𝑹𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏: 𝑨 𝒃𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒇 𝒅𝒊𝒔𝒄𝒖𝒔𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏

The dictionaries and general public opinions have defined radicalisation as an extremist ideology towards anything and everything, say, religion, situation, society or sect of people belonging to a particular group. You would be wondering that what made me think or write about this topic which is highly sensitive and subjective in nature and might also result into severe disagreements and difference of opinions if talked about openly in public, but I feel that it should be discussed and should be brought to our attention especially during these times when one social media post holds an extremely surprising power to change people’s mind or to rather trigger people’s minds.

Initially, I used to think about this mass destruction tool called radicalisation as an issue of a group of people having similar mind-sets and used to believe that those people are born that way, i.e, triggered and manipulated in every way possible but after researching and developing a keen curiosity towards understanding the depth of this issue, I realised that radicalisation can be easily attributed to human nature since it directly triggers or boosts the most common human emotion of supremacy and dominance.

After analyzing several different opinions about this issue and coming across several different people who somehow had the qualities that could take them towards extremism and violence, I came to a point where I started noticing few common qualities that people with extremist thoughts had or might end up having if triggered in any possible way. I would like to briefly discuss those points in the upcoming paragraphs.

Firstly, I would like to bring your attention towards the fact that people with high emotional turmoil who show extremely minimal patience towards researching facts, end up believing the facts that are being fed to them by the AI tools either knowingly or unknowingly. I noticed that due to least interest towards reading about the actual facts and figures, people end up picking up the easiest ways to understand social incidents be that short posts or unauthorized news serves both entertainment and fake ideology.

Secondly, I feel that social isolation or less inter- cultural interaction has led to more confusions and pre judgemental ideology towards a certain sect of people belonging to a specific caste or religion or even towards certain incidents that include beliefs that are different from what the person has been taught or fed about. It can be observed that most people who have developed a radicalized mindset towards anything are those who have absolutely zero idea about the ground reality of their extremist thoughts or hatred towards that particular person or situation.

Thirdly, it is pretty much accepted and historically observed that having supremacist and dominant thoughts are a part of human existence and this nature alone has led to the worst nightmares of all times, wars and violence. It can be easily concluded by observing people that humans who have extremely shallow understanding of their own beliefs, ideologies and opinions are the ones who find cheap and unfortunate satisfaction in insulting or bringing down other’s way of living or beliefs that happen to be different from theirs. These people find immense satisfaction and boost in their egoistic personalities after having unrealistic and hypothetical understanding about both sides of the stories which according to me is the biggest disrespect and insult to human intellect that is naturally gifted to humans by nature unlike AI, which is ofcourse gifted to humans by humans itself, bringing the human intellect on the top of the pyramid! The aforementioned statement might sound extremely opinionated and inflexible but it's something that is almost a fact, unapologetically.

Fourthly, it can be argued that people who are emotionally vulnerable tend to get easily manipulated or triggered which can even lead to extremist ideas and actions in a few cases. Although, I believe, it's almost a gift to be sensitive towards issues while keeping our sanity alive but at the same time, it should be kept in mind that our thoughts should never be against our morals and violence or any sort of negative actions are never going to provide solutions to those issues. Rather, it should be focused that one develops a personality that has both emotions and rationality so that people and especially youth don't reflect their triggered emotions upon their actions and are able to come up with justified reasons for agreement and disagreement upon the issues.

Finally, after discussing few points briefly that might lead to radicalisation, let's keep one thing in mind that this is a very subjective topic to discuss about but at the same time I would like to bring your attention to instances where people have chances for getting falsely accused for either being radicalized or moving towards radicalisation. In several instances where you feel that people are just being different from the crowd to align their lives according to the beliefs and ideologies passed on from generations through societies and people might not be radicalisation at all and rather just a personal choice of living their life in a certain manner that would be ideal according to their beliefs and is harmless to anything and anyone around them.We cannot come up with a conclusion so easily that a sect/person/society are moving towards radicalisation just because they are not similar to our way of understanding that how lives should be lived. I feel that there is an endless amount of beauty in accepting the difference between the human forms, their beliefs, ideologies, religion,opinions, cultures and appearances.

Although several different points and perspectives could be discussed about radicalisation since it is very subjective in nature, I would like to conclude this article by what Jeff Sharlett mentioned about the radical mindset that liberalism does not speak to ideals, radicalisation does. Therefore, let's not disrespect the complex beauty of human minds which is naturally oriented towards critical thinking and comes up with thoughts, beliefs and conclusions that are at least close to righteousness if not completely righteous

~Ayushi