other paranoid phenomena, are to be overcome.
But all of the manifestations of the paranoid vision make sense (and as seen above are in line with standard Psychiatry), and are of a piece. Delusions of grandeur are an obvious enough refusal to acknowledge one's finitude. The sense of evil that is endemic to the paranoid vision has a similar ground. After all, evil represented as defilement, possession, or as a devil (projected onto a vilified group of people) - has the aspect of externality. The implication is that one is inwardly pure and perfect. This arrogation of absoluteness to oneself is a refusal of the task to mediate the finite and the absolute. Conspiracy theories, apart from their vilifying function, fail to acknowledge the limits of the knowable. They derive from a refusal to acknowledge the uncertain, contingent, and chance dimension of spatiotemporal existence. Apocalyptic fantasies are founded on a rejection of the world, with all of its imperfections. Rather than taking up the arduous task of being the crucible, one longs for the day when the imperfect world will be destroyed, and a less demanding mode of existence will appear.
The paranoid vision can be viewed as one modality of the flight from the inner demand to live at the intersection (of time and eternity, of the finite and infinite.) Might all psychopathology, and all immorality, consist in various forms of flight from that difficult task? The evidence would suggest that they are indeed a flight, but a detailed exploration of this phenomenon must be deferred for another time. For now, it will be enough to propose an answer to the question that began this chapter: What does the existence of the paranoid vision tell us about that amphibious creature known as a human being? It bespeaks of the difficulty of living at the intersect. After all, if mediating opposites was not thoroughly problematic, there would be no paranoid vision, nor would there be the ten-thousand other ways in which human beings flee their special calling. It is because the task is arduous that there has always been admiration for such virtues as saintliness, nobility, and heroism, for all things excellent, are as difficult as they are rare.
Of course one could deepen this level of investigation by shifting from a psychological to an epistemological plane of inquiry, one where visions of life are central. A similar advance might also be made in the field of social, political, and organizational psychology. That an organization can become possessed by the paranoid vision should now be clear enough. A question that arises is lso can an organization be possessed by other ways of seeing as well?
Evidence exists that paranoia is contagious, but such evidence would seem to be lacking in regard to the other personality disorders. This is important because we have taken the fact at the end here, that paranoia is founded on a vision of life, the assumption being that visions of life are akin to cognitive viruses. How, then, is one to understand this anomaly? One possibility is that there is something unique to paranoia as a way of seeing that makes it communicable. If so, what it might be has still not been determined. Another possibility is that the other personality disorders are contagious, but in ways that have not yet been discerned.
Elaine Showalter does, in fact, contend that the personality disorder known as "hysteria" is contagious. She regards a number of disorders that became prevalent in the 1990s - alien abduction, chronic fatigue syndrome, satanic ritual abuse, recovered memory, Gulf War syndrome, and multiple personality disorder - as contemporary manifestations of hysteria. If hysteria is contagious, how does it spread?
In fact hysteria has at times been spread by stories circulated through self-help books, articles in newspapers and magazines, TV talk shows and series, films, the Internet, and even literary criticism. The cultural narratives of hysteria, which I call hystories, multiply rapidly and uncontrollably in the era of mass media, telecommunications, and e-mail. But here, again, a distorted view of the world is being communicated through certain narratives. Whereas the narratives of paranoia are conspiracy theories, apocalyptic fantasies, angry screeds, vicious rumors, etc., those of hysteria are psychosomatic diseases. Both paranoia and hysteria are transmitted through the media, although the choice of media are as different as a blog from a website devoted to disseminating conspiracy theories.
Hysteria is a ‚false explanation’ because it does not get to the real ground of a person's difficulties. One can gather that she regards certain forms of hysteria as akin to the paranoid vision, in so far as they involve finding a scapegoat for one's troubles. Recovered Memory Syndrome, a form of hysteria, illustrates the explanatory and justificatory power of hysteria. Those who suffer from this malady supposedly come to painfully remember what they had long been repressing from memory, that they had been raped as a child by their father, and that is the reason for their present emotional difficulties. Thus instead of some conspiring cabal, it is one's father who is to blame for paradise lost. Some of the other disorders associated with hysteria - such as chronic fatigue syndrome, and Gulf War syndrome - are simply regarded by hysterics as being caused by a virus of some sort, one that doctors have thus far not been able to discover. We must note, though, that these are not simply forms of hypochondria, for those with these psychogenic illnesses can come down with real symptoms, and suffer terribly. And at this point one can thus contend that psychological maladies are communicable only in so far as they are founded on visions of life. The logic here is that communicability requires narratives, and narratives are the product of ways of seeing, or visions.
A person with the type of psychogenetic illness derivative of hysteria is really a rhetorician, for their malady is the language that they use to persuade other people of the truth of their worldview. Thus paranoids, hysterics, and people with other ways of seeing as well, are only too happy to tell their stories to whomever will listen. But all that hysterics really need to do is to tell other people the name of their malady. They might, for example, state,"I am a victim of alien abduction." That statement alone carries with it an entire ontology. Why, though, the need to persuade? Certainly, misery loves company, perhaps because one's conviction seems truer if other people also believe in it.
Where in the above article we looked at the conditions that foster the emergence of the paranoid vision, and have uncovered a diversity of hidden agendas, especially hidden to those who are under their sway. That these agendas operate unconsciously follows from the fact that leaders of organizations, although they may be intelligent and idealistic, are often blind to their ontological assumptions. Furthermore, followers are resistant to seeing the emperor's new clothes, which means that an organization's real agenda usually remains hidden from them too.
These hidden agendas (ie. paranoiagenic factors) are invariably at loggerheads with the stated aims of an organization. As for Guru’s like Rajneesh or as Dr. James F. Rinehart in his new book „Apocalyptic Faith and Political Violence: Prophets of Terror” points out in the case of Aum Shinrikyo, have a long list of hidden agendas - from those that were mercenary to those that were millenarian - that were antithetical to the stated mission of helping his disciples to attain enlightenment. Or in the much more extreme case of the Khmer Rouge, stated mission was to bring about a new and better society, but their hidden agenda was bloodthirsty revenge.
Thus hidden agendas interfere with accomplishing the stated objectives of an organization because, as the saying goes, when one pursues two birds at the same time, one ends up catching neither. But, far worse than that, an organization's hidden agenda often turns out to be paranoiagenic. If it is seriously paranoiagenic, it not only retards the progress of the organization, or seriously weakens it; it mostly ends up destroying it.
Needless to say. an organization can have an agenda that is not hidden. but is clearly manifest, and which is not just paranoiagenic. but downright paranoid. Nazi Germany would be a case in point. Far from being hidden, its agenda was clearly stated by Hitler in Main Kampf. The problem is that the rest of the world did not want to believe that a person or a nation could have such an evil agenda until the damage was already done. All the same, it would appear that Hitler actually did have a hidden agenda. His stated agenda -- apart from exterminating people -- was the creation of a thousand year Third Reich. His real agenda, though, which he hid from himse", was precipitating the Gotterdammerung.
Nevertheless even an organization devoted to a charity, or to any noble cause, can become a hotbed of egotistical rivalry, suspicion, hostility, envy, and treachery. Disagreements will often result in such a group splintering into warring factions. The spirit of distrust then gives rise to slander and to that cousin of the conspiracy theory, the vicious rumor. Such troubled groups, as they become increasingly insular, will similarly evince a suspiciousness towards other groups or organizations who are viewed as adversaries, even those organizations that share similar goals, hidden agendas of all sorts that may emerge over time. For example, national security and the safety of a nation's people are generally regarded as vitally important objectives. But it came to lightl after September 11th, that the FBI and the CIA had long regarded each other as rivals, if not enemies. Consequently, each organization had a policy of not sharing vital information with the other. By some accounts, this lack of a coordinated intelligence effort contributed to the failure to prevent the September 11th disaster.
To offer another example, the purpose of President Nixon's cabinet was to assume the duties of elected office of a democracy. But as the Watergate conspiracy revealedl another agenda had emerged, one that was a product of the paranoid vision, with its virulent us/them view of politics, and its apocalyptic the-end-justifies-the-means fanaticism.
Ironically even an organization whose core value is rationality can devolve into a very repressivel apocalyptic, paranoid cult, thus becoming a hothouse of irrationality. That is what happenedl according to Jeff Walker, in his aptly titled book, The Ayn Rand Cult (1999). Walker points out many similarities to another famous cult of intellectuals, namely Freud’s inner circle. Freud's psychoanalysis, although popular with the public, had its inner circle. They were an in-group, with their own -private language, making no effort to become part of mainstream psychology. Some critics of psychoanalysis, exasperated by psychoanalysts' refusal to test their theories by verifiable experiments, have contended that the various psychoanalytic societies are not scientific organizations, but essentially part of a mystery religion. It has also been compared to the type of secret controlling cabal that is found in dictatorships.
But in the case of Ayn Rand, one would think that if a serious amount of money were involvedl an organization would become very practicall eschewing any subterranean agendas that might undermine its practical efforts. But that too is not the case. An example of a CEO who was thoroughly possessed by the paranoid vision was Henry Ford. Ford's remarkable success in business and his rabid anti-Semitism were not unrelated. The reason for Henry Fordls success was mass production, which was based on uniformity. Ford once famously said that customers could have Ford cars in any color they wanted, just as long as it was black.
Ford enforced uniformity through the infamous Service Division of his company. Representatives could visit a worker's home at any time to make sure that the worker was living morally, i.e. in conformity and in uniformity with Henry Ford's values, and workers could be fired if they failed to conform. This rage for uniformity was part of what was behind Ford's anti-Semitism. He wrote a bestseller called The International Jew, which was essentially one long conspiracy theory. It was quoted by Hitler in Mein Kampf (1925), and Ford subsequently received an award from Hitler.
It would seem that the Jews did not conform to Ford's constricted image of an American citizen, for they refused to assimilate and become Christians. Furthermore, they represented to Ford the forces of cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and all that was foreign. Their alien nature was an assault on Ford's need for homogeneity. Henry Ford's fetish about uniformity was a manifestation of the paranoid quest for purity, whether in the ideological or the quasi-material sense. That which is homogenous was pure; that which was unique or different was impure, or evil. Ironically, that which was the source of Ford's success, mass production in the service of uniformity, was also his nemesis; for it blinded him to the demands of consumers. Alfred P. Sloan Jr., the CEO of General Motors, had no such fetish about uniformity. Consequently, he welcomed the idea of offering cars in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Furthermore, one learns from, My Years with General Motors (1964) that Sloan developed the idea of market segmentation, i.e. creating cars for different income groups - Chevy, Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, etc. That is why the Ford Motor Company lost its predominance in the auto industry to General Motors, and never recovered. The point, then, is that an organization's stated mission, noble though it may be, or practical though it may be, cannot prevent it from becoming subverted.
As for Islamic terrorist groups, their "fantasy ideology" grows in a manure rich with conspiracy theories and other paranoid narratives, hidden from the light of reason, lacking contact with universal discourse.
Thus insularity is a failure to connect with the larger world. Without that connection, one lives a fragmented, isolated, alienated, and dissolute existence, and one becomes a candidate for possession by the paranoid vision. There is another comparison that one can make: Disagreement in regard to ideology or policy meant losing favor (see the remark about ‚other’ Muslims , at the beginning todays’ article), ostracism, and possibly excommunication. Thus despite the imperfections of democracy, a democratic nation has a better chance of surviving such crises than one that is authoritarian.
To a certain extent, the separation of the I from the not-I, the subject from the object, is a universal concern. Although by some, argued to be more of a "masculine" concern, it tends less towards inclusiveness. But for the paranoid, though, the need to erect a barrier between the I and the not-I is extreme.
The borderphobic vision, by contrast, is extreme in the other direction. It is predicated on the belief that borders, of any sort, are fundamentally unreal. Borders are, consequently, experienced negatively, as limits to one's true identity. Thus the direction that the quest for selfhood takes lies not in emphasizing the distinction of the subject from the object, but in abolishing the distinction. The hope is that by abolishing such dualities as self/world, I/you, and subject/object, a global sense of self can be achieved. Certain personality disorders - such as hysteria and the borderline disorder however, are more common to women.
Interresting, borderphobics are often in conflict with paranoids, and that conflict is expressed the political, is an indifference to maintaining cultural, language, and geographical borders. The latter is expressed, for example, in a refusal to protect one's nation's borders from illegal aliens. If the paranoid maintains extreme vigilance, the borderphobic is not merely indifferent to such borders, but often wishes to abolish them. The borderphobic is similarly in denial over the fact that the nations of the world can have very different and often opposing political interests. If the paranoid is oversuspicious, the borderphobic is under-suspicious Thus if the danger of a paranoiac foreign policy is a bellicosity predicated on a misperception of threat, the danger of one that is borderphobic is a foolish naivete that is blind to genuine threats.
It is also possible to be under the sway of the paranoid vision in certain areas of one's life, but under the sway of the borderphobic vision in other areas. An extreme example, the Khmer Rouge, certainly a paranoid organization, had a borderphobic vision of a classless (borderless) society.
But what can
be done, to transcend the paranoid vision in an organization is, that for
example the inner circle become aware of the nature of the psychological
dynamics of cultish organizations and to understand those factors
in their own personality. More important, to understand the dynamics of
the paranoid vision, those factors that can precipitate it, and those elements
in their own makeup that render them susceptible to it.
Each person,
when the time comes, must solve the sphinx-like riddle of the paranoid
vision.
Plus there are at least two long known forms of the transcendence of the paranoid vision, one involving its elevation to a new key, and the other involving a shift to its antithesis, the comic vision. What is the relation of these forms of transcendence to each other? If paranoids, and anyone else for that matter, ascend from delusory grandeur to true grandeur - by seeking to live at the intersect of the temporal and the eternal- they will be attempting to do what, from the standpoint of rational understanding, is unintelligible and, therefore, impossible. It is unintelligible because, as Kierkegaard indicates, the two realms, the temporal and the eternal, are incommensurate. How can one live in the light of that which eludes finite understanding? Here, then, is an insuperable contradiction.
The more thoroughly and substantially a human being exists, the more he will discover the comical. Even one who has merely conceived a great plan toward accomplishing something in the world, will discover it.. .But the resolution of the religious individual is the highest of all resolves, infinitely higher than all plans to transform the world and to create systems and works of art; therefore must the religious man, most of all men, discover the comical.
What about the transformations that are intrinsic to human existence, "the apocalypse within" (inner death and rebirt)? It is necessary, though, to issue a caveat. For both true seriousness must be balanced with comic lightness for human existence to avoid nihilistic despair. And perhaps, the comic spirit cannot save one from nihilism, but it is very much an antidote to that which, in some sense, appears as the antithesis of nihilism, namely dogmatism and fanaticism.Perhaps that is why there have always been tragedy (an encounter with life's mysteries) and comedy, that also encounters these mysteries, but involves an acceptance of life, as well as a liberation from excessive seriousness.
