Heroism, terrorism and social violence: Notes in political psychology

Behavioural and psychological differences between the terrorists of the 1990s-2010s and those of the 1950s-1980s reflect a worldwide trend towards increasingly primitive political thinking. The logic of religious motivations and the literal faith in afterlife rewards make the activities of modern terrorists more cruel and destructive compared to those of the secular “revolutionary romanticists”. This dangerous psychological trend has been accompanied by the blurring of lines between war and peace conditions as well as between military production and civilian technologies. For millennia, group solidarity has been supported by the image of a common enemy— “them versus us”. However, key conditions for civilisational sustainability are the formation and mass assimilation of new strategic meanings free from intergroup confrontations. Psychological experiments and political observations show that consolidation without confrontation is possible and modern interdisciplinary science provides the basis for panhuman meanings. Nonetheless, political attitudes are currently drifting in the wrong direction.