Trying to understand why some people become politically radicalized to the point of being willing to engage in violence—willing even to engage in terrorist acts as a defined subset of that violence—has by now occupied an entire generation of scholars and policy analysts. Though always an interesting topic considering the centrality of political violence in the history of the species, theories from several disciplinary origins have now filled entire libraries in the nearly 17 years since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Such is the sprawling state of thinking that it has become almost impossible for anyone to get arms around the entire extent literature. But for all the effort and literature, no consensus exists on an overarching explanatory template sufficiently robust to guide policymakers at various levels and in various countries.

Just one example of dissensus shows the practical problem. About a decade ago Marc Sageman propounded a theory of “leaderless jihad” that postulated a four-step process of radicalization emphasizing the new role of the internet as a distributed system of social mobilization.¹ As part of his argument, Sageman all but dismissed structural predispositions or determinist arguments: namely, that terrorism is caused by the defects of the larger society or world order, or by predisposed personality types—both popular approaches in the early days after 9/11. Bruce Hoffman criticized Sageman for exaggerating the impact of the internet and discounting the still huge role of hierarchical terrorists organizations like al-Qaeda.² The two then debated the matter and others joined in, some taking Sageman to task for not crediting the internet with even more influence (since he played down the role of images as emotional stimuli).³ The ensuing debate helped to clarify lines of disagreement and to generate better questions, but it did not offer much help to high-level policymakers or to those responsible for homeland security and law enforcement in deciding how to apportion their resources and attention.

As noted in an earlier essay, dissensus has left a legacy of contextual differences among targeted allied countries that shape how national authorities have developed theories of the case, as it were, to deal with the problem.⁴ One result: Americans tend to grant pride of place to the power of religious ideas as such and discount less obvious sociological dynamics, but most European authorities discount religious thinking and emphasize instead the social embeddedness of motivating ideas of all sorts. Consciously or usually not, both appear to be projecting frameworks whose origins lie within their own experiences as embedded in political culture.

The analysis of political violence and terror is not my day job, and I do not pretend to have pondered the bulk of the literature on it. The disadvantages of my circumstance need no elaboration. But just as one can better see a faint star in the heavens in one’s peripheral vision than by looking straight on, and just as creativity in the sciences often falls to those aware of but not inured to the methodological orthodoxies of the day, my circumstance may afford an advantage as well as disadvantage. I therefore hope to leapfrog most of the terrorism-specific literature and make a suggestion worthy of some consideration.

In essence, the suggestion is that the forms of social authority capable of radicalizing individuals so as to engage in acts of violence and terror are not constant across all societies. Differing social structures, as well as different cultures—related, but not the same things—affect which modes of persuasion and manipulation tend to work best to generate the worst sorts of behavior. Specifically, charismatic authority is liable to be much more effective in motivating or manipulating behavior among those reared in societies characterized by patrimonial and especially tribal social structures than it is in modern societies, where authority has long since been formalized and depersonalized. Moreover, charismatic authority is liable to be especially effective where and when pre-existent traditional authority is decaying or has broken down.

The sociologically tutored will note that we have just invoked Max Weber without even mentioning him. Though he is many years dead, that is still not nice. To return to some basics, then, Weber famously distinguished in his 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation” between three types of social authority: rational-legal authority; traditional authority; and charismatic authority. Weber also cited three delivery systems, so to speak, that combine to persuade younger people, in particular, to acknowledge the authority of elders: personal status; specialized knowledge; and social position. All three systems are at work in all three types of authority, but not in the same proportions.

Authority is the socially approved use of power as embodied in rules; it is, in other words, raw power legitimized such that its exercise is only indirectly predicated on a natural unevenness of coercive potential in society at large. Rule-making and rule-enforcing is present in every human society; it is partly what defines our species as social. Not every test of wills can be allowed to devolve into literal fighting, or the group could not survive. Rule discipline is therefore socially functional, and the generalization of that discipline sums to authority.

Now, legal-rational authority is the dominant form of authority Weber recognized in the advanced Western countries of his day a century ago. It is associated with the bureaucracies of modern states, and with governments of nations. And nations, in turn, being composed of so many people that the vast majority are unlikely ever to lay eyes on one another—even if, in a by now very attenuated sense, most West European nations at base are composed of large extended families—require a facility with abstractions to create a sense of social unity. That facility with abstraction is, in turn, almost invariably a by-product of mass deep literacy, a critical but often overlooked social-historical datum.

That facility with abstraction also enables a sense of individual agency, and with it a relatively keen sense of what some social psychologists call “interiority”—the belief that the realest “me” is the synthesizing narrator in my head. With it, as well, comes a modular conception of social roles: an individual can be tethered to a family, but also to a profession, a social class, and even to a faith community different from that of parents. Where legal-rational authority is prevalent, specialized knowledge is usually more important than personal status or social position as a vehicle of persuasion.

Traditional authority is power legitimized by longstanding cultural templates, invariably of religious origin or at least still religion-infused ones, and that corresponds to a social structure encompassing a smaller number of people who are usually more literally (genetically) an extended family or clan. Traditional authority is thus associated with ethno-linguistic, or “ethnic” groups (often but not always overlapping with sectarian groups), even ones that today compose communities nested within any of several heterogeneous modern states. So, for example, traditional authority dominates among the Muslim “emirates” of Northern Nigeria, with their “big men,” patronage networks, and the rest—not the legal-rational authority of the Nigerian state, such as it is.

Levels of deep literacy are lower than in societies characterized by legal-rational authority, facility with abstractions (magical efficacy excluded) is less robust, and the range of modular identities is narrower. In traditional authority, with its characteristic patrimonial social structure frequently still defined by agnatic lineages and with endogamous marriage as common, social position is usually more important that specialized knowledge and personal status as a vehicle of persuasion.

Charismatic authority is, as Weber put it, authority legitimated by extraordinary personalities capable of inspiring devotion and obedience. Given the physical limits of personal persuasiveness under pre-modern and pre-literate technical conditions, charismatic authority was limited to smaller groups than those that make up a nation or an ethnic group. After all, even the most charismatic individual can shout only so loud, and can be seen from only so far away. It best corresponded, and still does, to tribal social structures. Status is usually more important than specialized knowledge and social position amid relatively non-adumbrated social structures (and, as we will see, de-institutionalizing ones).

Charismatic personalities are associated most closely with shamans in pre-modern societies characterized by mythic consciousness, but also with an array of notable figures in the social transition to traditional authority marked by the gradual movement from myth to religion. What is the difference between the two?

The mythic consciousness equates roughly to animist conceptions of the world, a world suffused with magic and emotional consanguinity, and that moves through the law of metamorphosis in which anything can turn into anything else.⁵ Deities are immanent, not transcendent—transcendence is an abstract concept, after all, and authority in an animist world is exercised solely through the power of oral language, emotionally piquant and often mystical in its cohabitation with religious ideas. Its mode of narrative can be almost dreamlike, while music, dance, and other art forms often supply elaborative elements to the rituals of a mythic whole. Word magic prevails: Knowing the name for something gives one power over the thing named. Power is highly personal, hence the predominant role of status in eliciting conformity with authority; social order is not highly differentiated in part because labor specialization is minimal. All of this is characteristic of tribal societies as cultural anthropologists have described them.

Religion, on the other hand—Abrahamic religion at least, but also most others—is based on scripture. There usually is miraculous (read: magical) stuff going on in all stories of origin, but the narrative, having taken written form, cannot repeatedly accommodate anything turning into anything else at someone’s whim. There is a logical rigor inherent in the narrative and in the way it is conveyed from those few who can read to those who cannot. That communication may be emotionally infused, but the lexical content of the scripture limits the sheer emotional power of the words. Such narratives are not dreamlike; they tell coherent stories with more or less fixed and hence learnable causal and moral points. Supportive arts exist but at a greater remove from ritual.

Religion based on scripture is not for shamans but for priests and, occasionally, prophets. The deity is or becomes transcendent instead of, or sometimes as well as, immanent (in the concept of the soul—the deity within). And under the right conditions, a priest or a prophet can use scripture and its fixed lessons, rules, and rituals to reach out beyond the small group of the clan and the larger tribe. When that happens, the sway of charismatic authority can spread, temporarily at least, to larger groups, depending on available technologies of transmission. It can last as long as the charismatic individual lives, after which it either evaporates or else become institutionalized, at which point charismatic authority morphs into traditional authority, generally embedded in religious culture.

The former describes Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, which has failed to institutionalize itself, and the latter William Miller’s premillenarian cult in 1830s’ Ohio, the Millerites institutionalizing themselves eventually into the Seventh Day Adventists. It is possible that the differing social structures of present-day Uganda (still largely tribal) and mid-19^thcentury America (largely modern) account in part for the failure of the former and the success of the latter to institutionalize themselves. To emerge and be sustained, institutions must correspond to attitudes in people’s heads: If the broader social order displays institutional artifacts of culture, it will occur to people to institutionalize given social projects, and models will exist showing how to do it. If not, institutional innovation is more difficult and less likely to occur.

Such a transitional movement from myth to religion, as defined here, characterizes the history of Islam from the start. Mohammed was a charismatic tribal figure (some contemporary sources suggest that he was afflicted with epilepsy, his seizures seen as visitations from God) whose message achieved trans-tribal power, or authority. That was in part because his 6^thcentury social context in Arabia consisted of a hinge point between older oral and rising written cultures, and a material context that mixed smaller tribal social structures with larger proto-ethnic patrimonial ones in what was at the time a pluralizing environment in the Hejaz largely on account of a burgeoning caravan trade.

Mohammed managed to unite most of the squabbling tribes of Arabia and, through the power of the Abrahamic narrative, used his charismatic authority to supercharge what Anthony F.C. Wallace famously called a “revitalization movement”—which everyone today calls the result of that particular episode simply Islam.⁶ With the passage of authority to Abu Bakr and subsequent caliphs, charismatic authority institutionalized into traditional authority—in other words, to authority embedded in culture, in this case a vastly transformed Arabian religious culture.

This same basic pattern recurred long after Mohammed passed from the scene. To take only a few better-known examples, note Ibn Tumart, the charismatic leader of the Almohads in the 12^thcentury; the Mahdiyya movement late 19^th-century Sudan (Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah); the Sannusiyya movement of early 20^thcentury Libya (Muhammad ibn Ali as-Senussi); and of course al-Qaeda (Osama bin Laden) and the Islamic State (Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri) of recent times. All these movements (except perhaps the last two noted), and several others that could be cited both within Sunni and heterodox sectarian communities, began in a tribal context and expanded out to spread charismatic authority to larger groups, ultimately to be institutionalized (or fail to do so) as traditional authority, or fuse to greater or lesser extent with existing traditional authority, once the charismatic figure had passed from the scene.

That said, the movement from tribal-scale/charismatic to ethnic-scale/traditional authority applies to every inhabited continent and religious community, not just to Arabs and Muslims. The model for political mobilization and identity building in post-independence era sub-Saharan Africa, for example, often depended on charismatic tribal figures like Kwame Nkrumah (Akan), Jomo Kenyatta (Kikuyu), and Julius Nyerere (Zanaki) being able to extend their personal authority to the larger ethnic and/or state levels.⁷

Every society was at one point tribal by way of social structure, many became ethno-traditional over time, and some have since become modular-modern. The power of charismatic authority is deep in tribal structures, episodic in ethno-traditional ones, and possible, if rare, even in modular-modern ones. In other words, within this spectrum of social structures charismatic authority can arise anywhere so long as means of communication are available. Evidence resides in the fact that virtually every recorded example of a chiliastic premillenarian movement involves at some point the extrusion of charismatic authority into a broader social sphere. Here is a short list: Bar Kochba, with an assist from Rabbi Akiva, leading the Jewish Zealots of the 2^nd century against Roman occupation, on the model of the Maccabees leading a similar but successful revolt against the Selucid Greeks about 300 years earlier; Zhu Yuanzhang leading the Red Turban Rebellion of the White Lotus society against the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the 14^th century; Thomas Müntzer leading the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525 in what is today Germany; Hong Xiuquan fomenting the Taiping Rebellion in mid-19^th century China; and Wovoka leading the Native American “ghost” or “spirit dances” of around the same time. With the partial exception of Wovoka and the Ghost Dancers, none of these episodes arose from within a tribal social structure.

How and when does charismatic authority, generally associated with pre-modern tribal societies, manage sometimes to push through into socially larger and more adumbrated, more materially advanced and more deep literate, cultural forms? It can do so, assuming again that means of communication are present, when extant authority structures, and the stories of credit and blame they tell, lose their capacity to persuade—in other words, when they fail to account for the social realities people see around them.⁸ There are would-be charismatics in all places and at all times, but they do not “take” unless the plausibility structures (Peter Berger’s apt term in The Sacred Canopy) of the status quo are to one extent or another in decay. Myth maintenance is incumbent in all civilizational zones; there is no such thing as a creedal-free human culture. When the stories told by authorities stop working, a diffuse but relentless search ensues for stories that will work, at least to staunch the collective cognitive crisis of the moment if not to ultimately do more than that.

If the collapse of the creedal anchors of a society are advanced enough, a market for charismatic authority, and aspects of the mythical thinking associated with it, can emerge even when modern social structures and cultures predominate. In other words, vestiges of charismatic authority endure in a kind of escrow account even in modern, legal-rational forms of authority that have been, in Weber’s language, “desacralized” or “disenchanted.”⁹

One way to think about how this works is through the metaphor of an archeological mound: the lowest level is mythical, the middle levels accumulated above are traditional, and the uppermost levels are legal-rational—so nothing is ever really lost, but is rather built upon. When charismatic forms of authority erupt through the crust of the legal-rational structure, we know it because the avatars of metaphor again suffuse political language to a degree even more vigorous than usual. Here is how Ernst Cassirer put it in 1945 in his last book, The Myth of the State:

Even in primitive societies where myth pervades and governs the whole of man’s social feeling and social life it is not always operative in the same way nor does it always appear with the same strength. It reaches its full force when man has to face an unusual and dangerous situation. . . .

Later on there appeared other political and social forces. The mythical organization of society seems to be superseded by a rational organization. In quiet and peaceful times, in periods of relative stability and security, this rational organization is easily maintained. It seems safe against all attacks. But in politics the equipoise is never completely established. What we find here is a labile rather than a static equilibrium. In politics we are always living on volcanic soil. We must be prepared for abrupt convulsions and eruptions.

In all critical moments of man’s social life, the rational forces that resist the rise of the old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the time for myth has come again. For myth has not been really vanquished and subjugated. . . . The description of the role of magic and mythology in primitive society applies equally well to highly advanced stages of man’s political life. In desperate situations men will always have recourse to desperate means—and our present day political myths have been such desperate means. . .

If modern man no longer believes in natural magic, he has by no means given up the belief in a sort of “social magic.” If a collective wish is felt in its whole strength and intensity, people can easily be persuaded that it only needs the right man to satisfy it.

Eric Voegelin was perhaps the first to point out, in a 1938 book, the similarities between religious creedal systems and the mass-movement ideologies of the early 20^thcentury: fascism and communism. José Ortega y Gassett was perhaps the first to show their highly emotional nature, their dismissal of reason and their shrouding of legal-rational authority in the charismatic trope; he wrote in 1930, before Hitler came to power: “The Fascist and Syndicalist species were characterized by the first appearance of a type of man who did not care to give reasons or even to be right, but who was simply resolved to impose his opinions. That was the novelty: the right not to be right, not to be reasonable: ‘the reason of unreason.’” And the main technologies of that era which enabled the rapid spread of charismatic authority in modern and modernizing societies—newspapers and especially radio—led other governments to want to control those technologies against their capacity to stimulate mob-like and potentially violent political behavior: Hence, for example, the creation in the United States of the Federal Communications Commission in 1934.

These totalitarian movements each had their charismatics and attendant cults of personality: Mussolini and Hitler, and in minor drag Franco and Perón in due course; Lenin and Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung. These were all proverbial men on white horses—Cassirer’s “right man”—come to save “the people,” always defined as an embattled social monolith. Both leftwing and rightwing forms of populism today also feature charismatic leaders, would-be charismatic leaders, or paler forms of the type. Some people even insist that Donald Trump is charismatic! The rise of populism in the current moment is, of course, a symptom of the decay of prior elite authority for its failure to tell stories and be believed. And the technology of transmission now has moved beyond radio and even television to the internet.

Now that we have defined our terms and set them in socio-historic motion, so to speak, how does all this translate back into our problem with contemporary radicalization, and the violence that stems from it?

It should be obvious to those with a keen awareness of realities in Arab and Muslim worlds today. Radical Islamist entrepreneurs who wish to foment violence within and outside Muslim-majority societies are appealing in the main to individuals who no longer believe the stories of credit and blame that either traditional (in the region, mainly) or proto-legal-rational authorities (in the West, mainly) are telling them.

Alas, the weakness of the Arab states, especially the crypto-modern non-monarchical ones, is widely understood; so is the weakness of peripheral Muslim states like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and even Turkey and Iran.¹⁰ The Arab state elite narratives held sway in the immediate post-independence period, feeding off resentment against colonialism and visions of pan-Arab renaissance, but decayed over time due to an accumulation of deficiencies: the administrative failure to provide basic services, to generate broadly shared economic growth, to overcome the divisions of class and sectarian heterogeneity, and more besides. Hisham Shirabi’s theory of distorted modernization in the Arab world, which he called neopatriarchy—a decrepit halfway house between patrimonial and modern forms—still rings basically true, especially when shorn of its own Marxian distortions.¹¹

One result of these deficiencies was the emergence of would-be Arab charismatics to compensate for the inability of these state orders to become functionally modern. Gamal Abdel Nasser was, of course, the most famous of these, and his charisma-dependent deployment of Radio Cairo to stir the Arab masses is of course well known. But even more effective leaders, like Habib Bourguiba, deployed charismatic forms of persuasion to rule and to instill change from above in a patrimonial society. And of course we have the tragicomic charismatic pretenders, some verging on the ridiculous (Muammar Qadaffi) and some on the pathological (Saddam Hussein).

The eventual result of the extrusion of charismatic forms into Arab political life, against the backdrop of incomplete or failed modernization, is that political discourse in most Arab countries has long since decayed into a kind of parallel pantomime in which leaders, media, and publics use words as mere gestures to protect themselves from harm, not to actually debate problems and issues. Most of these societies are stalled; some of them are actually falling apart thanks to massive serial eruptions of sectarian and ethnic identity politics. The stories that national leaderships tell fall increasingly flat on the cynical ears of frustrated young populations. Since the failure of the wildly misnamed Arab Spring, things have only gotten worse, as survivor states have doubled down on their repressive apparata.

All people need essentially a three-legged stool to participate stably in society and to contribute, in turn, to the stability of the social commons: a stool composed of identity, community, and purpose. People need to have a sense of who they are, who they can reliably associate with to mutual benefit, and from that community find their purpose in society. To the extent that people lose one, two, or all three of those identity anchors—in the case of the Arab states because the authorities cannot supply them to one extent or another—they soon float in a mist of anxiety, and in a state of near panic to reestablish connections they may be drawn to almost anyone or any organization promising relief. That is why, in the context of the hollowed out Arab nationalist narratives of our day, Leninist-like sectarian organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood thrive in urban areas often ripe with recent arrivals from the countryside—those recently cut off from family and folk tradition; in other words, from the webs of traditional authority weakened in many cases by the onslaught of rapid change.

That is also why those who are among the first in their families to escape illiteracy are so easily wooed by the appearance of intellectual sophistication in sermons plied by radical preachers. Forty years ago, cassette tapes embodied a new technology that worked for Rouhollah Khomeini as well as for Osama bin Laden, Anwar Awlaki, and many others. It is why television became and remains such a powerful medium in the contemporary Middle East for the spread of radical ideas—note the popularity of Yusuf al-Qaradawi broadcasting sermons from Doha, to take one example—because relatively few among the targeted audiences are deep literate and, reared in tribal or patrimonial social structures, they are attuned to the aesthetic of such appeals. They may be able to read lists and menus, but true deep literacy is still relatively rare in the Arab Muslim world; and deep literacy in Arabic and other Middle Eastern language among those living in minority Muslim communities in Europe is rarer still.¹²

As to those Muslim minority communities in Europe, where most of the salafi-sourced terrorism perpetrated within Europe comes, Olivier Roy first and many others since have made clear that the kinds of people—mostly young, unmarried Muslim males—who become salafi-professing terrorists are not embedded in traditional Muslim family networks, nor do they typically have madrassa-level educations in their own religious cultures.¹³ They tend to be attracted to neo-fundamentalist appeals as refugees from anomie. They may or may not have personality types that predispose them to being “captured” by the charismatic social authority of others,¹⁴ but they clearly have been “shock” pluralized: exposed without much buffer or respite to ways of thinking and behaving that are at variance with their own early socialization—whether in the Middle East or in the laps of immigrant parents in Europe.

As such they may find themselves between worlds, confused, often alienated from family, and feeling very much alone.¹⁵ So consider the following extract:

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages . . . overlap. . . . Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand.

It would be hard, perhaps impossible, to improve on these words as a general description of what young Muslim Arabs are experiencing today, in the region and perhaps especially in Europe—words written in 1927 by Herman Hesse in Steppenwolf to describe the agony of the post-World War generation in Europe. The powerful echo we hear in them today suffices to emphasize the truth that the underlying energies of political violence are not restricted to any one ethnicity or faith community. It also suggests the kind of unstuck circumstances in which the appeal of charismatic authority will be strongest.

The charismatic mode of establishing authority over others can work within any social structure or culture, given circumstances sufficiently unusual. But it works most readily on targets who are in the main pre- or non-deep literate, who are cut off from the stabilities of traditional authority and the peer anchors of mimetic learning modes tied to family. It works best on those who feel put upon by isolation, perceptions of discrimination (real or imagined), frozen or downward-slanting social mobility and status, and, often enough, sexual guilt and frustration.¹⁶

Moreover, those socialized in pre-modern social structures typically have a weak sense of individual agency, and a much stronger sense of communal agency. The hierarchy of authority in Middle Eastern tribal and, in somewhat less confining patrimonial societies, discourages young and socially marginal males from having and articulating their own opinions about political and religious matters; all the more so for women in all but a few such societies. Such people are not supposed to have ideas of their own, and the methods of traditional education that still dominate most Muslim societies, which rarely teach critical thinking skills, turn disposition into reality.

When thrown into social situations outside the region in which individual agency is the norm and is expected to be manifest in behavior, such individuals often experience a kind of cognitive ataxia. Many then go looking for someone to give them the opinions others have told them they are supposed to have. To get them they may seek ersatz father or sheikh figures—and virtual kin networks related to them—like the ones they knew before. It is by no means unusual for such individuals to want to surrender agency to others, to relieve them of the responsibility of choice. We tend to focus analytic attention on leaders; but we would be wise also to seek a better understanding of followers, without whom leaders would be unemployed.

These mostly youthful searchers are, then, strongly other-directed personalities, to use the language made famous in The Lonely Crowd (1961)—because their ur-culture and attendant social structure helped mightily to make them so. This is why charismatic mosque preachers in Europe have so many young men to recruit­—like moths to a flame they come, so to speak, soul-seared, often desperate, seeking identity, community, and purpose. Then, once hooked, peer pressure kicks in, pushing away dissonant thoughts, as in any cult.

But even absent a literal community of proselytized believers, the internet really is, as Sageman argued, a potent recruiting tool for radicalization and violence within Western countries. Not only do internet chat rooms and connections establish instant virtual communities when literal ones are hard or impossible to form, but—and this is the key—no one can intrude on the transmissions.

In a normal social setting, a radical entrepreneur can only rarely monopolize the cognitive space of a would-be recruit. In face-to-face social encounters, multiple cues pointing in many directions are present. Third parties can express doubt or ask questions, so that the bubbles of enthusiasm radical entrepreneurs conjure can be burst. But not in internet communications, which are sealed, close-ended transactions. Yes, the images attending the words from a charismatic figure can be powerful, even mesmerizing and all but hypnotic, evoking a kind of animal magnetism. We all know that images are better at communicating affect than rational analysis. But in addition to that, salafi entrepreneurs are expert at cultivating their message to suit its receptivity in the charismatic mode.¹⁷

Western societies have their own terrorists, of course. Examples come to mind from Tasmania, Norway, Northern Ireland, Germany, Spain, and the United States. In the United States we have Muslim lone wolf or internet-inspired violence perpetrated by legal residents: Fort Hood, San Bernardino, Boston Marathon, Orlando. But we also and obviously have experienced episodes of domestic terrorism that have nothing to do with Islam in any form. John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 qualifies as an historical example of domestic terrorism, no objective doubt about it. More recently, of course, we have the Santa Fe, Texas shooter, the Parkland, Florida shooter, the Las Vegas shooter, Dylan Root, the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter, and one could go on.

But consider carefully: No one recruited these murderers. No charismatic figure manipulated them; no one persuaded them to do anything. No one sent them cassette tapes or links on the internet. There is no indication that any of them were outer-directed personalities. They were all, to every appearance, inner-directed individual actors, members of no group. They were all deep literate, too, even the youngest among them. The differences between them and radicalized Islamist terrorists, in the region and in Europe, could hardly be starker.

This means something. It means, in sum, that methods of persuasion and manipulation by radicalization entrepreneurs tend to work best when they converge with the dominant forms of authority in the social-psychological environment of their targets. Charismatic techniques don’t usually work well on individual-agency, inner-directed, literate Westerners, except in highly atypical circumstances when all hell has broken loose—such as the Steppenwolf-era conditions in the Weimar republic that enabled the rise of the Nazis. By the same token, legal-rationalist scripted modes don’t work well on patrimonial/tribal-socialized Middle Easterners, and on other people still bound to patrimonial and/or tribal social structures.

There is at least one obvious implication here for Western policymakers: Avoid the rationalist fallacy in counter-terrorism efforts.¹⁸ Government messaging centers that focus on texts to be written, translated, and then conveyed one way or another to potential rank-and-file purveyors of violence in the region don’t work, and never will. Rank-and-file terrorists do not recruit themselves from having read Sayyid Qutb essays in literary Arabic. This is no way to fight a so-called war of ideas.

Several other practical policy implications can be teased out of this analysis, as well. One concerns the possibility that exposure to charismatic personalities, even when mediated by television and the internet, can evoke physiological reactions in some ways similar to those of addiction to certain experiences, such as gambling, sex, roller coasters, extreme sports, and others. Let these implications await future analysis, however.

*I thank Sara Brzuszkiewicz, editor of the European Eye on Radicalization project, for posing to me the question of the relationship between charisma and radicalization, and I acknowledge helpful comments during the drafting of this essay from Anna Simons and Nathaniel Garfinkle.