How is extremism formed?

In other words, this deep conviction, whether it is compensation for a feeling of inferiority or intellectual nourishment, is based on the individual's conviction that they carry a noble project and have the right to evaluate, criticize, and punish others. These emotions increase proportionally as ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and feelings of inferiority increase.

Therefore, we should not be surprised by the following scenario: an addict, despised by society for their morals and deviant behavior, suddenly turns into a religious person who memorizes a number of verses, hadiths, and repeated phrases. You find that only weeks after their transformation, they see that society is misguided, and that they have the right to evaluate, criticize, and punish others. The religious transformation gave them the feeling of the nobility of their ideas and their guardianship over society, and gave them something more important, which is social acceptance by a narrow community, compensation for their inferiority by feeling superior to others, and the ability to evaluate and punish them even if they are better than them in knowledge, morals, and achievement.

The previous scenario is a transition from the extremism of crime and deviance to the extremism of religion, and you may find the same person, if money and interests are available to them, turning to the extremism of nationalism, ethnicity, or tribalism.

The point here is that extremism is a state that exists in all religions, sects, denominations, races, genders, and intellectual currents. Attempting to limit extremism to one of these is the production of a new extremism. Therefore, extremism must be studied as a state that transcends times, places, nations, states, and religions, united by a deep conviction associated with a feeling of superiority over the other and the right to evaluate, criticize, and punish them. Superiority combined with demeaning the other is a necessity for extremism to be able to direct punishment and harm without feeling guilt or facing moral questions.

I recall in an interview with a soldier who participated in the Vietnam War, he said (while criticizing himself) that he did not see the Vietnamese as human beings, but as much less than that. He carried a noble idea (spreading freedom and democracy) and possessed the right to change these people on their land, which is thousands of kilometers away from his country, and for the sake of that, and his feeling that they were inferior beings, he would kill them if they resisted.

If we review all wars, colonialism, settlement, and extremism in its forms, we will find that what this soldier said is common to them: the conviction of carrying a noble idea or project that gives guardianship over others, and gives the right to inflict harm in its forms without the need for a tortured conscience or moral anxiety.

From the above, we see that extremism needs a social environment that provides ideas and narratives, and an individual with a psychological state that accepts these as a result of psychological fragility, feelings of inferiority, ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and the repetition of ideas and narratives, especially during the upbringing stage in the family, school, or narrow community. Then comes the nourishment from an intellectual, educational, or media discourse, especially in the presence of social role models who believe in that thought.

Since extremism is a state of deep conviction in the subconscious mind, it does not submit or respond to logic. The subconscious mind is based on patterns of neural connections and neurotransmitters that work automatically according to programming, just like any computer program that a programmer enters, but the computer's operation on that program does not care about logic or the emotions of the people who use it.

The important point also is that the subconscious mind in humans forms convictions and concepts, and produces behavior consistent with those convictions. However, the mind is opportunistic by nature (the necessity of survival), so in the presence of power, interest, or social or legal restrictions, different behavior appears until the opportunity, stimulation, or distance from the influence of those determinants arises, and the true behavior consistent with the convictions appears. Therefore, blaming official authorities or the surrounding society for extremism for not detecting it early represents a lack of deep understanding of the phenomenon of extremism and the human mind. Yes, there are indicators that may point to a readiness for extremism, but these are more widespread than we think.