![]() It's this sense of power, destiny and adventure that they give themselves over to the ineffable and unknown. Despite the "ruthlessly rigid creed" ISIS has been able to appeal to professionals - doctors, engineers, technicians etc - to embark on its project, building a "good life" based on political Islam and Sharia law. The West is facing enormous challenges to help these young people give up their naive idealism or to provide an alternative means of satisfying the quest for "self-aggrandizement," a motivation that goes beyond self-realisation, as some of the jihadists had reached the highest level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Indeed analysts try to find out why some of the "educated" and "bourgeois" have decided "join a brutally barbaric movement", leaving behind "their comfortable Western democracies". In nearly every aspect of our lives – morals, manners, sexuality, family structure, careers, and religious beliefs – we Westerners are essentially free to do as we like.Įva Hoffman believes the inability of some youngsters in the West to cope with their excessive freedom - like binge-drinking and casual sex - may be the explanation, why they have fallen prey to ISIS jihadology. It is hard to think of a form of political community that requires so little allegiance from its members, proposes so few shared norms, and enforces so few behavioral guidelines. The contemporary democracies from which Western jihadis defect offer an unprecedented degree of freedom. As one of Freud’s disciples, Erich Fromm, famously argued, the urge to escape the demands of free choice – by adopting rigid beliefs or norms of conformity – can be especially compelling for those whose sense of a strong autonomous identity or a capacity to think for themselves is not fully developed. For those acolytes, freedom is a psychologically burdensome condition. Why do hundreds of Muslims, many of them educated and from middle-class backgrounds, leave comfortable Western democracies to join a brutally barbaric movement? What makes young men and women susceptible to the extremist Islamist message?Īs he watched the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, Sigmund Freud described the dangerous appeal of authoritarian leaders and the satisfying self-aggrandizement that their followers experience when they subsume their personalities in an ideology or group. LONDON – Among the most chilling developments in the rise of the Islamic State is that so many citizens of Western countries have joined the group’s ranks, becoming suicide bombers and beheading hostages.
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