Max Scheler and the psychopathology of the terrorist

Modern Age, Summer, 2005 by Manfred Frings

The subconscious feelings of the two components of resentment--impotency and unattainablity--have aroused a desperate desire to overcome them: a Dionysian frenzy of wild and random outbursts of desperation has been unleashed; impulsive and repeated vengeful acts of terrorism based in envy, including suicide and public beheadings of enemies, are daily events. Arguably, in their plight Muslims are encouraged by an unshakable submissive link to Allah. (11)

It has been stressed that all resentment contains what Scheler called a "tragic element." Whenever any human beings suffer from disarrangement in their feelings of the order of values, the order of their ranks remains concealed yet transparent throughout the disorder. The concealed transparency of the order of values is analogous to the order of spectral colors concealed in visible colorations. Clearly, the order of value-ranks is disturbed in the feelings and minds of terrorists. For gleeful satisfaction in killing someone cannot bear a value higher than clemency, compassion, or the will to stop violence. The satisfaction of killing in the name of God (not peculiar to Islam religion alone) cannot be a value higher than having pangs of conscience and repentance about it.

It is not likely that global terrorism today can be wholly overcome by military force alone, because terrorism is tantamount to subversive guerrilla tactics generated by resentful frustration over impotencies and goals unattainable. Terrorists resemble powerless insects that, whenever one of them or one of their colonies has been wiped out, re-emerge to repeat their nuisance.

A perhaps more promising means than military force to cut back global terrorism could be a restructuring of Muslim outposts. Such restructuring would take a long process and the West should not seek to make changes in the Islamic culture as a whole. Rather, this restructuring would come close to a re-education with the aim of finding the right pathways to a reorganization of some of Islam's cultural goods--a process which has begun in Afghanistan (the education of women, voting).

One must admit that a parallel restructuring is needed in parts of the West also. For in the eyes of the ordinary Islamist, the Western media and entertainment industry are often grossly insulting because of their vulgarity and moral decadence. Clearly, this industry has prompted the labeling of the United States as satanic, although the same label is not applied to Europe even though decadence in the media and the entertainment industry is more explicit there. Which brings us back to the Greeks.

The ancient Greek virtue of moderation (sophrosyne), to be practiced in everything humans do and to be taught through education, has practically disappeared today. The ordinary Muslim would perhaps agree fully with Scheler's observation that people in Western societies are, not only in sports but everywhere, infected with an excessive "infantile obsession to be first." A renewed discipline of moderation in the West would help to allay Muslims' feelings of insult and resentment.