The Psychology of Extremism and Its Appeal

Seriously though, we've heard a lot about extremism recently, a nastier, harsher atmosphere everywhere, more abuse and bother boy behavior, less friendliness and tolerance and respect for opponents. All right, but

what we never hear about extremism is its advantages. Well, the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies. Let me explain.

The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. Attractive, isn't it? So if you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway,

and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you're only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons, and that if it wasn't for them, you'd actually be good-natured

and courteous and rational all the time. So if you want to feel good, become an extremist. Okay, now you have a choice. If you join the hard left,

they'll give you their list of authorized enemies. Almost all kinds of authority, especially the police, the city, Americans, judges, multinational corporations, public schools, furriers, newspaper owners, fox hunters, generals,

class traitors, and of course, moderates. Now, once you're armed with one of these super lists of enemies, you can be as nasty as you like and yet feel your behavior's morally justified. So you can strut around abusing people

and telling them you could eat them for breakfast and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth, a, a, a fighter for the greater good, and not the rather

sad paranoid schizoid that you really are