Psychology of Jihad

Current international situation, being patently abnormal, can not be understood in terms of normal psychology and so needs to be considered in terms of psychiatry. This approach allows us to see real psychodynamic mechanisms at play and devise realistic measures to tackle them.

Certain mental maladies are contagious and can engulf whole nations. This is evident in cases of Communism and Nazism, medieval witch hunt and heresies, pacifistic and feministic movements, climate change scare and some other eco-doom eschatological hysterics and phobias. Many crazy cults have the same flavor of mental epidemic. They occur in situation of anomie and decadence, when crisis of traditional beliefs, norms and values has suppressed natural immunity to these spiritual viruses. As all opportunistic infections, they persist in latent form and wait until conditions are ripe for epidemic outbreak.

Now we have two concurrent mental epidemics, one in the West and other in Middle East, which aggravate and intensify each other. (Like AIDS and tuberculosis.) The pathology of Western society consciousness was extensively studied by Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, who on the basis of his personal experience in Nazi concentration camps innovated the existential analysis — a new approach to therapy, going beyond Freudian and Adlerian analysis. The bottom line of his studies is that modern Western people have another type of universal neurosis than Freud’s or Adler’s patients: the core of it in permissive society with abundant possibilities of self-realization is not sexual frustration or frustration of will to power and success, but frustration of will to meaning. (See his books: “The Doctor and the Soul. N.Y., Vintage Books, 1973” or “The Will to Meaning. N.Y., Plume, 1969”.)

The notion of existential vacuum, or anomie, perfectly describe spiritual situation in post-Christian Europe and Europe-emulating subculture of godless American intellectuals. (Viktor Frankl also jokingly proposed to erect at the western coast of US a complement of Statue of Liberty, situated at the eastern coast, — Statue of Responsibility, somewhere in San-Francisco Bay Area.) A whole entangling of leftist soul pathologies is neatly described in terms of Frankl’s existential analysis.

In contrast, Middle Eastern medieval mentality is a mighty invitation to both Freudian and Adlerian approaches because of extremely repressive culture and stagnant social order of these societies. Usually the latter features result only in apathy and fatalism, so typical for the region during most part of the last millennium; but since WWII and decolonization a new factor came into play: frustration of self-esteem of these cultures. It was described by different names — future shock, cultural shock, clash of civilizations, — but underlying mechanism is simple.

Imagine some poor, backward, patriarchal tribe suddenly challenged by contact with advanced, prospering, affluent civilization, very different in its ways and customs. All its artifacts surpass everything that these savages can fancy; contemplate, for example, Vandals entering ancient Rome. These huge, magnificent buildings, statues, decorations, fountains; columns and aqueducts; wide paved streets and spacious squares; Colosseum, beside which these poor guys seemed to themselves gnomes or gnats. All these stones, it seemed, yelled to them: you are miserable, inferior creatures; you would never be capable to erect anything comparable! Guess, what their reaction were?

Of course. Vandalism. This is the name under which this tribe entered history pages. Inferiority complex, originated in patriarchal family with sexually frustrated young men and aggravated by unexpected, undeniable demonstration of their tribe inferiority, had fueled and triggered sudden and senseless orgy of destruction. Warrior culture built on honor and shame was wounded to the quick. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

And next, imagine rustic goat-herders or cameleers with most primitive conditions of everyday life, among whom European settlers are buying land, planting eucalypti at malaria swamps, cultivating, draining and irrigating wastelands, making greenhouses and vegetable gardens and do lots of other unseen things. And gather crops, plenty of them; several years passed — and these newcomers are rich! (Not by European standards, of course, but by Bedouin standards — very rich.) Also take into consideration that these poor folks are habitual robbers. Robbery is a long-standing tradition in Middle East; it comes along with goat-herding and cameleering. So, their reaction is fairly predictable. And reaction of those whom they rob is also quite usual and understandable.

Nothing previously unknown was going on here; this, at least for the time being, is millennia-old conflict of herdsmen and farmers. Only, usually nomadic herders arrive (or foray) on settled farmers lands; this time farmers arrive on the lands that herders used to reckon theirs. Conflict aggravates, escalates to all-out intertribal war, intermingled with external powers struggle, and, at last, is settled by UN resolution on land division (which farmers proposed from the beginning of the clashes). The later developments are too well known to describe again; I only sketched the psychological background of conflict: two very different cultures on very different stages of development, one on ascending, enthusiastic period of its history, another on stagnant and blind-ally path.

This conflict is not so important to global development as it is often portrayed; but, at a smaller scale, it really reflects general pattern and underlying mechanisms of much more dimensioned and epoch-making conflict of Western civilization with medieval or even more primitive barbarism of Muslim civilization. It also has already passed many stages of development to which the second, more wide clash, has not arrived yet, and so is a good predictive model for the latter. That is why it deserves more detailed scrutiny. Perception of this conflict is also a sensitive litmus test of sanity of West as a whole, of its different subcultures and of individuals as well. In this magic crystal we can see themselves and our future. So let us see — and try not to fear too much.