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" Captive Minds in Search of Identity "
Kastens, Theana Yatron
Glucklich, Ariel
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1052735
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| Doc. No
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TL51852
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| Main Entry
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Kastens, Theana Yatron
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| Title & Author
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Captive Minds in Search of Identity\ Kastens, Theana YatronGlucklich, Ariel
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| College
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Georgetown University
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| Date
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2019
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| Degree
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D.L.S.
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2019
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| Note
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264 p.
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| Abstract
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This study examines the lives of several Western-based individuals who left the West to pursue new lives dedicated to the destruction of liberal Western society with the aim of replacing it with a society based on an Islamic Sharia code of justice. In each case, the examined individuals left sufficiently pronounced social footprints from the time period before their new, radicalized identities emerged to provide insights into the conversion process on their paths to violent Islamic jihadism. Their individual behaviors and mindsets are considered carefully through an interdisciplinary lens that includes religion, geopolitics, history, digital technology, sociology, biology, ethology, anthropology, environment, neuroscience, genetics, memetics, epigenetics, psychology, etymology, mythology, exchange symbolism, and identity. No one individual is the subject of this work. All selected individuals are collectively considered to illustrate the human mind’s susceptibility to skillfully tailored messages–targeted propaganda–that harness the emotional reins of the individual and produce profound psychological reorientations of reality. Emphasis is placed on the powerful influence of memes in shaping an individual’s identity and how that identity commands the life decisions of the individual. The emerging new reality that takes effect coexists in a parallel world along with the physical world in which the individual continues to inhabit. The backdrop of everyday life camouflages signs of the individual’s conversion to extremist activities and/or intent. The individual changes before the eyes of others, who remain blind to the import of the changes. The individuals who appear in this study each offer tangible evidence to support singular and interrelating aspects of the insidious effect of targeted jihadist propaganda on the human mind, and how that propaganda shapes their transformed identities. This study follows a cultural anthropological path, drawing on the works of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy, cultural anthropologist Adam H. Russell, and others to examine the science behind an individual’s metamorphosis from a traditional Western, secular-based identity to a radical Islamic jihadist identity intent on genocidal annihilation of the West. The behavioral model that is crucial to defining jihadist identity, and which is employed in this study, was conceived by forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy, who developed the Pathway to Violence model for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioral Analysis Unit at the United States Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia. It establishes the progressive conversion of the once seemingly socially adjusted individual to one who perpetrates violence indiscriminately upon an unsuspecting and innocent public population. The bifurcated focus along which the elements of this study are drawn and are made applicable to this model are centered on social identity and cultural social forces shaping that identity. This study aims to answer the questions of what causes Western individuals to shed their Western identities, what draws them in to identify with forces of radical and violent Islam, and what encourages them to wage jihad against their homelands in the West. Basic concepts of social science, such as social identification, cultural anthropology, collective fictions, exchange symbolism, crisis of identification and, in the end, how the “me” becomes “we,” draw this examination of virulent human behavior to a conclusion of deeper understanding about the social forces that threaten a livable level of global peace.
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Language
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Neurosciences
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Social research
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Glucklich, Ariel
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Georgetown University
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