The rise of Extremism
‘Go hard or Go home’, The most subtle form of Extremism. It is although classified under motivation and passed on as an over-used cliché, but the usage and the purpose serve Extremism.
Extremism in itself is not a bad thing, it may work as a driver to get things done by means of motivation or by means of reinforcement. But when it is mixed with societal stigmas, it becomes a recipe for disaster. And it has always resulted in fascism, riots and genocide. In the current scenario, we see a lot of hate and prejudice towards the ‘others side’. The context varies, but the concept stays the same- Fear of the unknown.
Extremists come in all shapes and sizes. An old white supremacist or simply a boy rooting for India against Pakistan. Yes, the magnitude is out of order, almost bizarre, but this is how biases are formed. Whenever the wars are not fought on a battlefield, they are fought in ideologies of people. An average extremist may not even know what his side represents. His entire life is built on a base of unknown. His island is that of quicksand amidst the sea of mediocrity. Yet, he fights.
The roots of extremism are hard to locate. They are as deep as the human evolution. Starting from protecting own social herds against the neighbouring ones to later protecting their City-states, to protecting their Countries. Tribalism and Extremism are indeed threads of the same yarn. It becomes incessantly complex to blame a person or a community for tribalism. In hindsight, they are just protecting their vested interests. All they care about is ensuring their children sleep with a full stomach at night. But there comes a point where the scale tips. Where greed takes over, where humans act like, well humans. This is where we go, extreme.
There are numerous examples to look at it in numerous ‘categories’ of extremism. Religion, Nationalism, Trade, Feudalism and Territory to Cognition- there is a scope of war in all of them. But at its core, it is simply an expression of human emotion. Fear makes us commit horrors we wouldn’t deem fit. When one man is fearful of the unknown, and he has the convincing power of a godman, he, by behavioural law, becomes a God. He leads and transcends the constructs, creates followers and hence, pushes the limits. As he sits with authority, he gives orders. With what we have learnt via the Milgram experiment, we know that we are great at following orders without thinking about the consequences. When the consequences become unimportant, the orders become indelible.
So, what do we learn?
We learn to question- Authority, Obligations, Norms, Systems and most importantly, our own ideologies.
Because when we question, we snatch the authoritarian’s power from over us. We learn to raise our voices and we learn to live the way we were meant to live. In Freedom.
