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HOW TO SPOT A TERRORIST


1. EXTERNALIZATION

Externalization is the mental process of reconciling
two competing desires, or internal drives, or concerns

2. MODAL THINKING

A MODAL is any context in which we take on a particular
role. Work, religion, the home, social obligations, etc.

3. MODAL CONFLICT as not A source, but THE source,
of terrorism-specific alienation. It is where we reconcile TWO competing contexts, or ideas, by externalizing, or else internalizing.

When we internalize a situation that causes a conflict, it causes
externalization elsewhere in our life, a visible sign.

For many years the best model for spotting potential terrorists,
was to look for those alienated, the 'loners'. But time and again
we have found this, while often present, is neither sufficient
to universally predict such, nor often present at all. People who
should have been on radar, weren't. What we have been looking at
is the effects, and not the causes.

When we see someone socially outspoken, that visible effect has
its source in the externalization of something internal. The adoption
of the identity that self-drives the radicalization process
emerges as a counterbalance to other things in peoples lives, OFTEN
alienation, but alienation is not the only source.

By examining it in this light, it is easy now to see, that in fact
what we mistook for one phenomenon, one type of maladjusted individuals,
was in fact many types all along. The common thread was not the label
'terrorist', but the process, which we misidentified with the outcome,
which didn't offer any explanatory power till now. Rather a better
explanation was yielded by looking at the sources.

What drives the formation of terrorist INTERNAL SELF NARRATIVES
(i.e. 'identities') is the clash between contexts which we must assume
roles in, where the roles are mutually exclusive.

Here people are faced with a dilemma, choose to accept the contradiction,
and internalize it to their existing identity, or EMOTIONALLY EXTERNALIZE
by saying "there is something wrong with the world."

Essentially the conflict of these two contextual roles, generates a THIRD
psychological context, which bids the ID to solve it, and how it does
this is by splintering (re-internalization), or else transforming one identity into another, externalization. The problem to the ego then becomes
the resolution of these competing contexts by either escape or destruction
of the supporting elements of those contexts.

Typically when this cannot be resolved, because people are moral agents,
the self-polarized person is then faced with another dilemma.
So they grow the context. And in this manner, it grows into what is called 'alienation' and what we have mistaken for the essential source of terrorism all along. The inflation of the 'source of the problem' as the greater context
"the government", "society", then becomes an empty signifier, an abstract
unassailable entity, the psychological mirror image of the very ennui and alienation the original hard, real, (clashing) contexts originally created.
In so doing the sense-preference of the individual changes modals, from the
physical, everyday, to a sort of permanent crisis mode, where they identify their
role at any particular place or time, not with their activities, or life goals,
or any other social behavior, but with a timeless, placeless state of being,
the "realization of the idemtope ideal" identity. Idemtope is fitting here, because what it refers to is something that does not change, either by itself, nor by others, in the same way that radicalization is often very hard, or even irreversible. They have changed from someone who describes themselves based on what they "do" (for a living, for school, for hobbys), to who they "are" or want to "be".

This change while subtle on the surface, is not insignificant. The state of being
is close, psychologically to the state of 'not being', i.e. death, precisely
because in the state of existence, we cannot conceptualized its opposite. Hence why many terrorists are not afraid of death, or experience much reduced fear of it.

This may seem farfetched, but this is clearly explained, and becomes obvious when you examine the opposite: The 'doing' sense-preference of self description,
i.e. almost everyone walking around today, the average person, is clearly afraid of death. And it becomes apparent why immediately: Death is very easily explained as a Cessation of doing, it is made real by a clear definition
rooted in its verb-oriented opposite. Naturally this suggests one minor hypothesis, that people for example, who use abstract nouns to describe themselves, as opposed to verbs, are more likely to be dangerously radicalized.
We can see therefore that this model has immediate explanatory power.

End part 1.