It’s always many reasons.
Or probably is. Radicalization provides relief, a map to locate multiple grievances in a person’s world. If you have two reasons, you have more than one. Now add religious indoctrination, a community that supports that identity, but include idiosyncratic insult, and maybe personal pathology. All can dovetail when the circumstances overwhelm and demand redress. The particular moment might not be plotted beforehand, except as possibility. It might’ve never happened. But then it did.
Is there little doubt the standing condition(s), the formal cause(s), were already in place?
Guns and death religion?
When the final insult came did spiritual justification scream for evil murder?
Looking for one prime motive is a mistake that obscures and dismisses the probable range of culpable facts. We need to face the complexity.
Written By Wynn Schwartz Ph.D
San Bernardino. The Motive? It’s Always Many Reasons. was originally published @ Lessons in Psychology: Freedom, Liberation, and Reaction and has been syndicated with permission.
Photo by “Caveman Chuck” Coker 
Sources:
Our authors want to hear from you! Click to leave a comment
Related Posts
I think this analysis misses the central fact about San Bernadino, or Paris, or all the other religiously-motivated mass murders: these people are living in **literally** a different world. As a result, describing their behavior as acting on grievances misses the point. Radicalization indeed provides relief, by giving the radicalized a new world and valued place in it. But once radicalized it’s a mistake to suppose the radicalized are acting on the grievances that pushed them in the direction of their new religion. As jihadists, they don’t need a reason; they merely need an opportunity. To **them**, they are engaging in actions that carry overwhelming significance and weight for them: bringing about Allah’s reign on earth. There are not many reasons; these people are not acting on reasons. They’re doing what is ultimately meaningful to them.
Joe, I agree that the radicalized person is living in a different world, so to speak, but not a totally different one. Here I think the expression “more or less” is useful. They still live in a world which overlaps the social practices of the other people they encountered. Except, as I think you’ve implied, someone who was formally a colleague in now a despised infidel. But opportunity provides a reason to act now. Opportunity is an aspect of the general circumstance. (Circumstances provide weighted reasons given a person’s values). The opportunity may have been the party, some specific insult, or something else, but it happened at a particular time given particular circumstances. But that aside, what I think you’ve said that is important and provides essential clarification is, ” Radicalization indeed provides relief, by giving the radicalized a new world and valued place in it”. And from that it makes sense to then add, as you did, “once radicalized it’s a mistake to suppose the radicalized are acting on the grievances that pushed them in the direction of their new religion. As jihadists, they don’t need a reason; they merely need an opportunity. “
The relationship between the two worlds is tricky to identify precisely. They “overlap” in the sense that some things are present in both – physical objects, many of the practices of their daily lives, and so on. Cars, combing one’s hair, grocery shopping, or for that matter, AK-47s are in both worlds. But “overlap” is not really right, because of way the worlds don’t overlap, namely, the ultimate significance of each. Think of the world of football, for example. The fundamental thing in football is the football game. Everything in the world of football derives in one way or another from the football game – footballs, players, referees, fans, football stadiums, SuperBowl ads, tailgating parties, ad infinitum (literally). So in the football world, the ultimate significance, the thing that gives meaning to everything else, is winning a football game (an event). In the world of ISIS , that is the establishment of Allah’s kingdom on earth, the caliphate. So all those mundane things acquire a radically different significance: they are part (admittedly tiny) of establishing the caliphate. So eating breakfast is **not** the same thing, to them, as it is to us, in that way. That’s why people who undergo a religious conversion often report, “Everything’s the same, but different.” And in particular, the practice of shooting someone has that same radically different significance – and in that way is a different practice: to them, it is part establishing the caliphate; to us, it’s murder. And lest this appear to be splitting semantic hairs, let’s remember that regardless of one’s position on capital punishment, it is not the same social practice as murder, though the practice of killing someone is a part (a sub-practice, if you will) of each.
That makes sense but at least two questions remain regarding the actual/empirical/historically particular people. 1) Is this particular “religious conversion”, or radicalization, a total all-informing ultimate significance that changes everything that implements that significance. This would inform the distinction you are drawing between murder and other forms of killing people. But is it a total alteration of worlds in the psychology of the perpetrators? Or is it uneven across practices, with time to time doubts, reluctance, personal or idiosyncratic grievance in the mix? I don’t think we are in a position to tell. 2) Also, what do you make of the trigger, the efficient cause, the opportunity? Is it sought and recognized pure of heart in jihad or with mixed motives of grievance and revenge?
I’d say that 1) Yes, it’s total, or it’s not a change of world. Worlds are all-encompassing, by definition. That’s now the world they live in, just as someone who becomes, e.g., a Lubivitcher Jew (as an old friend of mine did) is then actually living in that world. It’s even across all practices, in the sense that the ultimate practice (e.g., bringing about the Caliphate) is the ultimate meaning of everything they do. But whether any individual jihadist actually experiences that he’s bringing about the Caliphate while, say, he’s eating an egg for breakfast, I bet not, just as very few devout Christians experience eating an egg as affirming their life in Christ, though they’d agree that that is in fact its significance. 2) I’d guess triggers vary from person to person. Though they’re jihadists (hold that place in the world of Jihad), they remain people, subject to all the other motives people are subject to.