Extremism and “Mount Stupid”

In 2013 we depressingly predicted the fall of west Iraq to the group known then as Al Qaeda in Iraq, who subsequently renamed themselves ISIS, the “Islamic” State in Iraq and Syria.
Since then we have seen an explosion of violence in Syria and across the world, with 698 terror attacks in 2017 alone. This has been accompanied by a slick media presence on the part of terrorists and increasingly sophisticated tactics to spread terror and increase fear.
ISIS is not the only extremist group gaining ground. It exists in a symbiotic relationship with the far-right, whose xenophobic agenda has coalesced around a hatred of immigrants, refugees and Islam, stances that have increasingly become normalised and part of mainstream discourse, even though Muslims are the main victims of terror.
This fits into the key goal of ISIS — to eliminate the so-called “grey zone” of coexistence and harmony between Muslims and those of other beliefs by stoking mutual distrust and hate.
This is not, however, an isolated phenomenon, with extremism rising worldwide, from the murder of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar by Buddhists to increasing nationalism and a pushback against globalisation and international cooperation. Religion is often co-opted to further extreme political agendas, but capitalism and communism have left their fair share of broken lives and bodies.
On a day to day level, we can see the sharp splits in society between liberals and conservatives widening, with cries of fake news augmented by social media filter bubbles.
We will be discussing this more in a series of upcoming papers, but a core element of this is that society as a whole has reached the limits of its current model as class mobility decreases and the social contract is torn.
To put it simply, too many now no longer believe in the American Dream or their national equivalent, leading them to vote for change, any change, be it President Trump in the USA, Brexit in the UK or President Macron in France.
When this happens, people prefer to follow black-and-white ideologies of change, something philosopher Isaiah Berlin referred to as “positive liberty”: the freedom to change the world. This is in contrast to the “negative liberty” we have been used to, the freedom from people telling us what to do (this was discussed in depth by documentarian Adam Curtis in his series “The Trap”).
These ideologies are often set up against the “other,” setting up scapegoats in line with René Girard’s mimetic theory as their proponents promise a better life.
Of course, absolutist ideologies can gain particular purchase when society has broken down completely, from the depression of post first world war Germany to Syria today.
Losing the war on terror
ISIS is just the latest mutation of al Qaeda, against whom the West has been fighting a “War on Terror” for 16 years since September 11th, 2001.
This war has claimed the lives of 2 million civilians and cost $1.6 trillion, yet the number of jihadists has risen from under 1,000 to over 100,000 in this period.
We are losing this war and need a new approach to combatting extremism of all types.
After three years of research, funded by private individuals so as to be independent and unbiased, we believe the best approach is providing contextual information and resources to combat the illusion of superiority that is at the heart of all forms of extremism.
To quote Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai:
“With guns you can kill terrorists, with education you can kill terrorism.”
Proper access to contextual information also helps augment the positive contribution of belief systems and communities, bringing people together for laudable goals.
We believe that the Ananas platform can help with this goal, and the next part of this paper contains some of the theory that underpins our findings and approach.
The illusion of superiority: The unifying factor in extremism
Ideologies and belief systems have allowed humans to go beyond other species by joining them together in groups beyond the local tribe to achieve large goals by having a common language and set of principles with which to work together.
Everyone has layers of belief systems, things that they hold to be true and that allow them to be a part of a larger community. For example, one might be a buddhist, capitalist, ethereum-loving Manchester United-supporting Republican who uses Emacs.
Each of these is a layer of identity and beliefs that allows that individual to be a part of a larger community, speaking a common language of ideals.
Where ideology and belief systems become dangerous and turn to extremism is when there is an illusion of superiority of one group over another in terms of basic humanity.
This can happen to the most seemingly sensible of individuals and groups.
For example, few would deny that Germans are, as a nation, generally quite a sober and reasonable group.
However, it cannot be denied that the Nazi party grew amongst the Germans and took power, murdering millions out of a false belief of racial and societal superiority.
Those that do deny this generally do so out of a deep-seated rejection of authority and often built up hatred, leading them to extreme stances.
Almost all of those who participate in these heinous acts are not actual psychopaths, the incidence of which is thankfully low amongst humans, but rather do it for the “greater good,” something that Lord Rabbi Sacks termed “altruistic evil” in a recent book.
Some do this “on orders,” others out of a sense of pride.
Almost always it comes about due to an illusion of superiority caused by imperfect knowledge.
When confronted with contextual knowledge or getting to know those that they despise, these people typically undergo immense cognitive dissonance and a disavowal of their prior positions.
This phenomenon is a variant of the “Dunning-Kruger” effect, as illustrated in Figure 1.
When individuals gain a little knowledge, they often vastly over-inflate their perception of their own confidence.
The peak of confidence in this graph is often known as “Mount Stupid.”
In everyday life this is simply annoying (news headlines make instant experts of us all), but when combined with political aims and somewhat opaque principles, this can become deadly as extreme “faith” in the belief that your ingroup is superior to the outgroup, which is seen as a threat and less than human, is a core component of atrocities.
This faith can also be in the organisational system and hierarchy, which is why armed forces are structured in the way they are to enable soldiers to kill others through faith in the hierarchy.
Fig 1. The Dunning Kruger Effect
As you learn more, your confidence levels often drop, which is why multiple studies have shown that one of the best innoculations against religious extremism is actually a solid religious education and identity.
This is why many terrorists often have minimal religious knowledge and chequered pasts, turning to an absolutist ideology out of rejection of their past.
In becoming radicalised, they are often fed a narrow set of information and lack the ability to look at the context and bigger picture of a religion where the vast majority of the adherents are unsurprisingly peaceful.
Similarly Islamophobes often have not spent time or spoken to Muslims about their beliefs, instead taking a small amount of often biased, non-contextual information to make familiar claims that there is inherent evil lurking within a monolith viewed as Islam, making its followers an effective fifth column that could turn rabid at any time.
Is the Pope Catholic? Is ISIS Islamic?
With 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, the question of whether Islam is evil is probably quite an important one.
The answer is probably not, but many have a suspicion there is something within the ideology that ISIS and al Qaeda may be a “true” manifestation of.
Any human group typically has a range of characteristics, beliefs and rules that determine who is “inside” the group and who is outside of the group.
For example, there isa set of rules that determine if you are a member of the girl scouts, such as being a girl and paying a membership fee.
In every community there are those that set the rules and those that control the membership.
For example, the question of whether the Pope is Catholic is a non-sequitur due to the principle of papal infallibility as part of the dogma of the Catholic Church, allowing him to define doctrine and membership (or lack thereof through excommunication).
The question of whether ISIS is Islamic is a more complex one as, for a start, there are several larger, distinct groups within Islam. This question also begs the question of whether ISIS do what they do because of Islam or they happen to be Muslims doing it.
It is clear that ISIS are not “Twelver” Shia Muslims, where group membership and doctrine is determined by Grand Ayatollahs such as Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran or Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq.
If they are a part of any group, it would be of Sunni Muslims, the largest of the Islamic groups.
However, a hallmark of ISIS is that they declare other Sunni Muslims as not Muslim, a process known as “takfir,” claiming this then makes them liable for death.
Despite this statement, saying that they are the only ones to speak for (Sunni) Islam and the 1.2 billion outside their group are not “true” Muslims, many non-Muslims are fearful that they might be the “true” manifestation of Islam that any Muslim could mutate into.
How (Sunni) Islam works
The epistemological structure of Sunni Islam, ie how you determine whether something is inside of Sunni Islam or not, the Truth of the matter, is partially to blame for this.
Unlike Catholicism, there is no Pope in Sunni Islam, nobody to say what is Sunni and what is not.
This is because Sunnis believe that revelation stopped with the death of the Prophet Muhammad, whose word was effectively gospel.
Thereafter trying to figure out the Shariah, the abstract will of God (not actually the chopping off of parts of people), was done by putting together a picture of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the Sunnah, as best they could and comparing that against the eternal Quran, which they considered to be the eternal, literal word of God through a set of basic axioms.
Obviously things had moved on from then, so one of the most important parts was formalising these links and axioms and trying to get as reliable a picture as possible of the practice of the Prophet Muhammad as the perfect manifestation of the will of God. This picture was built up by collecting stories about him, known as “hadith,” and checking and cross checking their reliability.
Thereafter a legal set of principles was established to try and fit the classical scriptures to the present time, an area known as Islamic jurisprudence that allowed scholars to deliver “fatwa,” or rulings.
This is the ontology of Sunni Islam, which is surprisingly amenable to digitisation and analysis. This is important as it historically had reasonable doubt at its core, as revelation and certainty stopped with the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
Our base model for religious datasets and ontologies (we have developed different ones for other types of ideology) consists of several layers. At the base is scripture (Quran and hadith in this case). The next layer is the interpretative one (the corpus of Islamic jurisprudence), and the final two layers are the private and community practice of these.
Our modern common law system can also be thought of in these lines, and the development of Islamic jurisprudence and reasonable doubt (the extreme punishments you see today had huge evidentiary hurdles and were seldom enforced classically) contributed to the development of our secular legal system.
So to determine if something is “Sunni,” we need to first have all the available evidence (the scripture, the Quran and hadith) and then test it against the core axioms of that system of jurisprudence, just as to see if something was legal in the UK or USA, we would look at past case law, basic principles and the evidence at hand.
In the case of ISIS, their actions are incoherent and inconsistent not only with classical Sunni structure, but also within their own adaptation and mutation of this.
However, due to the lack of centralised authority, those that speak for Sunni Islam are those with the most money or the loudest voices (more people googled ISIS than Islam during the group’s rise). New sources of authority are now possible thanks to blockchain and the modern internet, something we will return to later in this white paper.
The importance of context
When analysing extremists of any cloth, it becomes clear that they gain success by bringing as many people to “mount stupid” as possible by painting a picture without reasonable doubt.
This is usually done by presenting key “evidence” and views that are selective and lacking in context.
Context is incredibly important; indeed, information without context cannot be thought of as knowledge (knowledge comes when information is mixed with experience).
In Islam specifically, extremists try to attract recruits by laying down breadcrumbs that are just convincing enough for a malformed view to be constructed by those with a solid secular rather than religious grounding.
This is why, far from attracting just losers, engineers are far more likely to become jihadists than the general population, something discussed by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog in their recent book, The Engineers of Jihad. They are just smart enough to build this absolutist vision, but not proficient enough to be able to access context.
Here is an example of a verse from the Quran (chapter 2, verse 191) commonly used by extremists of all stripes to “prove” Islam says to kill the non-Muslims:
“…Slay them wherever you find them…”
But looking at the surrounding verses provides context:
“Fight in the cause of God only those who fight you and do not commit aggression…”
“…Slay them wherever you find them…”
“…But if they cease fighting then let their be no hostility except against oppressors”
Numerous other verses talk about fighting, but many others talk about peace, such as chapter 5, verse 32, which states:
“Whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.”
There are more layers to this analysis that can one can undertake, but being literal without being comprehensive will never work.
Thus it is essential to have all the evidence before making a definitive statement about an ideology or law and a way to balance all the available evidence in as objective a manner as possible, while acknowledging how far subjectivity can go.
This is also related to the genesis of the “fake news” phenomenon, which relies on a lack of context and feeding into pre-conceived notions, often established in a filter bubble, in both directions.
Initiatives like Steve Ballmer’s “USA Facts” may go some way to helping, but to really make progress we need to go beyond the facts to analyzing how these lead to opinions and which are internally consistent or not.
In the next in this series of posts we will look at how we can use technology to help in the fight against extremist ideologies and the hatred that comes from mistrust.
If you’d like a preview of how we are using modern technology to fight hate, including a private, tokenised economy, you can read our white paper here.
