On Extremism and the Need to Belong: Shortcuts to Finding Meaning and Purpose

False Prophets of Hope and Ineffectual Shortcuts to Happiness

“Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.”

Milan Kundera

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So I made the mistake last night of reading the 180 page manifesto written by the 18-year old man-child who murdered 11 people and wounded 3 others in Buffalo, New York two days ago. He supposedly explained why he did it, and I was curious.

I knew it would probably be a mistake, and it pretty much was. “How much are you really going to learn from this kid barely out of high school ranting about race and Jews and whatever?” The answer is – not much. 

But then how much did I learn from reading the Unabomber Manifesto – not much. I vaguely remember reading his lengthy screed against technology and modern society. It was twenty-seven years ago.

How much did I learn from the manifesto of that former LAPD officer back in 2013 who was finally cornered and killed up in the Big Bear wilderness – I learned that he was a weirdo and an outlier. But there were a few passages which gave me insight into the man behind the violence – and I have remembered them.

How much would I learn from perusing all the videos about race and whatever by that guy who shot up the Bronx subway four weeks ago? I didn’t even make the effort. I am not going to spend a full hour watching videos. (I might spend ten minutes scanning text.)

Would I learn anything by watching the infamous “basement tapes” filmed by the Columbine High School shooters? No. Even if I could, I would not want to watch them. That would be spiritually akin to watching a snuff film.

I suspect it is almost always a mistake trying to find too much cogent reasoning in the musings of psychopaths. Such writing belongs more in the realm of deviant psychology than political science. 

But, despite my better judgment, I took a look at Buffalo shooter’s words last night. It took me about 30 seconds online to find and download his manifesto. What does it say? Well, the Buffalo shooter rants about “white people being replaced” and has pictures of Jews with big noses – embarrassing stuff. He examines firearms specs. It is execrable. It is the nightmare of any responsible parent to see their child descend body and soul into this sewer of racial hogwash and Jew hating. Vast stretches of the manifesto are inane memes and lists of gun parts. But in the last few sentences of his “conclusion,” he gets back to the tribalism of being a member of the white race involved in a struggle to survive. He claims he is a warrior in the fight of good against evil – he must struggle as a warrior in a valiant fight, and suffer to bring about a better tomorrow. He will be tested; he must sacrifice. The battle could go either way, and there is no time to lose. “The best time to attack was yesterday, the next best time is today.” So he must kill black people. Time for drastic action to make the world a better place, as he sees it. So he took that action last Saturday.

Clearly, someone somewhere filled this man-child’s head with poisonous gibberish which most full-grown adults could identify as lazy nonsense in less than fifteen seconds.

But he is hardly alone. Over 1.5 million foreigners volunteered to fight for Deutschland über alles in Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht, strange as that seems to us. Some of them I’m sure did not want to serve the Third Reich and were pressured into it, but many freely chose to fight for the Nazis. Hitler had the momentum, he was performing great feats. Why not join the bandwagon? In similar fashion, many in the West declared capitalism to have “failed” during the the Great Depression and chose to emigrate to the Soviet Union to “build the future which is communism” a few years before the Nazi invasion amidst Stalin’s show trials. In retrospect, that was an unwise choice, to put it mildly. If you were “idealistic” you could volunteer to go fight for the socialists in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, or travel to Cuba during your summer vacations to help harvest sugar cane for Fidel Castro in the 1960s. 

More recently thousands of Muslims around the world heeded the siren song of the Islamic State and ran away from their families, who often would have physically restrained them, to travel to Syria and fight for ISIS. They responded to online propaganda urging loyal Muslims to join the struggle to build the prophesied new Caliphate by becoming an ISIS combatant (if you were male), or marrying an ISIS combatant and becoming pregnant with his baby (if you were female). It did not go well for them. If you were male and an ISIS fighter, you were most likely killed in combat (good riddance). If you were female, you were probably widowed and in jail with young children (who nobody wants to repatriate). That was probably not the future they had envisioned for themselves. But it was the reality they found when they joined what was essentially a death cult.

There is a real if perverted form of idealism in all this, exploited by false prophets. Young people, and they are mostly young, often have a real desire to serve and build a better tomorrow. Yet they often have poor judgment on exactly how to do that. It reminds me of the Aristotle quote of Odysseus warning his son from rash and over-emotional efforts at striking back against injustice. “Anger is easy and anyone can be angry. But being angry with the right person at the right person at the right time in the right way is not easy and not everyone can do it.” The same goes for idealism and trying to change the world for the better.

This kid who perpetrated the Buffalo shooting, from the last two pages of his manifesto, is trying to get what all of us want: to belong to something greater than himself, to have a life of meaning, to labor and sacrifice to improve the world, etc. He invested his passion – his life, really – into something utterly not worth it. What he is now? A convicted murdered and lifelong prisoner, like the Unambomber. Was that young man who shot up the synagogue in Escondido, San Diego in 2019 (killing one person and wounding three) operating in the same fashion? Did someone help him to fall in love with anti-semitism? Did it happen online? And was he too young and inexperienced to really know what he was doing? To understand the tragic context of the history of anti-semitism and the sloppy politics of blaming Jews for everything? Were his parents shocked and surprised to see what finally happened? That their son, too, had joined a death cult?

Well, it is too late for him now.

The Buffalo shooter concluded melodramatically his manifesto by saying he will “see us in Valhalla.” What romanticized stupidity. No, he won’t die in valiant combat only to dwell in Valhalla with Odin and the other heroic warriors awaiting Ragnarök. No, something much more sordid and mundane awaits him. The Buffalo shooter will live out the days of his life with other vicious convicted criminals in the Maximum Security Ward of the Attica Correctional Facility of New York State – or some such similarly horrible place. In prison this man-child will become a mature man, then a middle-aged one, and then an elderly and infirm old man – all while living in a grimy cage. He will most likely die there (good riddance). Those he murdered will not even have that much. All ten of them are dead.

What a stupid waste – on about four different levels.

But I will say this loudly and clearly: whenever someone tells you they dislike you because of your race, religion, or whatever external factor – look at that person with a suspicious eye. But the opposite is also true: if anyone tells you that you are better or more valuable because of your skin color or religion or whatever, be equally suspicious towards that person. The Buffalo shooter man-child’s writing reeks of the idea of “race essentialism” – that you, and other people, are defined by your skin color. His is a “zero sum” game of race warfare. I have seen this idea of race as the overwhelming factor in a person’’s life not only from white supremacists but from Black race warriors, too. I have also seen a variant of it with militant feminist lesbians, who seem to think they and their ilk are among “the chosen people” who should “stay with their own kind.” It is rank tribalism, a simplification and distortion of a complicated world. It might temporarily satisfy a psychological need, but it is a fool’s gold which ultimately won’t satisfy. 

You have value because you are you. It has nothing to do with any accident of your birth whether it be skin color, family religion, gender orientation, or national affiliation. If you think you are special because of some external trapping which you have no control over, then one day you might wonder if you have done anything really to warrant feeling special. Maybe you are just a boring black person? Or an underachieving transgender womyn? Maybe that has everything to do with your individual nature. You can’t put on the trappings of your “identity” and puff yourself up. Life is just not that easy. You might borrow strength in need from your racial/religious/political allegiance, but you can’t own it.

You were born alone. You will leave this world the same. In the end, we are all individuals before we are members of a tribe. How do you feel about yourself when you are alone and look in the mirror? Do you need alcohol or drugs to deaden the pain? Do you distract yourself with technology so as to avoid having to sit alone with your thoughts? You might run away from yourself temporarily, but you are still trapped in your own skin. This Buffalo shooter found meaning, belonging, and direction in white supremacy, anti-semitism, and violent action. He claimed in his writing he was willing to kill and die for it. (He lived up to the first part of that promise.) In his manifesto the Buffalo shooter claimed to have “started browsing 4chan in May 2020 after extreme boredom, remember this was during the outbreak of covid,” and I believe him. He was searching for a savior in a time of severe personal need, and he found it. But the salvation message is almost all bullshit. That Buffalo shooter man-boy is still alone; he is not saved. He lives in a prison cell alone. Maybe he will find fellowship and meaning in belonging to a race-based prison gang. I guess if that is all you have, it is something.

But it is not much.

This guy could have found value and substance in so many better places. Instead it appears he fell into various rabbit-holes of white supremacy online like “4chan” and was radicalized, and the rest is history. 

My God, I bet if I had twenty minutes to talk with this kid I could have changed his mind.

But I didn’t. I bet his parents didn’t either. As he wrote, “I was not born racist nor grew up to be racist. I simply became racist after I learned the truth.” He encountered “the truth” online. He was alone out there on the Internet during quarantine while enduring “extreme boredom” and thereby encountered false prophets promising a high-minded crusade he could join. He “drank the Kool Aid” à la Jonestown, circa 1978. He was obviously in a state of poor mental health, like so many other young Americans. The kid came to school in a hazmat suit and made threatening statements about wanting to kill himself and others before he graduated from high school; and thereby he attracted a bit of law enforcement attention, before he flew down again below the radar. By then he was committed to violent white supremacy. He finally made his big move last Saturday.

Beware, beware.

Young people, beware when dealing with those who pedal “race essentialism” – or any sort of essentialism. Does your gut tell you that maybe the world is more complicated than they are telling you? Trust your gut. Do some independent research. Sure, the Internet has plenty of propaganda and disinformation, but it also has exactly the opposite, if you make the effort to look around. Seek out those who argue to the contrary. You can learn from them – a person learns especially from those with whom they disagree. 

And parents, it might be a very good idea to pay attention to what your children are looking at online – and offline. “Mr. Geib, watch your daughter’s friends,” my high school students advise me when I ask them for parenting advice. Dime con quién andas, y te diré quién eres. “Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.” Offline or online. Pay attention to your children. Talk to them. Be a part of their lives.

Because it is young people who are seduced into joining cults. They are the vulnerable victims of false prophets like a Charles Manson or a Jim Jones or a David Koresh – or a Keith Raniere or a Larry Ray; a Shoko Asahara or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or a Sun Myung Moon – or a Louis Farrakhan or an Andrea Dworkin; a Richard Spencer or David Duke or Christopher Cantwell – or a Warren Jeffs or an Ammon Bundy. The world is full of such charlatans who preach a simplified Manichean world, and would exploit their followers for their own ends. It takes a person attracted to the extremes to gravitate towards such leaders — or a person who badly needs a home, any home. That self-professed “student radical” who was in favor of blowing up ROTC buildings in the 1960s went over to the other side and wanted to blow up abortion clinics in the 1980s. But older people almost always have too much life experience and common sense for fever dreams and promises of transcendence. Most young people, too. But not all of them. 

Look at the man-child Buffalo shooter from last weekend. Could it have been prevented?

I can’t control other people, but I can exert some control over my own family – and that is, in the end, what I really care about. Can I snoop onto my daughter’s web browser search histories? Should I do that? Review all the TikTok “viral” videos my daughters watch? The popular Youtube “influencers” they pay attention to? Eavesdrop on the unending text message threads with their friends?

No way I can do that.

Now would I want to.

But I do a little bit. Here and there. 

But less and less as they get older. 

Should I do it more? What might I be missing?

You read about these teenagers who are radicalized online and it scares the bejesus out of parents.

As a parent how much control do I have really over my kids? (It’s a good question.)

My daughters have their zone of privacy and individuality, which I am loath to barge into, unless absolutely necessary. As they get older, they should get a larger space of privacy and freedom, it seems to me, unless evidence arrives to show they shouldn’t. Because there are huge risks in not giving your children enough freedom or privacy as they get older. But you can give them entirely too much freedom, too.

How much freedom do I afford my daughters? How much structure and support? Where to find that sweet spot? How does it change as they age? How much? Where? When?

It is not easy.

“But I can pay attention. I can have conversations with them,” I think to myself. “I can keep the lines of communication always open.”

That might help. But it is not enough. Time. I think it comes down to time. 

I have to spend the necessary time with them. Gobs and gobs of time. And then allow them to be candid and open with me. Good communication. That is the key, I think. I hope so.

All else will flow from being a large part of their lives on a daily basis. 

Or am I mistaken?

What else, paterfamilias? I should try to use my words and converse with my daughters, yes? But also try to be a good role model myself? In my person and behavior they will observe with their own eyes how to live  – “What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.”

We shall see.

I will hope for the best.

But be prepared for the unexpected.

And have plenty of faith in myself and my daughters.

They will know what to do and when, and my wife and I will help them as much as we can. It will work out.

Yet I will pay attention. 

I will try to always give my daughters their space, but never be completely unaware. I will pay attention to what happens under my roof without running it like a jail. I will pick my fights while insisting on achievement in school and in sports, and ignore minor transgressions while upholding high standards in general – while always keeping in mind the long view.

I will watch out for my daughters. And they will grow up to be bold, brave, confident, independent, and successful young women, knowing they are loved and protected – my daughters never having joined a messianic cult or extremist group, never having seen the need for it.

At least I will hope so.

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“In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.”

Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams

“Extremism is so easy. You’ve got your position, and that’s it. It doesn’t take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left.”

Clint Eastwood