Understanding How the Privileged Become Violent Fanatics
Abstract
The great British biologist J.B.S Haldane counted monotheism's creation of fanaticism as one of the most important inventions of the last 5,000 years. Call it love of God or love of group, it matters little in the end. Modern civilizations spin the potter's wheel of monotheism to manufacture the greatest cause of all, humanity. Before missionary monotheism, people did not consider that all others could be pigeonholed into one kind. The salvation of humanity is a cause as stimulating as it is impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, all modern missionary "-isms," whether religious or in their secular post-Enlightenment guise, preach devotion unto death for the sake of humanity, including allowance for mass killing for the mass good. "The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology," wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. Especially for young men, mortal combat in a great cause provides the ultimate adventure and glory to gain maximum esteem in the eyes of many and, most dearly, in the hearts of their peers. By identifying their devotion with the greater defense and salvation of humanity, they commit themselves to a path that allows massive killing for what they think is a massive good....Download Info
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Paper provided by HAL in its series Post-Print with number ijn_00505428.Length:
Date of creation: 07 May 2010
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Publication status: Published, Huffington Post, 2010, 000
Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:ijn_00505428
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00505428/en/
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Related research
Keywords:This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2010-07-31 (All new papers)
- NEP-HPE-2010-07-31 (History & Philosophy of Economics)
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