Everyday Canvas

Why This Viciousness of Ideologies?

Prompt: Could terrorism--local, national, or international—have roots in a person’s or a group’s cultural disorientation and psychological instability? What do you think starts this type of crazy behavior?

--------------------

Since terrorism has been around for millenniums, a related question comes to mind where this prompt is concerned: What makes it possible for any human being to act with such cruelty and viciousness?

I have to think that, first, all these people had difficulties with identity and becoming integrated in decent societies, therefore feeling alienated, marginalized, and disqualified as human beings. Their available bios show that these people found no meaning in their lives, and when given such a strong purpose fortified with becoming brainwashed, they grabbed at it with an immense thirst.

For example, the male (Farouk) during the last California attack belonged to a family who was supposed to be living the American dream. Yet, when the family life is looked at carefully, we see a terribly maladjusted father, emotionally caught between two cultures, who drank and beat his wife up. Whether this terrorist himself was beaten or not, he watched his mother become subjected to this kind of violence, which made it okay in his underdeveloped mind. Added to it his being of a very different background and being made fun of at school, the seeds of sadistic and masochistic behaviors were sown.

By no means exist any excuses for this terrorist, however. There are many children who are subjected to all this and they turn out just fine; this one, on the other hand, didn’t. The reason for Farouk's downfall could be in the analogy of why some people get cancer and others don’t, due to the mankind’s changeable and defective genes or faulty minds. In short, the problem also could be in the environmental factors or innate psychological and biological problems.

Another point I’d like to make is that most of the terrorists, especially those that carry out the acts, are much younger and much more vulnerable people, due to the shortcomings of their age, lack of emotional support, and their sense of isolation.

On the other hand, their older puppeteers are of a different group; they are the ones who use ideologies, be it for conquering lands or pushing some radical sect or idea, for their hunger of power. They are the demagogues who provide motives and a sense of belonging to the younger idiotic ones.

People in both these groups are psychopaths, devoid of empathy and compassion to those outside of their own group.

Now that I’ve looked at the problem from my angle and came up with some reasons for these damaged people’s actions, I can find no solution and no positive way of handling the danger of terrorism that looms over all of us, but I think the least we can do, as individuals, is not to disparage, ridicule, or vilify the people and groups among us who are of a different race, belief, or background and different from us in many ways, so knowingly or unknowingly, we don’t become the cause of their adapting such an awful type of behavior.