Abstract: The search for transcendence can assume a pathological aspect—taking on a nihilistic form inconsistent with the demands of survival. Ironically, it is the perversion of self-transcendent emotions, not self-assertive ones, which have been largely responsible for the chronicle of atrocities that human beings have inflicted on each other down through the ages. The fanatical certainty of serving a ‘higher cause’ allows the perpetrators of ‘inhuman' deeds to act—not on their own behalf—but as subordinate parts of a hierarchy, which absolves them of personal responsibility and invests their actions with the sense of fulfilling a ‘transcendent’ purpose or mission. As a symptom of the perversion of self transcendence, witness human sacrifice, a notorious example being that of the Aztecs, who annually took the lives of between 20 and 50 thousand young men, virgins and children—so that the sun would not die.   Book by Roger Griffin Terrorist's Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning For information on ordering through Amazon, PLEASE CLICK HERE. Terrorist's Creed casts a penetrating beam of understanding into the disturbing and murky psychological world of fanatical violence, explaining how the fanaticism it demands stems from the profoundly human need to imbue existence with meaning and transcendence.

Human beings have a need to belong, to feel an integral part of something greater than themselves: a cause, project, or living entity that outlives and transcends their own brief life-time. However, this need to belong is deeply ambivalent, creating an inclusive sense of community in some circumstances, while generating exclusion, fanaticism and violence in others.

This ambivalence must be understood whenever discussions arise concerning the need to ‘respect’ the cultures of others at all costs, assessing the value of religion as a source of harmony, or setting about explaining why a minority may be tempted to join movements preaching hatred and violence.

I am concerned here with the ‘existential’ dimension of belonging: the degree to which it fulfils deep psychological needs beyond the material sphere. Ernest Becker and Peter Berger have studied how human societies have been driven to construct heroic myths as templates of a higher, transcendent plane of existence, and to elaborate ritual-based cosmologies which make up a ‘sacred canopy’ warding off the devastating psychological pain of coming to grips with the finitude, absurdity, and loneliness of life on earth.

In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm explores the theory that the existential needs of ‘man' (his recurrent term for humanity) are structured by two fundamental biological conditions that mark ‘his' emergence as a unique species, i) the ever decreasing determination of behaviour by instincts and ii) the growth of the brain and particularly of the neo-cortex.

The self-awareness and imagination that resulted disrupt the unreflecting harmony with biological life that characterizes animal existence, so although humanity is part of nature, it constantly transcends nature and the natural limits.

Human beings are existentially homeless, yet still tied to the planetary home they share with all creatures. Homo sapiens is condemned to exist within reflective being, while other organisms are untormented by the knowledge of death and personal mortality.

The physiological and psychological developments underpinning man’s humanity have ‘evicted him from paradise', the paradise of unreflexive being. Self-awareness produces existential needs common to all human beings—rooted in the drive to overcome the horror of separateness, powerlessness, and lostness. To survive, they construct new forms of relating to the world—enable them to feel at home.

Fromm identifies: a) a frame of reference and devotion (i.e. a ‘world-view'); b) rootedness (i.e. a sense of being part of something both prior and posterior to one’s life; c) unity (i.e. a sense of oneness with at least part of the world; d) effectiveness (i.e. a sense of having an impact on the world; e) excitation (or a relief from boredom and depression).

Human beings, Fromm says, fulfil these needs in two diametrically opposed ways. Precluded from returning to the symbiotic Garden of Eden which they experience as part of the mother's world—or before evolving into homo sapiens sapiens (i.e. knowing they know, the hallmark of human awareness)—they progress through a difficult process of individuation to free themselves from the power of the past, and so become independent, and capable of compassion and love.

These faculties enable individuals (as individuated beings) to experience solidarity with fellow humans without denying separateness or difference—thereby achieving fulfilment in a state of productive being in the world.

However, the craving for symbiosis can lead to regression into a symbolic world in which the mother is substituted by nebulous entities inviting fusion--abstract entities such as god, ancestral soil, class, the nation, the race, the religious community.

The result is the anaesthetization of individual consciousness into states of ritual, trance, ecstasy, or fanatical obedience. In this atavistic relationship with the world, life-enhancing, creative faculties give way to life-thwarting, destructive ones based on sado-masochism and narcissism.

What brings out the negative potential of the human psyche are periods of disequilibrium that disrupt the stable sense of ‘home' afforded by a sustainable culture. The need to restore a new equilibrium may be satisfied not by healthy (individuated, creative) frames of reference, rootedness, unity and effectiveness (benign belonging), but by symbiotic, destructive ones in which the integrity of ‘home’ can be maintained only through the demonization of the ‘other’ (malignant belonging).

The Ambivalence of Belonging

Fromm’s analysis resonates with that of another major 20th century commentator on the human condition, Arthur Koestler. A central concern of The Ghost in the Machine (1970) is the physiological basis of human psychology.

To simplify Koestler's subtly argued and extensively documented hypothesis: human beings are endowed with two basic drives: self-assertiveness, and the opposite one of self-transcendence, that allows them to be both autonomous individuals and members of a social hierarchy such as a family or tribe.

A healthy relationship with the world, i.e. one based on harmony and creative symbiosis with it rather than destructive urges, depends on a balance of the two drives--which allows people to experience themselves simultaneously as unique, independent personalities and as integral parts of larger social entities.

However, because of the ‘paranoid' or ‘delusional' streak in the human make up, both self-assertive and self-transcendent drives can assume a pathological aspect, taking on an obsessive, nihilistic form inconsistent with the demands of survival and irrespective of the damage they inflict on fellow creatures. Ironically, it is the perversion of self-transcendent emotions, not self-assertive ones, which have been responsible for the chronicle of atrocities that human beings have inflicted on each other through the ages.

The fanatical certainty of serving a ‘higher cause’ allows the perpetrators of ‘inhuman' deeds to act—not on their own behalf—but as subordinate parts of a hierarchy, whether human or metaphysical, which absolves them of personal responsibility and invests their actions with the sense of fulfilling a ‘transcendent’ mission.

As a symptom of how the capacity for self-transcendence can be perverted, Koestler cites the wide-spread use of human sacrifice in traditional cultures, a notorious example being that of the Aztecs, who annually sacrificed between twenty and fifty thousand young men, virgins and children--so that the sun would not die. The basic mechanism at work in such a culture is that individual self-transcendent emotions are no longer sublimated through ritual into mature, humane integration with the external world.

Instead, they express themselves via a culturally reinforced collective regression to an infantile type of projection that abolishes the affective distinction between part and whole—to produce a potentially destructive identification with the supra-personal entity (the elaborate narrative myths of Aztec culture became lived realities for Aztecs and their victims).