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Pathological Devotion: The Work of Roger Griffin
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Roger Griffin

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Roger Griffin is professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University, the author of over 100 publications—considered one of the world’s leading authorities on Fascism. Read more about him on Wikipedia.

The write-ups below crystallize central ideas that appear in his papers and essays written for LSS. Please read the write-ups, and then click each link to read the complete Newsletter issue.

Human beings have a need to be an integral part of something greater than themselves. Through the prism of modern History, Roger Griffin shows how the search for transcendence can assume a pathological form—transforming a “normal” individual into a fanatic devotee. It is the perversion of self-transcendent emotions, he says, not self-assertive, ones that have been responsible for the chronicle of atrocities that human beings have afflicted upon each other.

In the First World War, militant forms of ultranationalism exploded into orgies of slaughter and ‘sacrifice’ on behalf of organically conceived nations—as energies liberated from the decay of Christianity became channeled into defending the ‘nation’. World War was a collective act of redemptive self-sacrifice—transcendent meaning produced by the relentless flow of blood.

Papers and Essays by Roger Griffin
Longing to Belong: Transcultural Humanism as a Source of Identity
  • PART I: The Need to Belong
    Human beings have a need to belong, to feel an integral part of something greater than themselves. The search for transcendence can assume a pathological aspect—taking on a nihilistic form inconsistent with the demands of survival. 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.
  • PART II: Identificatory Belonging & the Desire to Destroy
    Militant forms of ultranationalism exploded into orgies of slaughter and ‘sacrifice’ on behalf of organically conceived nations in the First World War—as energies liberated from the decay of Christianity became channeled into defending the ‘nation’ or ‘people’, and asserting its rights to exist at the expense of the individual.  The 1930s saw the rise of two ‘modernist’ states that led to the deaths of millions of people in the pursuit of their utopias.
  • PART III: Transcultural Identities
    The fusion of cultures is becoming more powerful throughout the non-totalitarian world. As long as the uniqueness of a culture is asserted in an integrative spirit as just one of an individual’s sources of belonging and the principle of multiple identities is recognized and promoted—throughout society—then multi-culturalism can be a source of newness and mutual enrichment. Everyone can celebrate having a hyphenated identity with plural belongings and self-descriptions.
The Metapolitics of Terrorist Radicalization
  • PART I: Terrorist Radicalization: Nomic Crisis
    A fundamental psycho-social syndrome transforms a non-violent, non-militant, ‘normal’ individual—with values too inchoate and confused to be dignified with the term ‘worldview’—into a fanatic devotee of a creed demanding an act of destruction that sends a message of terror to a target audience.
  • PART II: Splitting and the Manichaean World-View
    Splitting, a concept first developed in the discipline of child psychology, involves the projection of ‘bad feelings’ and ‘feelings of badness’ onto out-groups—to a point where the world comes to be seen as a theatre of cosmic war. The individual becomes enlisted in a Manichaean fight to the death between opposing metaphysical, cultural or (for racists) biological principles—on which the survival or death of humanity seems to depend.
  • PART III: The Bliss of Completion
    The third stage in the radicalization process is the mindset in which the sanctity of the mission has been so internalized that acts of violence against society can be carried out with a sense of pride, and even cosmic self-fulfillment. Rohrmoser’s reference to ‘salvation or perdition’ is telling, once it is understood that the psyche experiences the nomos as holy—even if it is an entirely secular utopia.
World War I may be seen as a collective act of redemptive self-sacrifice—transcendent meaning produced by the relentless flow of blood. Mechanized slaughter was turned into a “burnt sacrifice” that would infuse a decadent age with a new sense of transcendence. Richard Koenigsberg has explored the “sacrificial fantasy” that the death of the soldier is vital to the revitalization of the “body politic.” The sacralization of death in the First World War points to the survival into modern times of the same primordial logic that drove the ritual life of the Aztecs.