Violence as Cargo‑Cult Ideology

The piece argues some modern attackers aren’t expressing a prior ideology but trying to manufacture one through spectacle—wrapping incoherent motives in symbols to create a pseudo‑religion. Meaninglessness in digital culture becomes the motive force; violence is the attempted cure. — This reframes how we diagnose and deter political violence—away from ideology policing and toward addressing meaning deficits and media amplification that reward symbolic carnage.

Sources

The Islamist brotherhood inside our prisons

Steve Gallant 2025.12.02 75% relevant

Both pieces diagnose a phenomenon where violent or extremist action is sustained and reproduced by social dynamics and symbolic logics rather than by straightforward instrumental aims; the article’s description of a prison brotherhood that transmits ideology and enforces loyalty maps onto the cargo‑cult account of violence being manufactured and ritualized rather than purely ideological or opportunistic.

They are engaged in cargo cult meaning-making, the pursuit of a pseudo-religion

Isegoria 2025.10.06 100% relevant

Freddie DeBoer: 'they are engaged in cargo cult meaning‑making... acts we have grown to see as expressions of meaning are in fact childish attempts to will meaning into being through violence.'