Total-institution socialization via isolation and occupancy transforms civilians into terrorists.

Evidence

This transformative socialization is usually carried out in a closed environment that becomes the recruits’ pervasive new reality, with new kinships, strongly held group beliefs and values, all-encompassing codes of conduct, few vestiges of individuality, and substantial rewarding and coercive power—all with the purpose of completely transforming recruits’ personal lives (Bandura, 1982). Those in charge further enhance the power of communal influence by curtailing recruits’ personal contacts and exposure to countervailing influences outside the group. Immersion in heavily prescribed activities that leave the recruits with little time to think or to explore other milieus has similar encapsulating effects. Regardless of the particular constellation of influences that shape the path to terrorism, every terrorist faces the moral problem of having to kill innocent people. Skill in disengagement of morality also requires intensive training to be able to inflict pain and suffering with equanimity (Haritos-Fatouros, 2003). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2127

Categorization

• XREF: This is Goffman’s total institution applied to terrorism; also directly maps onto my kept material about child soldiers being induced to violence through ritual training. — connects to: Purely self-interested individuals collapse when organization and terror arrive — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 169; Totalitarian power requires remaking individuals from inside outward with terror. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1140
• BMF: The closed environment that becomes a ‘pervasive new reality’ with new kinships and few vestiges of individuality strongly evokes the One State in Zamyatin’s ‘We’ — collective transformation through enclosure and prescribed activity.