Moral rigorism as the idea of a “terrorist dream”

The author describes the trends and reasons for perceiving terrorism as a narrowly criminal politicized community in the article. Terrorism is seen as a political protest, as a form of political activity of a kind of aesthetic color. The author gives a philosophical and cultural assessment of terrorism through a comparison of fascism and "igilism" as a permanent drift from terrorist muscle groups to the creation of a single and homogeneous totalitarian terrorist organization, and later on to a totalitarian-terrorist state implementing a genocide policy. Terrorist activity is compared with moral rigorism, based on the need for liberation from liberal values expressed in modern constitutional law. The idea of a "terrorist dream" is viewed through the prism of such concepts as freedom, happiness, and the ideal in which the myth of "social happiness" is presented as the ideology of modern radical Islamism.


Introduction
Terrorism, developing on modern soil, embossedly demonstrates the specific trends of the mass culture genesis, the process of its general dehumanization. The reaction of people to terrorism in modern society, of course, is a special topic that requires comprehensive research. However, the process of understanding cultural phenomena related to the spread of terrorism seems to be very important, since it allows you to more deeply understand the mechanisms of the impact of terrorist destruction on the mass consciousness, the very ability of people to withstand acts of mass intimidation and blackmail.
Theories of terrorism and the views on terrorism to date have been formed quite a lot. However, for a long time, terrorists were perceived and perceived as narrowly criminal politicized communities. The tendency for such an assessment of terrorism, at least, prevails in practical politics. There are apparently two reasons for this. Firstly, the terrorists chose criminal offenses as the method of their political activity, because, limited in resources and ways, they wanted to gain as much political fame as possible, as much political influence as possible. After all, even an unsuccessful attempt on the tsar of the Russian Empire promises almost mass fame for some organization that is deeply underground.
Secondly, these terrorists did not fit into the prevailing field of political culture. Without a mass social base for the revolution, they opposed the existing political systems themselves and by this already put themselves outside the law. They did not yet have the resources to organize and carry out a revolution, but they already claimed to provoke a revolution. So Russian Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) opposed tsarism, because they considered tsarism to be the cause of all, without exception, defects in the socio-cultural development of the state, its backwardness, inertness, and political slowness. The tsar appeared to be a tyrant, and the political regime of tsarism -tyranny, serfdom. On the one hand, this ruled out the possibility of free and legal promotion of its political program, since it destroyed the political system itself and called for the creation of some other system in which tsarism had no place. By the way, tsarism itself for a long time showed a steady desire to free itself from serfdom, outlining a particular scenario of a "revolution from above." On the other hand, this freed the terrorists from any political obligations and responsibilities, turning all political work into a form of partisanism, an endless series of sabotage.
They visualized themselves as martyrs and heroes, even suicide bombers, that is, people who knew how their political work would inevitably end. This is a consequence of the chosen political position, which does not imply political opponents or competitors with which one can and should argue, but seeks to eliminate them, destroy them. So the opponent and competitor turn into an enemy.
Thus, the political protest expressed by terror is often depicted as a form of imparting its political activity and a peculiar aesthetic color. A terrorist politician assumes the role of a sacrifice made to society in the name of the ideals of the future described by him, the terrorist himself. Here it is appropriate to mention the opinion of J. Habermas, who wrote: "Of course, in certain situations, terrorist activity may be associated with the excessive intensity of one of the cultural moments, that is, with the tendency to aesthetize politics, replace it with moral rigorism, or subordinate it to any dogmatism of some kind teachings " [6]. Excessively radical programs for transforming society, idealizing the future, romantic faith in the ability to overcome all, without exception, vices of mankind, freeing oneself from reflection on the eternal problem of goals and means, all this contributed to the development of post-political views when politics itself was recognized as incompetent. Other, irrational programs and methods of measures to transform society were required.
Given that terrorists recognized extremism and cruelty as the only possible form of political work, they freed themselves from the need to popularize their own ideas. They believed that their goals would be achieved not as a result of the will of the majority, but unexpectedly, as a result of a complete and quick revision of the cultural, value foundations of society, its traditions, the disorganization of the socio-political institutions of the state, the collapse of the state under the pressure of fear, a violent seizure of power, coup, rebellion. In addition, one cannot ignore the fact that many terrorists believed that the terrorist act itself was an effective measure of political propaganda, a kind of message, an act that certainly affects public opinion, increasing the number of supporters. The terrorist act itself showed contempt for a political opponent and always, because of its incompleteness and fragmentation, was understood as one of the episodes of a long and uncompromising struggle in which no one deserves mercy, when numerous innocent victims should be perceived as "natural costs", "incidental losses ".
For the sake of truth, it should be said that the goals of the terrorists are also achieved as a result of the collapse of their political program, their organizational and ideological defeat. And this was accomplished precisely thanks to the terrorist attempt to aesthetize their activities, to comprehensively propagate the principles of sacrifice and struggle. So the pseudoscientific, and sometimes scientific propaganda of the Soviet era created a peculiar system of assessments of terrorist revolutionaries of the 70-80s of the 19th century. The official recognition of the fallacy of the terrorist path did not prevent her, this propaganda, from replicating the aesthetics of strife and rebellion, conspiracy and sacrifice, writing down the images and actions of Zhelyabov, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, Morozov, Zasulich and many others, as images and actions of heroes of a biblical scale. Hundreds of books were written about them, terrorist revolutionaries of the 70-80s of the 19th century, films were made, their activities were the subject of compulsory study at school, they were regularly studied in the framework of such a scientific discipline that does not exist now, like scientific communism. The heroization of the rebellion, which was launched by the Volunteers, was reflected in the novel by N. Chernyshevsky "What to do?", Written in 1863, on the eve of the mass terrorist wave of Russian history. The image of the "man of steel", Nikitushka Lomovoy -Rakhmetov, the future leader of the revolutionary movement, the leader outlined the cultural contours of a potential terrorist who devoted his whole life to preparing for future social disasters.
At the same time, it is necessary to mention the extreme forms of the aesthetics of terrorism, which are reflected in the worldview of S.G. Nechaev (1847-1882), a radical terrorist, author of the infamous "Catechism of the Revolutionary" [3]. The author of the doctrine of total, large-scale terror set goals the implementation of which could compete with the politics of genocide. "Nechaevschina," as an independent term, has long begun to denote a certain set of methods in which cold-blooded cruelty is almost the leading mode of activity. The aesthetics of the victim, the aesthetics of violence are replicated in the modern terrorist quasi-state -ISIS. Intolerance and contempt for "aliens" and "non-believers" by radical Islamists led to a genocide policy in ISIS-controlled territories. "The fate of Christians in the city of Raqqa, from where they (Christians) were squeezed out with the help of terror and intimidation, is indicative in this respect. The cleansing of Raqqa from the Gentiles allowed Daish militants to establish control over the city on the basis of the introduction of a strict Sharia order" [1]. Note that extreme cruelty and sophistication in the reprisals against their own subjects (free or involuntary) allows us to talk about ISIS as a state of continuous terror, one front of which is aimed at external enemies, and the other against its own citizens.
The slogan "Who is not with us is against us", which was actually taken as the basis by Nechaev in his conceptualization of terror as a means of cleansing society of the prevailing vices, is currently adopted by ISIS. The development of the caliphate was not the result, but only increased terrorization of the population, which suggests that terror itself acts as a tool, a means of isolating the so-called terrorist community, that social group that is ready to accept intimidation and cruelty as cultural and social value. In this sense, it is quite possible to compare European fascism and "igilism," as a form of Islamic fundamentalism, as a permanent drift from terrorist muscle groups to the creation of a single and homogeneous totalitarian terrorist organization, and in the future, to a totalitarian-terrorist state implementing a genocide policy. The only exception is that Nazism (as the highest embodiment of European fascism) considered racial theory -racism [4] as the principle of society's composition, and igilism -adherence to archaic Islam. Comparison is quite acceptable in the sense that the main target of both Nazism and Igilism is the very same liberalism, with its freedoms, the principles of equality and the rule of law, with its constitutional law and democracy.
The attempt to bring some fundamental theoretical basis for their terrorist activities, perhaps, was most evident in the Russian terrorist movement. The idea of the right to terrorist activity grows not only from the expectations of an emerging social conflict, but also is based on an aesthetic principle, on the belief in the exhaustion of one's own ideas about happiness. It is the idea of happiness: individual, social, eternal, that opens up the possibility of acting arbitrarily, without thinking about pesky morality. One of the ideologists of Russian terrorism P.N. Tkachev wrote about this: "No matter how different individual ideas of people about their personal happiness, no matter how varied and incommensurable in qualitative and quantitative terms those individual pleasures, the sum of which is their individual happiness, in any case objective, so to speak, nature happiness is always the same and unchanging and can always be subject to strictly scientific analysis and determination" [5]. Summarizing the thesis of "objective happiness", Tkachev comes to the conclusion that social happiness"... can satisfy as many diverse needs as possible ..." [5], therefore, the problem of general happiness comes down to the question "of establishing such social conditions under which all members of society could evenly develop all the diverse needs of the human body ... " [5]. In this case, it seems that this is not only a philosophical assumption. This is a kind of practical doctrine, on the one hand, claiming to win a large number of supporters, since it focuses on the unhindered satisfaction of needs, and on the other, putting an end to centuries-old disputes about social happiness. This "discovery", outlining a program of activities for those who have learned it, enlightened. ISIS is a unique example of a "terrorist dream". This is an example of how, in the prevailing political and cultural chaos in one of the regions of the planet, terrorists managed to form a temporary, but living territorial enclave of a terrorist state. Having partially achieved their goal, radical terrorists proclaimed the development of a new caliphate, that is, the isolation of a certain territory on which the desired terrorists order was established. So the idea of "social happiness" came to life, as ideologists of modern radical Islamism imagine it. At the same time, the concept of "social happiness" replaces the concept of "freedom", with the exception of cases when it comes to liberation from the vices of civilization, the costs of its cultural development, which to one degree or another damage the traditional ideas about religious life and religious prohibitions. But the concept of "freedom" is not forbidden or little used in the doctrines of the "Islamic revolution", the doctrines of one or another type of "great caliphate". Apparently, it is not removable in any manifestation of the revolutionary principle and is part of the ideas about revolutionary destruction.
The concept of "freedom" is still one of the most vague, fuzzy, dependent on one or another ideological line. Attachment of the concept of "freedom" to one or another ideological concept is always or almost always a question of values, that is, a totality of ideas about the ideal world order. By virtue of this circumstance, the concept of "freedom" is almost always a confident statement: "freedom from". In this case, speaking of ISIS, we can confidently say that the myth of the freedom of igilism is based on the need to free oneself from the liberal values expressed in modern constitutional law. In fact, these are social freedoms that guarantee a certain set of rights and guarantees provided by the modern state. An alternative to these freedoms, recognized in the world as universal values, proclaims a radical religious principle, a religious tradition rooted in the very sources of Islam. In fact, this is a rejection of the social and political achievements of world civilization in favor of the terrorist myth of social happiness. Thus, the call "to free oneself from freedom" in favor of a radical religious tradition reveals the paradoxical essence of igilism, which paints a picture of an ideal social future, where the idea of "social happiness" does not correlate with civil and personal freedoms.
"Other freedom", "other happiness" of igilism does not seem to be a complete sociocultural concept that unites everyone who prefers Islamism to other principles of communal living. Apparently, he needs further clearance. However, it, this concept, demonstrates a certain established algorithm for the formation of ideas about a society that proclaims universal prohibitions on certain freedoms, in other words, a totalitarian society.
This algorithm is based on the reanimation of cultural images and values of the past, formation, development of self-image of culture, based on the principle of revitalizing a departed, experienced cultural form. The object of destruction, revolutionary destruction, is liberalism, with its mass culture, "licentiousness", "economic Darwinism" [7], the degradation of the institution of the family, traditional culture, etc. The new cultural ideal grows out of the sinister image of a jihadist who sacrifices his own life, leads an ongoing struggle, despises Western culture and the Western way of life. This is an ascetic and a victim of the "Rakhmetov" type, who sees no value in his or her own life, striving to achieve social happiness.

Conclusion
The actualization of terrorism as a possible form of political activity, apparently, is connected, among other things, with a certain stereotype of thinking, when the awareness of the personal selectivity (God's chosenness) of some individuals forms a belief in the ability to act and live only in accordance with their own beliefs and intentions. So terrorism goes beyond the usual politics when activity is based on the support of certain social groups, even if they are completely radical, but it becomes an exclusively criminal antisocial form of social activity. Obsession, sacrifice, aesthetics of rebellion, contempt for the prevailing values speak, rather not of an attempt to transform society, its cultural forms, but of a commitment to destruction as an independent value. Moral rigorism, excessive rigidity and odiousness of terrorism, its concepts of happiness, a just society, are formed into a way of denying the intellectual, cultural experience of mankind. At one time, Fatali M. Mohaddam in his book "Terrorism from the point of view of terrorists: what they feel and think and why resort to violence" wrote: "The stereotypical ideas about terrorists that are widespread in the West come down to the fact that terrorists are irrational, and their confrontation strategies are untenable. Again and again, terrorists present themselves as people incapable of rational thinking, and their plans are perceived as insane" [2]. By virtue of this, let us clarify that terrorism is, of course, rational in calculating and choosing the methods of its activity, in planning terrorist acts, and ensuring secrecy. The very idea that refutes the prevailing norms and cultural baggage of mankind is irrational, the very idea that violence and horror can be a consolidating beginning in building a mythical "society of happiness".