Editor's Letter: The fevered fringes

last updated 8 January 2015

All Muslims are terrorists, and all terrorists, Muslim. Barack Obama is a Marxist on a mission to destroy the U.S. economy, after which he will establish concentration camps for Christians. All Republicans are heartless fascists motivated by hatred of blacks, old people, and the poor. These examples of extreme black-and-white thinking, which psychologists would see as evidence of mental illness, can be found every day on the fevered fringes of the blogosphere. Anders Behring Breivik spent a lot of time in that alternative reality, soaking up U.S.-based blogs that insist day after day that “Islam is intrinsically violent” (Jihad Watch) and that “the ‘moderate Islam’ meme [is] a theory with no basis in reality or history” (Atlas Shrugs). Breivik cited these blogs hundreds of times in the 1,516-page manifesto he posted before he went off to slaughter the children of Norwegian socialists. The irony, of course, is that Breivik’s violent and apocalyptic worldview is a mirror image of the one found on jihadist websites; for both the Nordic Crusader and the soldier of Allah, there is no gray—only black and white, Us and Them, humiliation and vengeance.

But let us not blame blogs or the Internet for the proliferation of extremism; they are merely tools. Let us blame black-and-white thinking itself, and the people who indulge in it. To live in a world devoid of doubt and ambiguity is seductive, and deeply satisfying, but it’s crazy, and inevitably leads to crazy results. If people who think differently from you aren’t merely different, but evil, then you mustn’t bargain with them, or even tolerate them. You must destroy them. And so it goes.