Thank You For Listening to My TED Talk

-

On Thursday, June 12, it was my pleasure to present a lecture titled “What Do Destructive Cults, Violent Religious Extremism, Far Right Militias & Conspiracy Theories Have In Common?” at a TEDxYouth event organized by some wonderful students at my school.

The basic conceit was to apply classic concepts in the typology of religion developed by Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge to several groups that have gained traction by exploiting modern feelings of isolation and powerlessness.

“Everywhere under Heaven is in great disarray,” says the Zhuangzi, a third century BCE book of Taoist wisdom—“the whole world tends to see only one aspect and think that they ahve grasped the whole of it.” O tempora o mores is hardly a fresh complaint in the long record of social unrest, nor is violent extremism a new response.

But the groups that take advantage of this all too human tendency to seek simple, self-affirming answers can and must be avoided. The solutions offered by these movements are destructive not only to those they exclude and villify, but to their own adherents. While my all too brief talk targets Daesh, the Three Percenters, and QAnon, the same critique can apply to any number of groups that seek to exploit the insecurities of young people – in particular young men.

I will add the video when I have it, but for now here are my notes (click the link below or expand this post).

Outline

Presentation


Location: Wrocław, Poland

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Heart of Darkness

-
Oh, what a place, what people! What a civilization is this of ours—this godless civilization founded on whiskey, Blackwood’s and the ‘Bonzo’ pictures! God have mercy on us, for all are part of it. —George Orwell The farang in Luang Prabang came in two broad varieties. First, the tourists, who found Laos on their itemized Lonely Planet itinerary after the tsunami forced vacationers heading to Thailand to move inland in 2000. These would stroll the colonial graveyard of the city, drink Lào-Láo in Veng Vieng, and head back into Thailand via the Friendship Bridge, with a Third World stamp to liven up their passports, and several complaints about the condition of the Laotian roads burning venomous holes in their mouths from all the retellings. Second, the travelers, who stopped in Luang Prabang because it’s in the middle of Laos, and who are quick to leave for the country’s fringes: the Four Thousand Islands of the southern Mekong, the backwater towns like Muang Ngoi or Muang Sing or Phon...
Read more

Red Roses of Sarajevo

-
There was once a land called Bosnia A fasting a frosty a Footsore a drossy a Land forgive me That wakes from sleep With a Defiant Sneer —Mak Dizdar The parks in Sarajevo double as graveyards, though the clean white obelisks that mark Christian burials are kept separate from the slanting mushroom-headed plinths of Islam, which look unfathomably old, stained by dirt and weather. There was nowhere else to bury the dead during the four years under Serbian siege (1992-5). I went to the Holiday Inn where all the journalists stayed, it being the only hotel still open at the time. It's on the Zmaja od Bosne road, a wide highway that goes from the city to the airport, and that was affectionately renamed Sniper's Alley during the siege. Serbian marksmen in the hills targeted civilians, who had to run through the marked sniper zones on their way to work, school, church, or the sparsely supplied grocer. It's vertiginous and unreal to see a city so recently affected by war, where many b...
Read more

Paris Fried Chicken

-
Image
I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. —Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses" So I thought a technical devil destroyed all the photos I took between London and Paris—all of them except the last one I would have chosen to keep: However, the missing photos (500 of them) were miraculously uncovered on one of the hostel computers in Paris after I left. It will probably take a month or two for me to unveil them. In the meantime, here are some pictures of Lille in France and of Brussels and Bruges in Belgium .
Read more