Striking fear into people is not what it used to be. Starting with Charlie Hebdo and finishing with Nice, terror became the brand of stupidity at a global level. Unlike the 9/11 reaction of the Bush administration who launched into a frenzy of wars as a form of retaliation, the European Countries and the European Union took the stance of Unikitty in the middle of Cloud cuckoo land, and fighting Unikitty is down right stupid.
It does not matter the kind of belonging you get from a priest and a mission, not does it matter the cause you’re fighting for, you are the book example of crass stupidity if you drive over children watching fireworks. I am afraid this is the reason it is so hard to win this war. On parts of the world information made people smarter, by default. Sure, we have our Brexit, we have our nationalist dominated parliaments, but for a while it looks like everyone got smarter than killing random people to make a point. On other parts of the world people are stuck into a way of life that keeps them dumb. And it is like small tumor cancer: you cannot make a clean cut, these parts are intertwined.
It looks like terror is here to stay for a while. It is going to be a constant event. There are two things which could pause it: the giving up of personal freedom to global war or the giving up of personal freedom to global security. Both unlikely to happen.
In my view, what these organizations managed to create is one of the most amazing management structures ever made possible: a stealth distributed cohesive centerless network. And the “funny” part is that they’ve stumbled upon it, they didn’t set out to create this. Al Qaeda was no such thing. Boko Haram is no such thing. But the worldwide spread group of sleeping agents inside the terror network is exactly such a thing. It is the alchemy that mixed radical religion, revisionist history, racism, nationalist speech, the globalization stage of the economy game, sociological factors and existentialism which spawned the magic potion that activates the agents of terror. Quick radicalization.
Bad folks have always been organized the same way: there is a money hungry, power hungry, sadistic sociopath at the top, who gathers minions around eager to level up on being sadistic sociopaths, who in turn create management levels of lucrative activities for the money hunger of the leader to be fed, and divisions of sadistic sociopaths who do not want to level up used to enforce dominance to feed the power hunger of the top guy.
The new instant radicalization potion is not like that. It is like the flower in Drakengard who is set to destroy mankind for no clear reason, but who in turn gives superpowers to those it enslaves. Oh, excuse the anime turned game reference, not everyone tastes that cup of tea. But this centerless network of sleeping agents of terror might be the most amazing sociological creation of humanity and the greatest challenge for existentialism and humanism: what is the philosophical antidote to that? Who will be the next Camus to teach us to fight the absurd and live in spite of if?