On the Roots of Absolutism

I want to characterize a particular feature of - typically violent - extremism. I call it absolutism: not as a manner of speaking, but as a strictly absolute state of mind from which absolute violence - violence to eliminate an other - follows. In 2006, I published a paper on ‘The Absolute State of Mind in Society and the Individual’. Briefly, I concluded that such state of mind embraced the features that many authors had identified in various forms of fundamentalism: righteousness, single-mindedness, unwavering persistence, simplification, religious sense of cosmic mission, sense of certainty, dread of internal impurity and tendency towards action, including violence. I suggested that this state of mind was ‘characterized by a psychotic idealization and its consequences: massive projective identification and a dread, not just of impurity, but of desolation …’ Furthermore,

Projective identification fosters such a mental state of inner certainty by appropriating the good qualities of the other and expelling the subject's or subject-group's bad qualities into the other. The body-based power of projective identification endows this process with a force akin to a physical force. The mental state of conviction stands in for empirical reality. [Hence,] uncertainty, doubt, reflectiveness, compromise, toleration - understanding itself - are experienced as pollution … External reality can tap the energy of this psychotic process, acting as a vehicle for it. The apparent rationality, say of political or religious absolutism, now suffused with passion, makes it more difficult to understand and stand against. We are not talking about psychotic individuals, but of a common psychotic core, which group formations can accentuate. (p. 137)

I think this characterization remains persuasive but does not sufficiently specify the source of the idea of ‘absolute’. An absolute state of mind aims not only to triumph, but dwells in certainty. It is not a better or stronger view, one