The Ring of Fire

Acceptance of the fundamentalist mindset requires that rage and paranoia be regarded as intrinsic psychological phenomena, present across many spectrums of personality and sociological order.  The group, however, is exempted from these categorizations. Though it is capable of unleashing great effect (and sometimes great harm) upon the individuals who compose it, it is devoid of all impulse and emotion. “The group does not have a psychological structure,” writes David Terman, “nor does it have some kind of individual nature.”  When acts of horror are perpetrated by groups guided by a fundamentalist psychology, it is the members’ will that was acted out – and not the will of the meta-entity they all belong to.  The individuals are left as both culpable perpetrators and victims of a poisoned social structure.  Paranoia (whatever its prehistoric uses for survival might be) is best served by a guru to a room of like-minded followers: rather than transference of this emotional archetype from individual to collective, the collective is often able to imbue each of its members with a thoroughly paranoid gestalt.

The sense of otherness that activates the latent rage of the fundamentalist is to them forever drawing nearer, and only dehumanization (or, in the case of ecosystems, de-vivification) can justify the paranoid’s division of the circle of existence into rival camps.  This is what I was attempting to articulate after our viewing of Jesus Camp; what disturbs me is not ‘born-again’ fundamentalism’s fervency (or even so much their theology) ­­­– it is their distorted sense of otherness and threat, which seems to have lead to a strange militarism amongst the otherwise life-loving community.  Their world is ringed with the fire of hell, and only those people of the same specific persuasion may join them in refuge from damnation.  If the fundamentalist could only expand the horizons of who and what they deem to be Good, then the passion that drives them to scorn so much of this Earth and the unrepentant sinners who occupy it could be morphed into a revolutionary zeal for justice and truth.  This has certainly occurred before in history – just regard the life and works of Mohandas Gandhi – but it is exceedingly unlike the religious fundamentalism currently in vogue here in America.  We live in a paranoid state, predictably fearing the end in its many costumes but also each other; forever drawing that unifying circle to smaller and smaller dimensions.