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Fathali Moghaddam’s piece “A Staircase to Terrorism” in American Psychologist (2005), argues that extremism ultimately originates from material conditions that breed feelings of deprivation. He argues that fraternal deprivation as opposed to egoistical deprivation is a better predictor of heightened feelings of discontent among minorities some of which evolve to manifestations of extremism. This means that members of a group who have shared identities are more prone to extremist behaviors as opposed to individuals. Shared feelings of discontent are amplified when it is mirrored in the experience of others that one can relate to.

It is from this fertile social pool that extremism takes roots and flourishes, according to Moghaddam. He outlines a process he refers to as the “staircase to terrorism” where some members who identify with a minority group figuratively climb up distinct stages in achieving a radical consciousness. His discussion gets interesting as he outlines how individuals transform from being merely disgruntled individuals to become a terrorist.

In this “staircase,” the first stages are the negative perceptions of the discontented sector. Apart from the outcome of the processes of justice, it also apparently important how these results are communicated by the dominant power and then received and interpreted by the aggrieved sector – the distributive and interactive aspects of justice respectively.

What Moghaddam refers to as the second floor, zeroes in on the ideological component that molds the raw feelings of discontent towards a particular type of narrative. He goes on to discuss the deepening levels of immersion in the form of actors leading parallel lives and how they end up wielding extreme categorical imperatives driven by a new moral outlook that eventually lead to the terroristic act.

It is a provocative read. While the piece unveils some aspects of the processes involved in the radicalization of individuals in this dangerous time of extremism, and thereby, fulfill the important task of social science to demystify and render unreified aspects of social reality through certain heuristic tools and typology-making; I am afraid it also masks and obfuscates other dimensions of it. This seems to be a necessary trade-off in the work that we do as social scientists. In the course of mapping out the contours in broad strokes, we lose out on the detail.

I was doing research for a UNICEF-commissioned study on the phenomenon of women and children caught in conflict in the marshlands of Liguasan in the year 2004, the site of bloody wars between government soldiers and Moro separatist forces since the time of Marcos in the 70s and continue to this day with the splintering of armed Moro rebel groups with some moving to moderate positions while others towards greater radicalization.

While I was undertaking key informant work on an orphaned boy and he recounted how his parents were hit by government-dropped bombs in the all-out-war of President Estrada of the year 2000, there were grown men from the community who were also listening in. The boy was crying as he recounted his painful memory, but I was surprised that the grown men gathered around us were also in tears. Apparently, as they were listening to the story of the boy about the all-out-war of 2000, it made them recall the own deaths of their parents and relatives in Marcos’ bloody campaign in the 70s. I would later find out that the grown men were veterans of the cyclical wars since the 70s between government and the Muslim separatists aspiring for independence and self-rule. In a different time, before the advance in the peace talks with the MNLF and MILF, they, including the orphaned young boy forced to carry arms by circumstance, were what our government once called as terrorists and child soldiers.

Moghaddam has the tendency to gloss over these historical narratives and given his psychological frame, chalk this off perhaps as ideological manipulation. It appears as if extremism is a clinical condition that afflicts people who are bereft of any agency and social context. I would suggest instead a more nuanced approach, the persistence of historical memory among marginalized groups in understanding and making sense of their historical and material conditions.

The piece makes perfect sense in the context of the post 9-11 era. Reading through his work call out images of a Hollywoord-produced television series where the protagonist is out to prevent the next big terror attack. However, if you were to transpose the staircase metaphor during the French revolution for instance, would the activist and protesters that ushered in the modern republic and the transition from feudal to industrial economies be rightfully labeled as extremists as well? Or for that matter, were the anti-colonial patriots who gave birth to our modern Asian republics fall under the same derided category?

The extremist position has the tendency to reduce the discourse into an us-versus-them debate as Moghaddam correctly observes. But folks, on the other side, also fall into the strap of making caricatures out of those who are unfamiliar and strange to us.