Intelligence Gathering and the Psychology of Ideologies and Belief Systems

If you want to understand the behavior and actions of terrorists, militant extremists, and organised groups of human beings, you have to develop a significantly thorough and well-rounded understanding of ideologies and belief systems

     Aside from plots, positions, resources, and membership numbers of certain groups, understanding the tenets and goals of their belief systems and ideologies is an essential component of intelligence gathering.

       Ideology and beliefs are the incentive behind the actions of almost all organised bodies of human beings, militant or otherwise. Even apolitical organisations have a set of objectives or goals based around ideas.

Since ideology is the incentive to the actions of groups, understanding the structure of the information that makes up these ideologies can greatly help efforts in combatting things like extremism and terrorism and possibly help predict and anticipate the movements and strategies of these groups.

Every political ideology has a goal. An end objective that it wants to achieve through its actions, violent or otherwise, that it takes once it is in a position of significant political power and influence or in its attempt to achieve said position.

       If you can understand the goal, you can understand the incentives of the actions of those groups and better predict the steps and procedures they will take to achieve them.

     Without a goal or objectives, ideologies and their followers lose purpose and no longer have any direction or drive. You'd be hard pressed to find an ideology that doesn't have goals and objectives wired into the information constructs that make them up. It's a core component of them.

 Once you understand the goals and objectives of the ideologies, predicting the actions and behavior of their followers can become a little easier.

    I have been interested in the study of the psychology of ideologies and belief systems for a significant chunk of my adult life. It's been difficult for me to find a specialized text that focuses on the particulars of what I am interested in. Psychologists like Jordan Peterson touch quite a bit on some of these topics, and I've read some tidbits of his stuff and others here and there. 

    However, studying psychology as long as I have in school has given me a good framework to work with to develop my own thoughts on the topic, and much of how I view this field comes from a lot of thought and meditation on the field.

         In regards to the psychology of ideologies and belief systems, I am going to give my best description of the constructs of how I personally view this field of study and this line of thought. ( note: I am totally open to being wrong and making mistakes. This is just a brainstorm of how I would describe this field and describe how it helps understand and combat extremism and understand human ideation in regards to politics and worldviews)

For starters, I'm going to try to give clarity on the semantics of the terms "ideology" and "belief systems." For the most part, they are pretty synonymous. Belief systems are usually made up of ideologies.

       Lets break down the term ideology.

    An ideology is a system of ideas constructed and utilized by human beings to achieve some sort of goal, political or otherwise.

     An example would be how Al-quaeda, and later the Islamic State, wanted to establish a world-wide islamic caliphate with islamic law as its sociopolitical backbone. The establishment of the caliphate would be the goal of the ideology and the law and cultural customs of that group of people would be the "substance" set of ideas of that ideology. 

     (I want to also mention that ideologies can have more than one goal as well)

     

     As we breakdown the hierarchy of an ideology, the step just below the term "ideology" is the individual ideas themselves that make up a particular ideology.

     - an idea is usually a set of abstract information with a particular construct of meaning and a particular way of being applied to the physical reality human beings operate in. Some ideas can be ambiguous and open to interpretation depending on the receiver of that information and how his or her mind interprets and processes that information.

       -when combined with other ideas, these ideas form the core "substance" or spirit of the ideology, and contain the primary objectives and goals of that ideology.

     Studying the psychology of ideologies would primarily focus on the human mind and how it relates, processes, and interprets ideologies and their respective ideas.

     You can turn to a hard science approach and look at neurology, brain chemistry, genetics, and brain structure in order to understand the physical components of idea formation and processing.

    Also, you can look at the abstract approach and study and think about idea formation and processing that is often hard to quantify and measure substantially.  Most ideas are abstract sets of information that are hard to quantify and measure and ambiguous enough to where the full scope of the information is often cloaked in uncertainty and in the fluidity of the meaning contained in abstract ideas they can be misconstrued or have alternate interpretations. As a result, this is where understanding ideas becomes the most important, and it touches into philosophy quite a bit. It is very difficult to empirically study ideas this way. This is more thought oriented.

    This study touches a lot into information theory. Ideas are just information at their core, so understanding what information is and how the human mind interacts with and processes it is essential in the study of the psychology of ideologies.  

   In my thinking, I look at the human mind as bearing host to information through our senses. Bearing "host" to ideas in a sense. Our minds hold the information we ingest through our senses and, when coupled with memory and learning, the information and ideas we host forms the essence of our consciousness and a core part of our identity.

 

I know not everyone sees it like this, and that's ok. I'm not saying I have it all figured out. This is just food for thought.

Since we bear "host" to our beliefs and our ideas, they often form a core part of who we are. A core part of our identity. This can make breaking the hold an ideology has on someone's mind exceedingly difficult.

We group and organise based around shared beliefs and ideas, and the natural human predisposition towards tribalism, "us-or-them" in-group out-group mentalities makes this ideological coalescing between humans a leading cause of conflict in the world. Ideologies like to compete for hosts or eliminate and neutralize competing ideologies and their hosts. This, naturally, leads to conflict.

      However, understanding the depth, scope, and nature of the information that makes up the ideas that make up oppositional ideologies as well as understanding their goals and objectives can make their followers more easy to predict in their actions and behaviors and may even make it more easy to deradicalize terrorists or diffuse extremism and disarm extremists.

    To conclude, I believe understanding the psychology of ideologies and belief systems should be an essential component of intelligence gathering and any anti-terrorism/anti-extremism mission.

Happy election day everyone!