Roger Griffin is professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of over 100 publications — and is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on Fascism. Read more about him on Wikipedia. Video on "The dangerous dream of reshaping a clean, original civilization" The search for transcendence can assume a pathological aspect—taking on a nihilistic form inconsistent with the demands of survival. Ironically, it is the perversion of self-transcendent emotions, not self-assertive ones, which have been largely responsible for the chronicle of atrocities that human beings have inflicted on each other down through the ages. The fanatical certainty of serving a ‘higher cause’ allows the perpetrators of ‘inhuman' deeds to act—not on their own behalf—but as subordinate parts of a hierarchy, which absolves them of personal responsibility and invests their actions with the sense of fulfilling a ‘transcendent’ purpose or mission. As a symptom of the perversion of self transcendence, witness human sacrifice, a notorious example being that of the Aztecs, who annually took the lives of between 20 and 50 thousand young men, virgins and children—so that the sun would not die. Book by Roger Griffin Terrorist's Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning For information on ordering through Amazon, PLEASE CLICK HERE. Terrorist's Creed casts a penetrating beam of understanding into the disturbing and murky psychological world of fanatical violence, explaining how the fanaticism it demands stems from the profoundly human need to imbue existence with meaning and transcendence.

Human beings have a need to belong, to feel an integral part of something greater than themselves: a cause, project, or living entity that outlives and transcends their own brief life-line. However, the need to belong is deeply ambivalent, creating an inclusive sense of community, idealism, and tolerance in some circumstances, while generating exclusion, fanaticism and violence in others.

This ambivalence must be borne in mind whenever discussions arise concerning the need to ‘respect’ the cultures of others at all costs, assess the value of religion as a source of harmony or destructiveness, or set about the task of explaining why a minority may be tempted to join movements preaching hatred and violence.

I am concerned here with what might be termed the ‘existential’ dimension of belonging: the degree to which it fulfils deep psychological needs beyond the material sphere. Ernest Becker and Peter Berger have studied the way human societies have always been driven to construct heroic myths as templates of a higher, transcendent plane of existence, [1] and to elaborate ritual-based cosmologies which make up a ‘sacred canopy’ [2] to ward off the devastating psychological pain which would ensue from coming to grips with the ‘objective’ finitude, absurdity, and loneliness of life on earth.

In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness [3], Fromm explores the theory that the existential needs of ‘man' (his recurrent term for humanity) are structured by two fundamental biological conditions that mark ‘his' emergence as a unique species, i) the ever decreasing determination of behaviour by instincts and ii) the growth of the brain and particularly of the neo-cortex.

The self-awareness, reason and imagination that resulted have disrupted the unreflecting harmony with biological life which characterizes animal existence, so that although humanity is part of nature, it constantly transcends nature and the natural limits to existence mentally and spiritually.

Human beings are existentially homeless, yet still tied to the planetary home they share with all creatures. Homo sapiens is condemned to ‘ex-ist’, live outside unreflective being, while animals and all other organisms ‘are’, untormented by the knowledge of death and personal mortality.

The very physiological and psychological developments which underpin man’s humanity has ‘evicted him from paradise', the paradise of unreflexive being. Self-awareness produces existential needs common to all human beings—rooted in the drive to overcome the horror of separateness, of powerlessness, of lostness. To survive, they are forced to find, construct, invent new forms of relating themselves to the world—to enable them to feel at home in it.

These Fromm identifies as: a) a frame of reference and devotion (i.e. a ‘world-view'); b) rootedness (i.e. a sense of being part of something both prior and posterior to one’s life; c) unity (i.e. a sense of oneness with at least part of the world; d) effectiveness (i.e. a sense of having an impact on the world; e) excitation (or a relief from boredom and depression).

According to Fromm human beings can fulfil these needs in two diametrically opposed ways. Precluded from returning to the symbiotic Garden of Eden which they experience as part of the mother's world—or before evolving into homo sapiens sapiens (i.e. knowing they know, the hallmark of human awareness) — they are capable of progressing through a difficult process of individuation to free themselves from the power of the past, and so become independent, creative and capable of compassion and love.

These faculties enable individuals (in the sense of fully individuated beings) to experience solidarity with fellow humans in a way which does not deny their separateness or difference—and thereby achieve fulfilment in a state of productive being in the world, one which involves giving and receiving.

However, the craving for symbiosis can also lead to regression into a symbolic world in which the mother is substituted by nebulous entities inviting loss of self, and its dissolution and fusion with abstract entities such as god, ancestral soil, class, the nation, the race, the religious community.

The result is the anaesthetization of individual consciousness in states of ritual, trance, ecstasy, or fanatical obedience. In this limbic, atavistic relationship with the world life-enhancing, genuinely creative faculties give way to life-thwarting, destructive ones based on sado-masochism and narcissism.

What tends to bring out the negative potential of the human psyche are periods of disequilibrium which rudely disrupt the relatively stable sense of ‘home' afforded by a sustainable culture or society. The need to restore a new equilibrium will then tend to be satisfied not by healthy (individuated, creative) frames of reference, rootedness, unity and effectiveness (benign belonging), but by neurotic (symbiotic, destructive) ones in which the integrity of the ‘home’ can only be maintained through the demonization and even war against the ‘other’ (malignant belonging).

The Ambivalence of Belonging

Fromm’s analysis resonates with the analysis of the human condition of another major 20th century commentator on the human condition and the unique biological and cognitive substratum that underpins it, Arthur Koestler. A central concern of The Ghost in the Machine (1970) is the physiological basis of human psychology.

To simplify Koestler's subtly argued and extensively documented hypothesis: human beings are endowed with two basic drives, that of self-assertiveness and the opposite one of self-transcendence, which enable them to be both autonomous individuals and members of a social hierarchy such as the family or the tribe.

A healthy relationship with the world in all its aspects, i.e. one based on harmony and creative symbiosis with it rather than possessive or destructive urges towards it, depends on a delicate balance of the two drives which allows people to experience themselves simultaneously as unique, independent personalities and as integral parts of larger social entities, both equally vital for the continued dynamism and cohesion of all human societies.

However, because of the ‘paranoid', ‘delusional' streak in the human make up, both the self-assertive and self-transcendent drives can assume a pathological aspect when they take on an obsessive, nihilistic form inconsistent with the demands of survival and irrespective of the damage they inflict on fellow creatures. Ironically, it is the perversion of self-transcendent emotions, not self-assertive ones, which have been largely responsible for the chronicle of atrocities which human beings have inflicted on each other down through the ages.

The fanatical certainty of serving a ‘higher cause’ allows the perpetrators of ‘inhuman' deeds to act—not on their own behalf—but as subordinate parts of a hierarchy, whether human or metaphysical, which absolves them of personal responsibility and invests their actions with the sense of fulfilling a ‘transcendent’ purpose or mission.

As a symptom of how the capacity for self-transcendence can be perverted, Koestler cites the wide-spread use of human sacrifice in traditional cultures, a notorious example being that of the Aztecs, who annually sacrificed between twenty and fifty thousand young men, virgins and children so that the sun would not die. The basic mechanism at work in such a culture is that individual self-transcendent emotions are no longer sublimated through ritual and tradition into mature, humane integration with the external world.

Instead they express themselves via a culturally reinforced collective regression to an infantile type of projection which abolishes the all-important affective distinction between part and whole—to produce a potentially destructive identification with the supra-personal entity (the elaborate narrative myths of Aztec culture became lived realities for Aztecs and their victims).