Why Is Radical Islam Catchy?

I was reading this article, on a British Jihadi Jane who was radicalized:

Kim Miners, who has posed topless for the Sun before is being groomed to become an IS jihadi bride, police fear…

Family say that Kim began finding comfort in Islam after her father died in a freak accident in 2010…

In one message last week he posted an image of a kitten wearing a suicide belt along with a caption threatening bombings against Shi’ite Muslims. Miners responded with a string of jokey emojis…

Her transformation is thought to have begun about a year later when she was deeply affected by the death of her father, Anthony, in a freak drowning.

A relative said that “she never recovered from it.”

Miners appears to have found solace in the company of Muslim friends, including another white convert…

She said her interest in Islam was sparked last year, adding: “I found peace through it all,” Miners said from her semi-detached home.

There is no guarantees anything is real. She could just as easily be playing the Jihadis, but I did find the account interesting.

Sad girl, family trauma, and lots of tattoos, which in women seems to often associate with a dissatisfaction with their self-perception and a desire to project a different image to the world, than the woman thinks she projects naturally.

In short, when I look at her, I see a lot of amygdala-angst haunting her, and driving her to seek refuge from it. Islam, particularly the radical form, is very black and white. It takes a certain amygdala-tolerance to look clearly and honestly at the world, and yourself, warts and all, tolerating the bad with the good.

If someone lacks that tolerance, then an ideology which says that there is perfection and pure evil, and your job is simply to do “good” by supporting perfection, will appeal because it eradicates those gray aspects of the world. It is almost like the use of splitting to reduce the amygdala load from tolerating even partly negative aspects to your environment.

Add in a self-esteem aspect, such as that by adhering to the religion you are innately superior, a morality amygdala relaxant, such as nothing you do to unbelievers is wrong, an in-grouping element, ie that believers are always willing to war on your behalf, so you are always on the inside of the group and supported, and the amygdala distracting elements of videos like beheading videos, which are so shocking your mind can’t even think about your recently deceased father, and the entire religion is a sort of anti-amygdala hijack, appealing to the most amygdala-dysfunctional individuals within the society.

Notice the parallels to liberalism, which justifies every urge the liberals have, splits the world into their good and conservative’s evil, and adds an element of inherent superiority. All that is missing is the group, but they try to make that up by importing savages and currying favor with criminals, which they feel will be loyal to them.

I would imagine the longer you shut off your amygdala with these ideologies, the more your mind grows to need that amygdala-relaxing aspect of the ideology. Don’t forget, it would unnaturally attract the amygdala addled to begin with, so reprogramming a jihadi or liberal may be like trying to talk logic to a liberal. What they really need is an amygdala-stimulating period like a boot camp, to acclimate their amygdala to perpetual negativity around them, before to give their brain the “physical” strength to tolerate a world, sans radical Islam. Then they can let go of the ideology.

I don’t know where that specific amygdala-centric model of Islam leads, but it feels like the different perspective could one day help create a mental hack, perhaps in the form of a religion or belief system, to attract and reprogram liberals, using the currents of their own mental deficiencies to chart a cognitive course more acceptable to conservatives.

The amygdala hijack may offer the ability to drive liberals from a debate, but it may also offer insight into the forces driving liberal cognition – in such a way that it may be used to alter the conclusions they come to.

But for now, all we need to do is wait for the apocalypse to provide the requisite stress, and remodel amygdalae.