Why Do People Join Evil Organizations?

In this article the people im mostly going to be talking about are people who join organizations such as ISIS, Doomsday Cults, ect, when they are complete outsiders (don’t have a direct connection to a group’s startup or problems. The reason I want to focus on people who are recruited or join ijn the later stages after the intital creation is because many times the people who help create the organization are genuinely evil or extremist people. Many of those recruited later on are often recruited into the ideology because they are looking for some place to belong.

There is no doubt that within the human nature of everyone lies a part of us that wants to belong. Whether this is just society as a whole, a specific friend group or a group of our peers, doesn’t matter We are after all social animals and it is in our primal coding to seek the comfort and security a group brings. Unfortunately for many, this can be something that is used against us, specifically in the case of organizations that are evil.

I saw a few documentaries over the past few days, one on a British boy, Tommy Evans, who went to Somalia and joined Al Shibaab and another about the Heavens Gate cult, which saw 39 people commit mass suicide in 1997. While each group no doubt had different motives, the people they targeted and recruited later on were very similar, those who were having a hard time and felt like they didn’t belong.

In the case of Tommy Evans, he was depressed after a string of disappointments in his life and more importantly, feeling a lack of purpose. In the case of many of the Heaven’s gate recruits they were targeted for the same reason. Giving themselves to a cause, even one that was evil and murderous, gave them life meaning. When you believe that the future only holds more disappointment, someone promising you future happiness will take your attention. Unfortunately in both cases it ended in death and destruction.

For young people today, there seems to be a rise in many who feel like our lives don’t matter which is unfortunate. Many see the future as only more of the same or worse and that it will only contain suffering. This is not true, but we see this with doomsday cults and the amount of people who seemingly want the world to collapse into chaos. There have always been people who claim the end of the world is coming, but more often these days it seems like people are believing it. Tommy Evans ultimately would be killed in the fighting, but he is not the only foreigner who has gone over to fight with these extremist organizations, or has joined a cult because they lack purpose.

Thanks to @Elyaque for the badges