Small tidbits and Sparks of wisdom

There appears to be a recurring correlation between the psychology of individuals or groups who feel oppressed, humiliated, deprived, rejected, or denied the dignity they believe they deserve and the way some of them behave when they eventually acquire substantial power.

The original grievance may be real or perceived. It may arise from poverty, discrimination, political exclusion, ethnic history, the experience of one’s family or tribe, social rejection, or simply the conviction that other people received wealth, opportunities, recognition, or respect that should have belonged to them. Over time, the grievance can cease being merely something that happened to a person or community and become part of its identity.

The critical point comes when such individuals or movements acquire power over large numbers of people. Instead of correcting a specific injustice, they may attempt to reconstruct society according to their own definition of justice. They begin deciding who represents good, who represents evil, who deserves punishment, and what must be eliminated to make society right. In effect, human beings begin assuming an authority that belongs to Gd, the Creator.

Revenge can consequently be transformed into something that appears morally righteous. The individual no longer considers himself vengeful. In his own mind, he is eliminating evil and correcting history. Once another population has been defined as fundamentally evil rather than simply as a competitor or opponent, almost anything done against that population can be presented as necessary for the greater good.

This phenomenon is neither exclusively secular nor exclusively religious. Nationalism, race, class, revolutionary politics, and religion can all provide an ideological framework through which resentment becomes a supposed moral mission.

Security, Wealth, and the Desire to Preserve

There is an important contrast with people who grow up surrounded by substantial family wealth, security, comfort, and dignity. They may recognize that others possess far greater wealth, but they nevertheless possess a basic sense of security. They have something substantial to preserve. Their instinct may therefore be preservation rather than destruction of the existing order.

A wealthy Muslim sheikh, for example, can possess strong religious convictions while having little interest in revolutionary warfare that could destroy his wealth, family structure, position, and society. By contrast, a refugee or impoverished individual who believes that the existing system has provided him with nothing may have considerably less attachment to preserving that system and may therefore be more susceptible to a revolutionary or radical message.

This does not mean that poverty produces extremism or that wealth prevents it. The point is that grievance can become powerful political material when an ideology provides an explanation for that grievance, identifies someone responsible for it, and promises a new order in which the perceived injustice will finally be corrected.

When Grievance and Absolutist Ideology Combine

The particularly dangerous combination develops when deep social or economic grievance joins an absolutist ideology that portrays opposing groups as obstacles to a supposedly perfect political, social, or divinely ordained order.

Economic deprivation, humiliation, lack of opportunity, resentment toward wealthier classes, or the belief that society deliberately kept one’s group down can create an enormous reservoir of anger. By itself, however, resentment does not necessarily produce organized destruction. It becomes considerably more dangerous when an ideology gives that resentment an explanation, identifies an enemy, and supplies a moral justification for defeating that enemy.

This is where otherwise radically different movements can develop a similar psychological structure. Revolutionary socialism or communism can identify economic classes as oppressors whose power must be destroyed to create a supposedly just society. Extremist religious movements can identify unbelievers, rival religious groups, insufficiently observant members of their own religion, or political opponents as obstacles to the religious order they believe must prevail.

Certain radical Sunni, Salafi-jihadist, Wahhabi-influenced, and Shiite Islamist movements demonstrate how religious absolutism can combine with political grievance and revolutionary organization. Sunni and Shiite Muslims as entire populations cannot accurately be equated with such extremist movements. The destructive mechanism arises when a particular ideology demands supremacy and legitimizes coercion or violence against those who refuse to accept it.

The secular revolutionary and the religious extremist may completely disagree about Gd, religion, economics, and the purpose of existence while nevertheless following a similar mechanism:

Grievance identifies the injustice.

Dogma identifies the enemy.

Organization mobilizes the followers.

Power provides the means to impose the ideology.

Nazi Germany and the Transformation of Grievance

Nazi Germany provides one of history’s most catastrophic examples of transforming grievance into an ideology of destruction.

Adolf Hitler came from an unstable and largely unsuccessful background, experienced personal rejection, served as a soldier during the First World War, and remained politically insignificant until discovering his effectiveness as a political speaker and propagandist. He became involved with a small political movement and eventually helped transform it into a movement capable of controlling Germany.

The Nazis constructed an explanation for Germany’s humiliation following the First World War and identified populations supposedly responsible for the country’s problems, particularly the Jews. Jews were eventually characterized not merely as political, religious, or economic competitors but as an existential source of evil.

That distinction was critical. Once another population becomes evil itself, persecution can be presented as purification. Revenge becomes justice. Destruction becomes self-defense.

The result was dictatorship, genocide, world war, and destruction on an almost unimaginable scale.

Rwanda: When the Neighbor Becomes the Enemy

The 1994 Rwandan genocide provides another extreme example of what can happen when historical grievance, ethnic identity, propaganda, fear, and political power converge.

The historical relationship between Hutu and Tutsi was complicated and was significantly reshaped during European colonial rule. Nevertheless, extremist Hutu political forces were eventually able to portray Tutsi civilians as an existential enemy. Political propaganda transformed resentment and fear into justification for mass violence.

Once the enemy was sufficiently dehumanized, ordinary moral limitations collapsed. Tutsi civilians and moderate Hutus were murdered on an enormous scale while the international community catastrophically failed to intervene effectively.

Again, the mechanism was greater than simple hatred. Perpetrators could be persuaded that destroying another population was necessary for their own survival and for correcting what they regarded as historical injustice.

The oppressed or supposedly oppressed person could therefore become the oppressor while continuing to consider himself the victim.

Religious Absolutism and Political Power

The problem becomes particularly serious when grievance combines with religious absolutism because the believer may understand his political position not merely as personal opinion but as an obligation originating from Gd.

Within Islamic history there have been different interpretations concerning warfare, unbelievers, apostasy, relations with Jews and Christians, Islamic political authority, and the application of Sharia. Certain fundamentalist and Islamist movements interpret religious texts and traditions as requiring a political and religious order fundamentally different from the secular liberal systems of Europe and America.

That does not mean every Muslim accepts such interpretations. They plainly do not. Nor can a particular percentage of Muslims holding violent or supremacist positions be asserted without defining the population, country, question, and reliable survey being cited.

The relevant question is narrower: what happens when a committed ideological minority believes that its religious understanding represents absolute truth, considers competing systems morally illegitimate, and subsequently acquires sufficient political or institutional power to advance its objectives?

A community that previously considered itself marginalized may use the freedoms of a democratic society to acquire education, wealth, businesses, political organization, votes, government positions, and institutional influence. All those activities are legitimate. The concern begins where particular organizations or individuals simultaneously maintain an extremist ideology and obtain increasing ability to impose that ideology upon others.

The issue is therefore not Muslim participation in Western society. It is the potential combination of grievance, religious or political absolutism, identification of an enemy, and sufficient power to impose one’s beliefs.

The Refugee Dilemma

Helping refugees escaping Muslim-majority countries can be a noble humanitarian cause. People may be fleeing civil war, political persecution, sectarian violence, religious extremism, governments, or militias threatening their lives.

Giving temporary protection to someone facing persecution or death, however, is one question. Permanently resettling large populations in an entirely different civilization is another question, with consequences extending far beyond the original humanitarian emergency.

The difficulty arises when refugees rescued from dangerous circumstances settle permanently in non-Muslim European countries and portions of those populations eventually view the established society not primarily as the civilization that provided them refuge, but as another political arena in which religious, cultural, and political demands can be pursued.

European societies possess institutions, property, political traditions, laws, cultures, and accumulated wealth created over generations. A refugee or immigrant naturally receives whatever legal protections and rights the law of the host country grants him. But humanitarian protection does not logically require the established population to surrender its history, laws, religion, culture, or national identity in response to every demand made by newcomers.

The situation becomes considerably more complicated if conflicts and ideologies originating in the homeland are transplanted into the host country. Religious ideology can then provide a vocabulary through which political demands are presented as questions of discrimination, oppression, morality, or religious rights.

Where genuinely radical elements exist, the paradox becomes particularly significant: the tolerance and political freedoms of the host country can themselves provide the mechanisms through which an intolerant movement organizes and acquires influence.

This exposes an inherent difficulty in refugee policy. Refuge from immediate danger and permanent mass resettlement are not necessarily the same policy. If the original danger eventually disappears but return to the homeland never occurs, humanitarian protection has effectively developed into permanent demographic and political migration.

The situation can be compared to introducing a new population into an established ecological environment without sufficiently considering how the populations will interact. Compassion toward the population being introduced does not eliminate the responsibility to consider the existing population and the long-term stability of the environment.

A society can therefore recognize a humanitarian responsibility toward persecuted people while simultaneously asking what responsibilities refugees have toward the country that received them, whether genuine integration is occurring, whether the host country’s laws and institutions are respected, and whether eventual return should remain an objective when conditions in the country of origin become genuinely safe.

Wealth, Opportunity, and Political Gratitude

A related question arises when previously poor or displaced populations acquire substantial economic and political opportunities in Western countries.

The democratic system may provide education, public assistance, business opportunities, legal protection, property rights, political participation, and eventually considerable wealth. The question is what happens afterward.

For many immigrants, the result is integration and attachment to the country that provided those opportunities. But where a grievance-based ideology remains powerful, prosperity does not necessarily eliminate resentment. Political success can instead provide greater resources through which old ideological conflicts are continued in a new environment.

This distinction matters when examining Muslim communities in the United States, including communities in Michigan. If particular politicians, organizations, religious leaders, businesses, or institutions engage in antisemitism, corruption, exploitation of government programs, or extremist political activity, those actions should be identified specifically and judged according to evidence.

The significant issue is whether specific people who acquire wealth and political influence through an open democratic society subsequently use that influence to attack the principles, institutions, Jews, Christians, or other populations they regard as standing in their way.

The Ponzi-Scheme Structure of Ideological Power

An anecdotal comparison can be made between the structure of militant political or religious movements and a Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme promises investors returns that are supposedly being generated by successful investments. In reality, the early investors may be paid with money supplied by later investors. Being early can therefore appear extraordinarily profitable. The apparent success of the early participants then becomes part of the advertisement used to recruit the next group.

A comparable incentive structure can develop inside an ideological movement, although the investment is not necessarily financial.

The early follower invests loyalty, obedience, time, reputation, personal relationships, and sometimes considerable personal risk in an ideologue who promises a new political, economic, social, or religious order. If the movement remains insignificant, the investment produces very little. If the movement succeeds, however, its earliest and most loyal participants are frequently positioned to become officials, administrators, commanders, ideological authorities, clergy, political leaders, or beneficiaries of the new establishment.

Being early can therefore have enormous value.

An early Nazi Party member who demonstrated sufficient loyalty could potentially rise with the movement as it accumulated power. The same structural principle appeared in revolutionary communist movements, where people who joined, organized, and demonstrated ideological reliability before victory could become members of the new ruling establishment.

A comparable mechanism can occur inside religious or social institutions without suggesting that religion itself is a Ponzi scheme. Whenever a person reaches the upper levels of a powerful institutional hierarchy, he may acquire influence over appointments, money, education, social standing, membership, political access, and the interpretation or enforcement of institutional rules.

The analogy is therefore structural rather than literal.

The masses entering later provide numbers. Those numbers provide legitimacy. The organization provides discipline. The ideological authorities provide justification. The people at the top control the direction of the movement.

As the base becomes larger, the position of those already near the top becomes increasingly valuable.

There is also a psychological investment. Once someone has devoted twenty or thirty years to an ideology, abandoning it becomes extraordinarily difficult. Questioning the movement can mean admitting that decades of sacrifice, loyalty, and personal identity were invested in something false or corrupt. Personal interest and ideological conviction can therefore become inseparable.

At its extreme, the movement develops into a pyramid of power.

The masses at the bottom supply manpower, money, votes, demonstrations, obedience, or military force. The organizers above them administer those resources. The ideological authorities explain why the system is morally necessary. The leadership determines where the entire structure will move.

The remarkable contradiction is that an ideology can publicly promise equality, justice, liberation, religious purity, or the destruction of oppression while simultaneously constructing a new privileged hierarchy.

The revolutionary who promised to eliminate privilege becomes privileged.

The movement that promised to destroy an abusive hierarchy constructs another hierarchy.

The person who promised to liberate ordinary people acquires precisely the power over those people that the movement originally condemned.

The Recurring Pattern

The broader phenomenon therefore extends far beyond any particular religion, race, nation, or historical period.

A person or group begins with the belief that it has been denied what it deserves.

The grievance becomes an identity.

The identity develops an explanation for who caused the injustice.

An ideology identifies the enemy.

The ideology supplies moral justification.

Organization mobilizes the masses.

The earliest and most committed participants rise within the organization.

The expanding movement rewards those positioned above the growing base.

Power finally supplies the ability to act.

At that point, the original demand for dignity, justice, equality, liberation, or religious righteousness can become something entirely different.

The person who once complained of oppression can become the oppressor. The movement that demanded tolerance can become intolerant of its opponents. The revolutionary who condemned privilege can become a member of a new privileged class. The individual who once complained that others unfairly judged him can eventually appoint himself the judge of everyone else.

The most dangerous stage arrives when revenge is no longer recognized as revenge. It has been renamed justice. The opponent is no longer regarded as another human being with whom there is a disagreement; he has become the embodiment of evil.

This is the particularly destructive combination: grievance, absolute ideological certainty, organizational hierarchy, personal incentives, and political power. Whether the ideology presents itself as racial, nationalist, socialist, communist, or religious, the mechanism can become remarkably similar.

Once human beings convince themselves that they possess the absolute definition of good and evil and simultaneously obtain sufficient power to enforce that definition, they can begin behaving as though they have assumed the authority of Gd, the Creator—deciding who deserves protection, who deserves punishment, and ultimately who deserves to exist.

Conclusion: Never Underestimate the Marginalized Individual

The conclusion is that history repeatedly warns us not to underestimate the forgotten individual, the humiliated person, the rejected outsider, or the small group that believes it has been abused and pushed aside. A seemingly insignificant grievance can remain buried for years and eventually become the beginning of something enormously destructive when it finds ideology, organization, followers, and power.

This principle applies on every level: country to country, group to group, community to community, and ultimately human being to human being.

A society should therefore be extremely careful about unnecessarily marginalizing people or creating groups that believe they have no dignity, opportunity, or place within the larger society. Where people can legitimately be helped, they should be helped with kindness and dignity, even when their beliefs, culture, politics, or ideology are different from our own, provided that they are not physically or spiritually threatening others.

The same obligation exists on the smallest scale. Be a decent neighbor. Treat another human being with dignity. Do not unnecessarily humiliate the weak person simply because he lacks the ability to answer back. Do not assume that because someone is presently insignificant, powerless, unpopular, unsuccessful, or rejected, he will always remain that way.

History contains individuals who rose from obscurity or rejection to extraordinary power. Napoleon and Hitler were not born commanding nations. Hitler in particular spent years as an obscure and unsuccessful man before circumstances, political skill, ideology, and mass organization eventually placed enormous power in his hands. This does not mean that every rejected individual becomes dangerous. Obviously, almost none do. The point is that nobody can know beforehand what abilities, opportunities, circumstances, or followers a seemingly insignificant person may eventually acquire.

Even when someone deserves rejection because of his conduct, there remains a difference between stopping unacceptable behavior and unnecessarily humiliating the human being. Necessary boundaries do not require unnecessary cruelty.

A tiny scratch in a great structure may initially appear meaningless. A small crack in a massive wall may appear incapable of threatening anything. But if pressure repeatedly enters that crack, if water freezes inside it, if the foundation shifts, and if nobody repairs it, the crack can expand until something vastly larger begins to break.

Human resentment can operate in a similar way.

The humiliation may originally involve one person. The grievance may initially belong to a tiny group. The movement may begin with ten people sitting in an insignificant room. Yet grievance can attract ideology; ideology can attract followers; followers can create organization; organization can acquire power; and power can eventually shake an entire country.

The lesson is therefore not to surrender to every grievance or appease every ideology. Dangerous beliefs must still be opposed, and people who threaten others must still be restrained. Rather, the lesson is not to manufacture enemies unnecessarily.

Where kindness is possible, use kindness. Where dignity can be preserved, preserve it. Where a lonely or marginalized person can be brought into society without endangering others, bring him in. Where disagreement is necessary, disagree without needless humiliation.

A great destructive force does not always begin as a great destructive force. Sometimes it begins as a small crack that everyone considered too insignificant to notice.