From manipulation to extremism, the way of indoctrination

Nowadays, the radicalization of some people's mindsetting (and their actions orientation towards extremism) is something quite important to discuss and to understand. The most notorious aspect of this is the growing phenomenon of Islam extremism since it still leads to terrorism on a world scale.

    However, it would an error to limit considerations just to Muslim extremists. In fact, the ways used to indoctrinate people are not new and they have less to do with religion and more with psychology.

Manipulate people into believing your truth

Indeed, any extremism is based on manipulating faithful people: and before that, on manipulating people to lead them to have faith. Then, how does it come that faith, starting innocent, can be perverted into something so much more sinister? How does it become the foundation on which people are brought to the extremist side of things like politic and religion (and not just Islam's)?¹

So you are alone with them, with no  interference. Once you trust them...

So you are alone with them, with no 

interference. Once you trust them...

   
   Well, first, being manipulated into adopting an extremist mindsetting is not something that can happen to anyone at any moment. Assuming that people are not already living in a society promoting extremism, or even permeated with it, let's talk about people from a somehow liberal society. They tend to have negative outlooks on extremisms, so manipulations towards that are normally ineffective. However, a vulnerable person is an easy prey for manipulation: such vulnerability comes from many possible sides; be it a personal grief, economic issues, social ostracism and so on.

    Vulnerability leads to uncertainty, ideals and beliefs can be shaken and that leaves breaches open. If you are in a situation like that, of course you can recover; otherwise, these psychological weaknesses can indeed be exploited and used to purposefully manipulate people. 

But how is it done?

Target the vulnerable ones, isolate and rebuild them for your purposes

First, supporting an unstable weakened person is fundamental to gain trust. However, it is really not a positive support since it is not meant to help the person recover. As psychological weaknesses are indeed like breaches, if you are a weakened person you are somehow an open person. With careful manipulation, you can become a very receptive person. Broken ideals, a shaken worldview, disillusions, if you are suffering things like those it is natural that you seek to be stable again. Good manipulations provide the means for a new stability, not in a positive way.

    Successful and extensive manipulations first deconstruct the personality of your weakened self, then reconstruct it according to their own means. They go as far as enlisting your help into realizing this. You are manipulated into believing that the occurring changes in mentality, attitude and behavior are for your own good. This can even go as far enough as diverting morality and establishing entirely new sets of values.

    Those are all steps of indoctrination. Once such manipulation is properly enacted, it leaves no space to discussion, doubts, questions, objections or other byproducts of a rational mind capable of critical independent thinking. A manipulative system indeed requires the person to give up such things, substituting them with dogmas consistently presented as the truth. Once the person adheres to that, there is no way to confute it. It is built on a complex of self-referential dogmas that is not to be understood, just accepted. The trust the person conceded at the beginning, reinforced on the way, is used to its full extent. It does not matter if what is told to the person does not really make sense, after all it is the truth. If the person does not understand it, it is his or her own fault; the system can't be wrong, nor can be the single dogmas composing it.

Distorted ideals gain more value than people and require sacrifice

Thus, dogmas are codified in a doctrine. The doctrine prevails on people and is enforced on them. Being an absolute value, it gives absolute power to the ones manipulating the people believing it. The conversion from a rational person, functional part of the society, to an extremist person, disfunctional, can happen through various means and is always a dangerous change for both the person and the society itself.

    With enough manipulation, you can be estranged from friends and family; can be convinced that people must all be equal and yet there are people who still have the right to rule; can be persuaded that racial purity is the single most important value in the world, way more than peace and decency; can be instructed that your Nation just happens to be destined to rule the world by whatever absolute means; can be converted to worship a God who

If you are an extremist, you are not taught to think rationally. You are lead to believe even the most irrational of things, as long as they justify whatever  your group asks you to do.

If you are an extremist, you are not

taught to think rationally. You are lead

to believe even the most irrational of

things, as long as they justify whatever 

your group asks you to do.

loves people so much to demand deaths and holy wars; and so on and so forth, as you can keep thinking of extremisms bringing people to think and do absurd things.

    You can be forced to behave in very specific ways, to work on meaningless, repetitive tasks, just to keep you busy but without a real purpose. You must not understand what you are doing, understanding is for free people whose collaboration is asked; you are not free anymore, and your collaboration is just enlisted. There are greater plans in the work and you are not supposed to grasp them, just be content with the fact that you are part of them. However you are safe because your new fellows, and of course your new smart leaders, will take care of you as long as you comply.

    You have to act and think within very strict rules because you do not belong to yourself anymore, now you belong to your new ideals. In fact, you belong to who manipulates you into believing in such ideals. You trust the ones manipulating you more and more, but you are also taught not to trust anyone else. Information (be it from mass media or not) is not something you believe anymore, unless you are manipulated into believing it.

The crisis of society exposes us to the danger of extremisms

Of course, this mostly applies in a society which is somehow liberal and precautions are to be taken. Things are even easier in a context already permeated with extremism. There, the indoctrination is already everywhere and people are subject to it since a very young age. It is also simple when you have a society inside a society, with communities isolating themselves, different for values and ideals. Depending on the environment, an isolated society can be discriminated and oppressed; but it can also be not persecuted, or even tolerated, self-isolating while being overall extremist.

from https://brianluff.wordpress.com Extremists use the rights granted by our societyto work for the negation of those very rights.

from https://brianluff.wordpress.com

Extremists use the rights granted

by our societyto work for

the negation of those very rights.

    Extremisms in liberal societies prey on those factors, it runs deep under the surface and gets stronger in front of uncertainty of policies and actions. It can be difficult to detect and to fight back, specifically because it is fueled by ideals turning normal people into fanatics. These people can't really be reasoned with, are not easy to snap out of their misplaced new faiths and of course not all of them can be found and monitored or preventively stopped. Because of these problems, extremisms are able to make new adepts for their causes; and when they take arms and translate into terrorisms, they are difficult to deal with.

    Then, in the West of the world, we living in a liberal society have to consider that we already are in a declining world. This by itself brings instability. An unstable society easily introduces factors of instability in its people, economical, ethical, political, religious. Things that used to be granted, factors of stability and certainty, now are not and instead are source of worries. We already feel that probably our future is not brighter than our past. This brings lots of questions and restlessness. Many people experiment difficult times and they are left vulnerable, psychologically and economically. Thus, it is easier for extremisms of various nature to recruit now than before.

    And of course this means danger.

¹: what follows is true for most systems manipulating people in a pervasive way, be them political totalitarianisms, theocracies, cults and so on. This highlight that, however the means may be very different, the mechanics of manipulating people starts from very common basis.