Two of the central problems facing the world are terrorist and totalitarian movements, and two of the

central problems preventing us from defeating them are understanding why: 1) people join them
despite their virtually complete lack of theoretical, moral, intellectual, or practical merit, and 2) people
refuse to leave even after that lack of merit has become obvious. By way of example, consider ISIS.
Their claims to religious orthodoxy, knowledge, and authority have been forcefully, overwhelmingly,
rejected by Muslim religious scholars and laymen. Their depravity is obvious not only to their
coreligionists, but to any casual observer. They have produced no real scholarship, and are said to have
banned arithmetic. While it’s debatable how seriously they try to govern their “state”, a large part of
their rule consists in executing anyone who might disagree with them, and they justify their claims to
fight for all Muslims mostly by abusing and killing them at will. As for their military forces and plans,
they have fewer than 100,000 men to conquer the world with, and their strategy, reportedly, is for God
to destroy their enemies after their enemies have defeated them. This only counts as a plan if there is
some reason to believe God is on their side, and we have already covered that above.

Nonetheless, people join them, and keep fighting for them long after they should have learned better.

It’s the same with totalitarian dictators. The Kim dynasty in North Korea still has supporters willing to
sacrifice their hearts, lives, and souls for them, even though they have never been good for anything.

Given all this, we might describe the mindset of a typical ISIS Jihadi like this:

T: Nothing will make the Islamic State wrong.

If T were translated into formal logic, we could immediately derive sentences like: ‘If we lose Raqqa, it
won’t make the Islamic State wrong,’ and ‘If Baghdadi is hit by lightning, it won’t make the Islamic State
wrong.’ We could also easily prove T false: just find something that discredits the Islamic State. There’s
no shortage.

But let’s suppose an ISIS jihadi infers this from T:

TC: If T is true, it won’t make the Islamic State wrong.

TC must be true, because it just says that if nothing will make the Islamic State wrong, that fact won’t
make the Islamic State wrong. This is T with a redundancy, so T must be true too. So, the jihadi can
“logically” conclude that the Islamic State will never be wrong, untroubled by facts. What’s more, since
TC “proves” itself, no one who “understands” TC can fail to believe it, or believe that the Islamic State is
wrong. Whoever says otherwise is either a fraud or a dupe. This could explain ISIS’ intolerance towards
its enemies—since no one can really disagree with them, those who refuse to admit they’re right either
willfully reject divine truth, or mindlessly follow those who do. Anyone who’d do either deserves
persecution.

TC and T together comprise a sophisticated example of what logicians call the “Curry Paradox”. A plain
example would be: ‘If this sentence is true, then 2+2=5’. Sentences like it can be used to “prove”
anything, no matter how false. Logicians would deny that TC follows logically from T, though there’s no
consensus why. I submit that the loyalty shown to terrorist or totalitarian ideologies is due to their
followers’ willingness to infer sentences like TC from sentences like T. I also submit that such inferences
are used in recruitment: if a recruiter can just get his victim to contemplate sentence TC, it can “prove”
to him that the Islamic State is right, regardless of facts.
Since there is no reason to accept T or TC when you understand their meanings and know the facts,
knowledgeable people who claim to accept them must be manipulating words without regard to their
meanings, i.e., mechanically, by (simple) algorithms. People often have trouble understanding how
terrorists think. If I am right, they think mechanically: manipulating ideas like pieces in a board game.
Understanding this could help us to deal with them.

This view might explain terrorist and totalitarian tendencies towards atrocities. Suppose, e.g., that ISIS
starts to look wrong, either morally or politically, or religiously. To defeat this “false narrative”, its
fanatics will either try to change inconvenient truths or find some new verbal algorithms, for a “new
narrative”. This would be difficult, if they needed a workable algorithm for doing some real good, since
they have practically no experience with work, reality, or goodness, but they don’t. They just need
something to distract people from their awareness of Isis’ failings long enough to reconsider deriving TC
from T. Then, T will “prove” itself and retroactively “justify” their distraction. Spectacular atrocities
make excellent distractions.