Terrorism: Youth, Ideals and Paranoia
- Ariane Bilheran
- Aug 12, 2017
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 9
Bilheran, A. "Terrorisme: jeunesse, idéaux et paranoïa", in Soins, Elsevier, octobre 2017.
Article devoted to the psychological explanation of the processes that lead adolescents to be seduced by terrorism.
“When we say: God is love, it is a very great and true saying, but it would be absurd to think of it so simply, as a mere determination without an analysis of the nature of love. Love differentiates two beings who are indistinguishable from each other. To be conscious, to have the feeling of this identity, of being outside myself and in the other, that is love; my consciousness is not in me, but in the other; this other in whom alone I have my satisfaction and peace with myself—and I am only if I am at peace with myself; if I do not possess it, I am the contradiction that divides itself—this other, also outside himself, has his consciousness in me alone, and both of us are only this consciousness of our exteriority and our identity, this intuition, this feeling, this knowledge of unity. This is love, and these are vain words if we speak of love without knowing that it is both the differentiation and the overcoming of this difference.
GW Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.
The fanaticization of adolescents and young adults raises the question of what, in the psychic processes at work at the heart of our Western societies, incites them to this. Adolescence is a key initiatory moment, the one where the individual learns autonomy, that is to say the capacity to internalize universal moral laws within himself to make them his own, in order to free himself from the grip of his impulses. It is important to clarify that these moral laws are not relative, according to Kant (and other great thinkers of moral and political philosophy): "The moral law therefore expresses nothing other than the autonomy of pure practical reason, that is to say of freedom, and this autonomy is itself the formal condition of all maxims, the only one by which they can agree with the supreme practical law."
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