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Does fanaticism run in families?
This question has bothered me throughout my life, having emerged from a rather eccentric family that held different iterations of extremist beliefs over three generations.
From my grandmother to myself, we ran an intense lineage from Protestant Calvinism (my grandmother) to support of "Tartan Terrorists" (my father) to membership of a revolutionary Communist party (myself). Looking back, all that these three wildly diverging belief systems share in common seems to be a millenarian belief that the end is nigh, and only a special elite can save our souls/the nation/the world.
It would seem that our family has had a deep-rooted and long-lasting psychological propensity to be drawn towards good/evil binary thinking and totalizing belief systems. Whether this was my grandmother declaring that 99 percent of our town was "Sinners, damned to hell," my father writing patriotic poems to support fire bombers of foreign-owned cottages in the Scotland of the 1980s, or myself in my 20s screaming in the streets for a violent international revolution.
The funny thing is, Calvinists, Communists, and Nationalists all despise each other. My father loathed and rebelled against his religious mother’s “hypocritical puritanism,” as I, in turn, rebelled against my father’s “xenophobic nationalism.” Nonetheless, we all ended up adopting intense fanatical beliefs, and somehow even living under one roof.
Which raises a curious question: How could such conflicting extremisms co-exist within one family?
This could imply that our family had some deep psychological need for extremist narratives to live by, something like an emotional framework independent of what the actual beliefs were. We were willing to overlook my grandmother's belief in hellfire and damnation because, in a sense, my father and I had our own hell fires burning—his was to be full of English "sassenachs," and mine was to be the burning pyres of the final destruction of capitalism. We all liked burning our enemies, period.
We seemed to exhibit a psychological craving for the intensity of these beliefs, irrespective of their actual content. We may even have found certain common psychological rewards from holding fanatical beliefs.
Which begs the next question: Was my family's extremism a product of nature or nurture?
To answer this, a few years ago, I sought out a book—The True Believer (1951) by Eric Hoffer. Its subtitle is “Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,” but it could equally well be titled “an investigation into the psychological rewards of fanaticism and extremism.” It's a very fine book, full of insights about the dangerous psychology of fanatics, and Hoffer, controversially, investigates extremists from all backgrounds, Communists, nationalists, Nazis, and religious converts, and finds that they have more in common on a psychological level than what separates them ideologically.
Hoffer (1902-1983), a self-educated former longshoreman and “drifter,” was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983. He was an unlikely visionary; although not a qualified psychiatrist, his analysis of fanaticism is only really now being proven by scientific studies.
Most importantly, his book has insights into the role that “self-sacrifice" plays in passionate political and religious beliefs. He inverted the usual assumption that people with profound beliefs are willing to make huge self-sacrifices. Instead, he claimed that people with a foundational desire for self-sacrifice will seek out extremist belief systems to follow, and they may be led to one or another quite randomly. By way of evidence, he showed that the Nazis and Communists used to recruit from each other’s ranks, rather than bother themselves with the more emotionally tepid, democratic types.
His most alarming insight was that for some people, the Western “self” is a terrible burden that they have to shake off; that the modern demand that we all “be someone” causes great distress to some and is too much for them to bear; that rather than being seen as a “failure” or “a nobody,” such distressed people chose to dissolve themselves instead into a fanatical movement.
Hoffer claimed:
“Those who see their lives as spoiled or wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom… the passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many that make up the tunic; one thread indistinguishable from others. No-one can point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.”
What such people are seeking is to be freed from the responsibility of individual existence, from the “fearful burden of free choice.” A fanatic feels a deep longing to “efface the self we want to forget.” As one Nazi convert cited in Hoffer’s book claims, he joined “to be freed from freedom.”
Although politically poles apart, the far right and the far left (and also the extremely religious) seem to share this same profound desire to merge with others in a belief system in which a sacrifice is made of a self that was unwanted and caused existential distress, anyway. As Hoffer says, "What matters is not the contents of the cause, but the total dedication and communion with a congregation."
It is a daring theory, but one that appears to be backed up by a recent study—"Psychological Features of Extreme Political Ideologies" by Jan-Willem Van Proojen and Andre P.M Krouwel (2019).
The study bears out Hoffer’s theories and backs up my own personal findings from my family of fanatics. It finds that: “Although there are important psychological differences between people with left-wing and people with right-wing ideologies, there are also substantial similarities between left- and right-wing extremists that differentiate them from political moderates.”
Most importantly, the study “suggest[s] that political extremism is fuelled by feelings of distress and is reflected in cognitive simplicity, overconfidence, and intolerance.”
The theory of heightened distress seems to resonate deeply within our family history. Looking back, our different generations have all suffered from a distress "hair trigger"; we are all tense and sensitive people prone to depression; we have often reiterated that we are “tired of the self.”
Perhaps our family is "wired" to fanaticism through our DNA in much the same way that sensitivity to distress, stuttering, addiction, and digestion problems have passed through our family tree. There could then be a gene for extremism/fanaticism. Or at least a genetic propensity to heightened distress that makes fanaticism more attractive as a remedial behavior.
Or, on the other hand, perhaps this is more a question of nurture, and the children of extremists end up traumatized by their fanatical parents. Perhaps “disorganized attachment” between child and parent can be passed from generation to generation, in much the same way that trauma and certain personality disorders can be passed down the family line through traumatization and re-traumatization. Addiction, too, seems to be passed on through such mechanisms.
There is also some disturbing evidence that trauma can be passed on through epigenetics, that "Your experiences during your lifetime—particularly traumatic ones—would have a very real impact on your family for generations to come." An experience of living with traumatic extremism would then get passed down the family line, like an echo.
I will leave this for scientists to investigate, but it does seem to me that Hoffer’s theories are correct and that a higher propensity for distress within our family history has led us again and again over the generations to a powerful need for fanaticism.
If it is true that fanaticism passes through families and can morph in content over generations, then this poses problems for parents with extreme beliefs. If you raise a child within your belief system, they will likely go on to be an extremist like you, but the beliefs they come to hold in later life may not be the same ones that you raised them with. They may even directly oppose yours.
Parents might raise kids to have hard left beliefs only to see them grow into supporters of the hard right or religious fundamentalists. The reverse would also be true. The form of extremism remains the same, but the content changes over time. Fanaticism seems to be like a hollowed-out vessel that needs to be filled with belief, no matter what the belief.
