Buffet ideology

In an open buffet, when there is so much food on the table, you are taking what you like and putting it on your plate, creating a strange and diverse mix, marrying foods that, apparently, may not combine well.

The Internet is a free buffet, but of ideas. And that has ended up leading to an increase in radicalization and extremism. So much so that the director of the FBI, Christopher Wrayused the term "free buffet ideology" to refer to the concept of "cross-pollination". This term, which is borrowed from the process by which pollen is transferred between flowers for their fertilization, refers to the process by which pollen is transferred between flowers for their fertilization. in its ideological version to the interconnections between the extremist ideas of groups on seemingly opposing political spectrums.

Internet helping the radicalization of ideas.

When the Internet was a fledgling technology in the 1990s, extremist ideas had their home in the forums that abounded on the Internet at the time. There, a content creator acted as a disseminator of ideas, and recipients at home consumed that content. They were one-way online communities. This was widely used by the neo-Nazis who saw in these public forums an unparalleled opportunity to widely disseminate their ideas.

But the arrival of the 21st century brought the foundation of the digital world in society, and with it, a more active and participatory vision in the digital environment. The first decade turned that form of communication into a one-way street, from content creator to consumer to open up to the two ways. The consumer was also a creator. The Internet made it easy, and publishing was as simple as talking.

The next decade would lead to the social networksThe first two companies, born at the beginning of the century, to their gradual reconversion into distribution networks. What began as a tool to contact friends or make new contacts, ended up becoming what it is today, tools to publish content and disseminate it widely with extreme ease.

From passive spectator to active creator.

Today, the users of these networks are not passive consumers, but also generate content, mixing everything that reaches them, making a cocktail that fits what they want to believe in every moment, without giving much thought to anything in particular.

It has moved from a system of reading and membership the end of the 20th century, vertical, to the current system, where hierarchies have disappeared in the extremist movements, giving rise to a horizontal system.

As everyone consumes and contributes at the same time, there is no single figure that brings together a discourse, so there are thousands of them, intermingled and dissonant. In this way, each influencer can create at will an ideology to advertise, without the need to have a specific group behind it to nourish it with ideas.

The new extremists are choosing ideas that we used to associate with the extreme right or left, creating new discourses that combine radical ideas from both extremes. It only takes one convergent point to assimilate as one's own a traditional discourse of the opposite political spectrum..

The germ: opposition to the dominant ideologies.

But how does one get to this point? How does one begin to select and assimilate ideas that come from completely opposite ideologies?

These individuals start from a vision of themselves of resistance. They see ideas that have majority support, such as minority rights, the democratic system or government oversight of the economy, as something to fight against, to rebel against. These individuals seek to challenge the basis of this majority ideology. Whether their starting ideas are from the extreme right or the extreme left is irrelevant, what prevails is the need to to demonstrate against the prevailing ideology.

If, for example, society has evolved from the marginalization of women in many areas, to the current criticism of those who maintain it today, and that is the majority thinking in today's society, to rebel is to criticize precisely that there is, or has been, such marginalization. That is why if anything unites these groups of extremists, left or right, it is the belief in all kinds of conspiracy theories, being against LGBT rights or their anti-Semitism.

The idea behind supporting certain actions or speeches of characters that ideologically are in the opposite political spectrum is to reach a wider audience.

Networks allow extremist groups to easily reach an audience that is not directly connected to their line of thought. By supporting ideas seemingly contrary to their ideology, they seek to capture the attention of new potential followers. These "converging points" of thought are rallying points that serve as a gateway to extremist groups.

The proliferation of extremist ideas also responds to the ease with which these discourses can be incorporated into the conversation on unsupervised networks such as Twitter or Telegram. Thanks to the cocktail of ideas they choose, it becomes easier for potential new followers to arrive at one of these conversations almost without realizing it.

Network users upset for some reason, legitimate or not, choose parts of different ideologies to create a set that responds to personal beliefs and grievances.

The difficult job of policing these extremist groups.

This buffet ideology has created frankensteins as neo-Nazis who propagate ideas of the national socialism but are identified as leftists. This makes the job of those who have to monitor extremist groups increasingly difficult.

Christopher Wray, the FBI director we quoted at the beginning, who works in the fight against terrorism, warns of the challenge of trying to fit current discourses into watertight categories: "One of the things we see more and more, is that people make confusing mixes., has a variety of different ideologies.

Cover photo by Alessandro Bellone

Note: in this article we have intentionally avoided including links to hate speech or extremism that would illustrate the views shown in this article, in order to avoid increasing the dissemination of such views.