When you study history, you learn that everybody thinks they’re right when they’re alive. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” as they say. The people most guilty of this are the people who never doubt their beliefs: radicals. We’ve always had radicals, but thanks to social media, Gen-Z’s radicals are louder than ever.
A friend once told me how quickly her neighbor’s opinions of people changed. If she was in an argument with somebody, they were the worst person in the world. They were stupid and annoying and jealous.
But once the argument was resolved, that person was the best again. They were so much fun to be around and so smart and funny. And they would remain “the best” until another argument started.
I’ve known people like that. People who never doubted their opinions and assumed the truth of their beliefs to be indisputable. Even when those beliefs changed.
As my friend’s neighbor would say, anyone she’s feuding with has always been the worst. They haven’t become annoying and jealous. They’ve always been that way.
What is a Radical?
A radical is anybody whose tendencies of thought predispose them to getting radicalized and joining a “movement.”
First and foremost, radicals don’t doubt themselves. When they have an idea or a belief, they don’t entertain any notion that they could be wrong.
Usually, the ideas radicals pick up are harmless, like the stupidity of someone they disagree with. But sometimes, they’re not so harmless.
Radicals also lack flexibility. They refuse to change their ideas in almost any situation. They take it as a given that they are right, and are often frustrated and bewildered that other people could ever disagree with them.
Radicals almost always connect their ideas to their identities. They don’t define themselves as “people who are revolting,” but as “revolutionaries.”
And most importantly, radicals are obsessed with what they imagine is the right way to be. They think they know “the truth.”
A lack of doubt and flexibility, identifying with one’s ideas, and being obsessed with “the truth,” are at the core of radical thinking. Together, these tendencies are what make people like my friend’s neighbor particularly susceptible to radicalization.
Radicals in Society
Radicals are easily confused with outspoken people. But having strong views does not make one a radical. There is a key difference: most people can accept the possibility that they’re incorrect or lacking information. But a radical can’t.
So what happens to a person if they have radical tendencies? Are they doomed to join a terrorist group or stage a coup? It doesn’t seem like my friend’s neighbor is going to take to the streets and kill the rich this weekend.
The thing is, very few radicals actually get radicalized. Most people simply won’t fall into the extreme rabbit hole of information that’s necessary for radicalization, no matter how predisposed they are.
But the core of radical thinking, whether it’s concerning an estranged friend or storming the capital, holds the same several tendencies.
Radicals Throughout History
There have always been people with radical tendencies. And there always will be. But when we study radicals throughout history, we study those who became radicalized and joined movements.
Some radicals do awful things when they join movements. The SS Guard comes to mind. Under Hitler’s National Socialist Party, the SS Guard was tasked with carrying out the so-called “Final Solution,” a genocide of all Jews.
It’s hard to believe that SS soldiers and my friend’s neighbor have anything in common. The truth is, they barely do.
The only thing they share is the few small tendencies which predispose a person to radicalization. People like SS soldiers had those core tendencies, but they also had complex, twisted webs of radical ideologies built into them.
It takes a lot to go from a person who lacks doubt and flexibility, and is obsessed with truth, to a person who participates in genocide. It takes years of internalizing ideologies, information isolation, intense social influences, and more.
Beyond all that, it takes someone desperately looking for something to believe in, the most extreme of lonely, lost souls. Most people, whether they have radical tendencies or not, aren’t like that and never will be.
The process of radicalization is what separates the worst of humanity from generally good people with a couple radical tendencies, like my friend’s neighbor.
That being said, radicals can also do fantastic things: take the Black Panther Party for example. In the ’60s and ’70s, they created massively beneficial social and educational programs, set up community health clinics, fought back against police brutality, and pushed along legislation that was key to the Civil Rights Movement.
Sometimes, we need radical action to tear down the old ways. But more often, we just need to keep society moving along. And radicals rarely do that.
Our Super Radicals
Like every generation, Gen-Z has radicalizing movements. Our movements are largely split along the current political divide: we have liberal “woke movements” and conservative “anti-woke movements.”
Woke movements are generally concerned with raising up the historically oppressed: minorities of all kinds, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, etc.
There are a lot of woke movements concerned with climate change, too. A great example is the Just Stop Oil group based in the UK, whose outrageous public protests have garnered them significant (not entirely positive) attention.
Anti-woke movements push back against woke movements’ tendency to disregard people of historically privileged backgrounds in their attempts to equalize. They support the old institutions, like the police, and want things to either stop changing or go back to what they used to be.
A good example of an anti-woke movement is The Proud Boys, a far-right militant group founded on misogynistic, anti-immigrant, and anti-LGBTQ+ ideologies.
Both of these kinds of groups, woke and anti-woke, are radical. Their demands and the way they enforce them are extreme, all-consuming, and impractical.
However, they don’t accurately represent society. The vast majority of us don’t agree with the ideologies of any movement, woke or anti-woke.
Nonetheless, as per usual, a very small minority of Gen-Zers with radical tendencies will fall into an informational rabbit hole, get radicalized, and join one of these movements. That’s just the business of history as usual.
Except it’s not. Several studies have shown that algorithms like those of TikTok and YouTube are driving users towards progressively more controversial, extreme content over time. The sort of extreme content that radical movements generate.
With the help of social media, radical ideologies are reaching more people than ever before. And the easier it becomes to find radicalizing content, the easier it will be for radicals to get radicalized.
What About Everybody Else?
So what does all this mean for us non-radicals? Do we need to stop using these algorithms? Personally, I don’t want to stop watching YouTube or checking Instagram. And I doubt we can expect the whole world to do it.
More importantly, abandoning algorithms won’t stop radicals from finding and joining movements. On some level, radicalization is as inevitable as ever.
I’ll leave you with a very strong suggestion: doubt yourself. Don’t assume you know better than anybody else, or that you’ve got it right. Try not to worship truth. And if you’re arguing with a friend, try to remember their virtues, not just their flaws.
