The Psychology of Terrorism

1. The Psychology of Terrorism

2. The Psychology of Terrorism: • Common elements of most official definitions of terrorism: • Use of violence to create fear • Intent to intimidate or coerce • Political aims

3. The Psychology of Terrorism: • Terrorism is a conflict for hearts and minds • The terrorist aims to increase support among friends, demoralize foes • The victims of terror have little capacity for offense or active defense • For the victim, the resistance to terror must come from within; they must have reserves of psychic strength (courage) to defeat the intended effects of the terrorist (fear) while carrying on a normal life • We will look at the psychology of terrorism from both perspectives -- the terrorist and the victim

4. The Psychology of Terrorism:Terrorists • The terrorist is a group member who is exposed to and eventually embraces feelings of anger group frustration and insult. • Shared feelings of insult, humiliation • The cultivation of rage against a group -- the target • What is anger? • #1 Aristotle: Anger is emotional reaction to insult. • #2 Sabini: Anger is a motivator -- it is not merely reaction but is partly rational • #1: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, Ch. 5 • “Mildness is the mean concerned with anger.” • “The person who is angry at the right things and towards the right people, and also in the right way, at the right time and for the right length of time, is praised.” • “The deficiency, a sort of inirascibility or whatever it is, is blamed…for such a person seems to be insensible and feel no pain. Since he is not angered, he does not seem to be the sort to defend himself; and such willingness to accept insults to oneself and to overlook insults to one’s family and friends is slavish.”

5. The Psychology of Terrorism:Terrorists • #1: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, Ch. 5 • “Irascible people get angry quickly…but they stop soon, and this is their best feature. The do all this because they do not contain their anger, but their quick temper makes them pay back the offense without concealment, and then stop.” • “Bitter people, however, are hard to reconcile, and stay angry for a long time, since they cannot contain their emotion. It stops, however, when they pay back the offense; for the exaction of the penalty produces pleasure in place of pain, and puts a stop to their anger. But if this does not happen, they hold their grudge; for no one else persuades them out of it, since it is not obvious, and digesting anger in oneself takes time. This sort of person is most troublesome to himself and to his closest friends.”

6. The Psychology of Terrorism:Terrorists • #2: John Sabini and Maury Silver, Emotion, Character and Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 1998) • “…the emotions are connected to cognition, connected to people's desires and plans, and connected to what people care about and value…[Anger is] the perception of transgression.” (14) • “…the class of behaviors we call angry is abstract—that is to say, angry responses have nothing in common except their being designed to extract revenge for the transgression suffered (or the transgression the angry person believes he suffered). (14) • “…anger is a motivational state.” (157)

7. The Psychology of Terrorism:Terrorists • Terrorism is multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-social: it is practiced on a global scale • Terrorists exploit the “dynamics between discourse and action”1 to provide justification for their actions and to turn the tables on their intended targets. • Terrorism is intensified by forcing its victims to confront an infinitely wide horizon. • The next attack could come from any direction at any time • The most infinite and widest horizon is that of contemplated pain and the fear it gives rise to

8. The Psychology of Terrorism:Terrorists • Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907) • The terrorist embodies death, his victims life. The bourgeois victims, however, especially lower classes, also embody death, forcing the terrorist to attack the wealthy and powerful. • The prime motivation is death, which partly explains the obscurity of the terrorists’ demands. They are not, precisely speaking, political • No compromise, bargaining, negotiation • The tactic of terror is not flexible, therefore, not politically viable

9. The Psychology of Terrorism:Terrorists • “Entropolitics:” the tendency to chaotic, disorganized political action which results in inert uniformity, generally, the politics of disorder • “A release of political energy into oblivion; the complete dispersal of political energy in such a way that it cannot be captured or reused.”1 • The terrorist, especially the suicide terrorist, is a politically ambivalent monster, as insensible of great causes as of human suffering • Terrorism is therefore a constant feature of modern life as it is a pathology created by the passive nihilism of atomistic society. • The terrorist cannot be embraced or cured -- society must absorb his fury as a penalty for having created him

10. The Psychology of Terrorism:Terrorists • “Force of personality,” he repeated, with ostentatious calm. “I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means. That’s their impression. It is absolute. Therefore I am deadly…Their character is built upon conventional morality. It leans on the social order. Mine stands for everything artificial. They are bound in all sorts of conventions. They depend on life, which, in this connection, is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex organized fact open to attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.” (The Secret Agent, 62-3)

11. The Psychology of Terrorism:Victims • Victims are the media through which the terrorist communicates his demands to a society or its government • The intended effect is primarily psychological • The violence of the terrorist is intended to created mass victims from attacks against one or a few • Terrorism is directed primarily against the victim, but secondarily, and importantly, against the target society

12. The Psychology of Terrorism:Victims • The purpose of terrorism is “to create huge numbers of secondary psychological casualties by means of large-scale physical attacks.”1 Bruce Bongar, Professor of Psychology, Stanford Medical School. • The effect of terrorism, to instill fear, has a multiplier effect on civilian populations • For every death due to Scud missile attacks on Israel in 1991 there were 272 hospital admissions for “psychological emergencies.” Bongar2 • 1995 Sarin gas attacks in Tokyo subway resulted in 12 deaths and more than 4,000 hospital visits by nonaffected individuals exhibiting “psychogenic symptoms of chemical injury.” World Health Organization, World Health Report 2001 -- Mental health: New understanding, new hope.

13. The Psychology of Terrorism:Victims • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) • A psychological reaction to a highly stressful event, characterized by depression, anxiety, flashbacks, recurrent nightmares and avoidance of reminders of the event • PTSD spreads increased anxiety, depression • Tends to be the most common reaction of those far from the terrorist act • Tends to be higher among women • Multiplies the effect of terrorism throughout the target society • Terrorism’s basic effect is to elicit feelings of vulnerability

14. The Psychology of Terrorism:Victims • Anthrax attacks -- 2001 • Extended the fear of terrorism to each individual • Opened up a “limitless horizon” of fear -- the maximum objective of terrorism • Some argue that these attacks were not the work of terrorists but were “an inside job.” (Philipp Sarasin, Anthrax: Bioterror as Fact and Fantasy, 2006) • Provided a useful metaphor for terrorism that helped justify aggressive “vaccination” policies of intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. • The terrorist is understood as an infectious disease • The threat of bioterror globalizes the struggle, justifies total eradication • Extends violence to the source of the infection, “alien” peoples and their beliefs • Too apt not to have been an inside job

15. The Psychology of Terrorism:Victims • Terror is an attempt to interrupt normal patterns of judgment, especially political judgment (e.g., Madrid bombings) • The victim is attempting to resist the effects of fear -- how can this be done? • Modeling those who have mastered their own fears • Turning to sources of personal strength (religion, family, close relationships, etc.) • Maturity • Habituation • Self-knowledge, self-awareness

16. The Psychology of Terrorism:Victims • What can be done politically to enhance psychological resistance? • Modeling • Rhetorical leadership • Pursue most effective policies instead of the easiest or those enjoying greatest bipartisan support (e.g., profiling, surveillance, etc.) • Play offense and defense at the same time • Total involvement of society, reorient sub-structures of society to resist the fear of terrorism