Author: Anton Friedrich Fischer
A young man sits alone on his couch, scrolling through an endless stream of short social media videos. For weeks, a quiet frustration has been building in his life: he is out of work, his days feel dull, and his isolation is becoming a constant, leaving him feeling aimless and adrift. One TikTok video suddenly makes him pause. In thirty confident seconds, it claims that migrants are destroying his country and that corrupt elites have betrayed “people like him” in their mass migration plans. For a moment, his aimless frustration sharpens into focused anger. He no longer feels adrift but empowered. He scrolls on. A few days later, a similar video shows up in his TikTok feed, and then another, marking the beginning of his path of radicalization.
To understand why the message resonated so quickly with the young man, we must look beyond the screen to a historical shift in how we define ourselves, how this shift shapes modern life, and where we now seek meaning.
For much of history, identities and life paths were mainly inherited. Religion, class, and nation offered clear scripts on how to live and who to serve. In today’s liberal democracies, those rigid rules and narratives have weakened and fragmented. This is undoubtedly a great expansion of our personal freedoms, but it also places the task of creating a meaningful life increasingly on our own shoulders. We are now expected to choose our own careers, form our own relationships, and build our own communities.
For those with the economic means and psychological resilience to seize these opportunities, this freedom is surely a great gift. For those without such resources, however, these opportunities can appear open on paper only. The result is a sense of diffuse frustration and directionlessness where life feels stripped of coherence and orientation. This also extends to our social sphere, where the act of belonging has itself become an individualized project. Those who lack supportive networks or the internal resources to forge new ties are unable to achieve the sense of significance that human connection provides. In other words, when individuals lack economic, social, or psychological resources, the four pillars that psychologist Tatjana Schnell identifies as essential to a meaningful life—coherence, orientation, belonging, and significance—can begin to erode. In this way, social inequalities, whether perceived or real, translate into the psychological, as vague grievances and a crisis of meaning.
Extremist movements exploit precisely this void. A neo-Nazi group and an Islamist movement are worlds apart in their specific ideology, yet both speak to these unmet needs. This makes individuals trapped in a meaning crisis so susceptible to radical narratives.
Of course, not everyone who feels lost turns to extremism. Personal beliefs and moral convictions still matter. Yet, as terrorism scholar John Horgan observes, ideology often follows rather than leads the process of radicalization. For individuals in Western countries, the initial attraction to extremism is frequently driven by unmet psychological needs. With respect to meaning, extremist ideologies appeal in two distinct ways.
First, extremist ideologies offer a simplified story to restore the world’s logic for the person feeling lost. They explain straightforwardly what is wrong, identify who is to blame, and propose deceptively simple solutions. Vague and individual grievances are thus transformed into anger against a single external cause. For example, a far-right group may frame the young man’s personal frustration as the result of cultural decline caused by migrants. An Islamist movement may interpret the same frustrations as an awakening to the moral corruption of the West. Both restore coherence and orientation by offering easy solutions paired with a glorified vision.
Second, extremist groups absorb individuals into an intense, almost family-like collective. A person is no longer alone because he is now a “defender of the nation” or a “warrior of the faith”. Life feels important because the individual is part of a heroic struggle, effectively restoring the sense of belonging and significance.
The problem, of course, is that this fast track to meaning is cheap, destructive, and fragile. It provides only superficial coherence and orientation by demanding total submission to a dehumanizing worldview, while belonging and significance remain strictly conditional on fulfilling the group’s draconian dictates. Precisely because meaning is so tightly anchored in the group, it collapses as soon as the individual attempts to leave. Exiting a terrorist group, therefore, often results in a deeper sense of emptiness than before joining, as the individual self has been absorbed rather than developed, merely masking an underlying crisis of meaning. As Horgan notes, deradicalization is not simply a matter of exiting, but the difficult process of rebuilding identity, purpose, and belonging. Fear of losing this fragile sense of meaning can thus keep individuals trapped in these groups long after their convictions have faded.
Returning to the young man on his couch: he did not actively seek out a radical political manifesto but was drawn in by a crisis of meaning. The TikTok video offered an initial, intoxicating rush of coherence and orientation, converting his aimless frustration into focused, energizing anger—leaving him wanting more. In thirty seconds, he is recast as a heroic “defender of the nation,” granted a sense of belonging and significance. This illustrates how extremist groups exploit a psychological void by offering a cheap, destructive form of meaning to those feeling resentful and adrift.
Ultimately, we must address the psychological void that makes the “cheap” meaning of extremism so effective. It is not enough to simply debunk ideological lies, we must provide meaningful alternatives rooted in democratic values that are accessible with less social or economic resources. This is easier said than done, of course, but it would not just be an antidote for those drawn in or a lifeline for those trying to exit extremist groups. This would be a vital safeguard for wider society, ensuring our liberal democracies are more resilient against the hollow promises of extremist narratives.
Further readings:
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity Press.
Horgan, J. (2005). The psychology of terrorism. Routledge.
Schnell, T. (2025). The psychology of meaning in life: Insights and applications (2nd ed.). Routledge.