Author: Anton Friedrich Fischer
In an earlier essay I followed a young man on his couch as he drifted into a far-right echo chamber, and argued that his radicalization was, at heart, a search for meaning – a void looking to be filled . In a companion essay , I traced the descent into terrorism in three notorious figures through Wiktorowicz’s (2005) concept of the cognitive opening: a period of heightened receptivity to extremist narratives. In each case, a loss or absence of experienced meaning in life played a role in one way or another. But these essays left a narrower question unanswered: why the same extremist group can draw in such different people, each carrying a different void.
To answer this, I will set two bodies of work side by side in this essay: the psychologist Tatjana Schnell’s research on meaning in life, and the criminologist Tore Bjørgo’s on the diversity of violent extremists. Schnell tells us where meaning is drawn from. Bjørgo maps the diversity among those who join extremist groups.
Where meaning is drawn from
Using a mixed-method approach, psychologist Tatjana Schnell empirically investigates what gives people meaning in their lives and how to measure these sources of meaning. The result of this research is a comprehensive map of the 26 sources from which people generally draw meaning. These sources fall into four broad dimensions: self-transcendence, self-actualization, order, and well-being and relatedness. Self-transcendence is a commitment to something larger than the self, reaching either outward toward a worldly cause (horizontal) or upward toward a higher power (vertical). Self-actualization is the developing and challenging of one’s own capacities. Order is a life anchored in tradition, settled values, and the tried-and-tested. And well-being and relatedness is the cultivation and enjoyment of life’s pleasures, alone and in company. The specific 26 sources across these dimensions are not abstract ideals but values in action. Most people draw on a wide range of these sources of meaning in their lives. But there are differences between people in emphasis and breadth: some lives are anchored by only a few sources, while others rest on a broad base (Schnell, 2009, 2025).
When the sources a person has leaned on most heavily run dry, what opens is a crisis of meaning and a search it sets off. Most of the time that search is resolved in ordinary ways — a new job, starting a family, taking up volunteer work. It becomes a cognitive opening to extremist narratives only when three additional conditions meet: First, the central sources a person relied on have failed or were never there. Second, the person has, or believes they have, no other ordinary sources to fall back on. Lastly, an extremist group happens to supply meaning that fits the persons particular void at that particular time. This is why so few people in a crisis of meaning actually radicalize2 (Horgan, 2024; Wiktorowicz, 2005).
Who joins extremist groups
The heterogeneity of members in extremist groups is the starting point of the Norwegian criminologist Tore Bjørgo. Drawing on decades of interviews with current and former extremists, he argues that any one extremist group is a mixture of distinct types of people, each with distinct motives for joining and for leaving (Bjørgo, 2025).
Bjørgo sorts them into five ideal types: the ideologist, the follower, the adventurer, the misfit, and the traditionalist. Laid over Schnell’s framework, each turns out to be moved by a yearning for different dimensions of meaning — or, in two cases, by something that sits just outside it.
Before mapping each type onto Schnell’s framework, it is worth pausing on what “ideal type” actually means. These ideal types are analytical constructs and actual people can only illustrate them, since any real person merely sits closer to one ideal type than another. No real recruit is, let’s say, purely an ideologist or purely an adventurer. Any given person who joins an extremist group is almost always a mixture of these types, with one perhaps more pronounced than the rest. The value of separating them is analytical: each type isolates a distinct pull- and push factors in and one out of an extremist group. The cases that follow take them one at a time.
The ideologist — a cause
The ideologist is driven by a cause: self-transcendence, a commitment to something larger than the self. This cause can stay purely secular and worldly (horizontal) or reach upward toward the sacred (vertical). Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 lead pilot whose descent I traced in the companion essay2, most clearly illustrates the ideologist who reaches in both directions. The Salafist-jihadist narrative he found in Hamburg recast his private drift as a cultural war with cosmic significance and sacralized his meticulousness as a divine instrument. For him the worldly cause fused with the sacred, which made the meaning he gained from the Salafist-jihadist movements in Hamburg and later from al-Qaida so totalizing: his terrorist zeal was anchored not only in a political project but in perceived divine destiny.
As the name suggests, for the ideologist the dogma is central. He leaves when his self-transcending cause stops making sense to him. Bjørgo (2025) notes that ideologically driven activists typically leave only through loss of faith in the ideology itself, disillusionment with the strategy, or cognitive dissonance between the group’s violent means and their own values. Social ties and friendships matter far less than for other types. This makes the ideologist hard to reach: nothing short of the cause itself collapsing will move him. And where that cause has been sacralized, as in Atta, it cannot be falsified by argument at all, which is part of why, in his case, it ran all the way to its lethal end.
The follower — belonging
The follower sits at the opposite pole, with ideology being incidental. Nicky Reilly, who tried to detonate a nail bomb in an Exeter restaurant in 2008, can illustrate this ideal type. Having Asperger’s syndrome, and having been bullied for years, he was, in his mother’s words, looking for somewhere to fit in. He found people who welcomed him and took on their cause as the price of belonging (Box, 2018; Doward, 2008). This ideal type relates almost entirely to the relatedness pole of Schnell’s well-being and relatedness dimension — community, comradeship, the simple fact of being accepted somewhere — with ideology arriving late and worn lightly. The follower’s radicalization is, as Bjørgo (2025) notes, often superficial: he says and does what is expected because the group is the first place he has ever felt accepted.
Again, the tragedy is that the ideology is incidental. Had a football club or a youth center reached Reilly first, the belonging might have been just as real and not lethal. For the follower, a rival belonging — a mentor, a job, a partner — does more than any counterargument. Offered early enough, it empties the void before an extremist narrative can fill it.
The adventurer — a thrill
Of all five, the adventurer is the ideal type with the weakest link to sources of meaning. The nearest family is self-actualization — the adventurer has an appetite for challenge, power, and freedom — but he takes that agentic edge without its core: self-actualization is the developing and mastering of one’s capacities (Schnell, 2025), and the adventurer wants the sensation, but isn’t driven by growth. The psychological construct closest to the adventurer type is a sensation-seeking temperament (Zuckerman, 2007), a trait rather than a source of meaning. For the adventurer, ideology is just a justification for the sensation and adrenaline he associates with joining an extremist group. It is also why he can be more easily redirected: the same temperament that fed the brawl can just as easily feed extreme sport, the fire service, or joining a special forces team.
Andreas Baader, co-founder of the Red Army Faction, is probably closest to the adventurer ideal type: a car thief with a grandiose need for notoriety long before he became a left-wing terrorist2. The RAF’s theory came from Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof. Baader supplied criminal audacity and an appetite for action. Marxism merely handed Baader’s antisocial energy a heroic script (Aust, 2017). That he rose to lead the group cuts against the widely held belief that the head of a terrorist cell must be its ideologist.
Most sensation-seekers, of course, never turn to extremism, they skydive or join the fire service. The adventurer’s exit comes not through disillusionment with the cause but through exhaustion.
The misfit — a wound
Anis Amri, who drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market in 2016, most closely illustrates the misfit ideal type. Amri was a school dropout and thief in Tunisia before serving nearly four years in an Italian prison. By most accounts, this prison was also where he radicalized into Islamist, IS-aligned extremism. He then drifted through Germany under more than a dozen identities, dealing drugs, before the truck-ramming attack that killed twelve people in IS’s name (Basra & Neumann, 2016).
Unlike the ideologist or the follower, the misfit is not drawn by any specific cluster of sources of meaning, but rather by almost all of them at once. He is characterized by a generally disorganized, directionless life, experienced as empty and disordered, often compounded by trauma, addiction, or marginalization. What draws him in therefore works at a level up from any single cluster of sources of meaning: a group that offers the misfit meaning through a new identity, status, and community, along with “a purpose in life and redemption from former sins” (Bjørgo, 2025, p. 85), is likely to catch him.
The way out is just as distinctive. The misfit rarely leaves through a conscious decision — more often through expulsion, exhaustion, or falling back in criminal structures of his former life. And even then, the underlying wounds remain: without substantial help addressing the traumas, the disorganization, and the lack of any prosocial foothold, most simply drift back into the criminal scene (Bjørgo, 2025).
The traditionalist — inheritance
The traditionalist is defined by being born into an extremist group. Where the ideologist and the follower want to fill a void, and the adventurer and the misfit have a temperament or a wound in that pulls them in, the traditionalist has no void to fill and no specific temperament driving him in. He was born into the ready-made world of meaning within an extremist group. Derek Black is the clearest example of this ideal type. Black is the son of the founder of Stormfront, the internet’s first major white-nationalist forum, and the godson of a former Klan leader. By ten he ran its children’s section, groomed as the movement’s heir (Saslow, 2016). Family, friends, worldview, and identity formed a single seamless fabric, and his meaning came woven into it.
For the traditionalist, the belief is one thing, the bigger issue is that he knows no other life. The traditionalists whole life, his meaning, is attached to the group. This can again be illustrated by Derek Black. Black’s convictions began to shift within his first years at college, yet for years he went on living a double life, still slipping back to white-nationalist gatherings and his father’s radio show, because leaving the belief still meant losing his father, his godfather, his childhood, his entire world. Those social ties are, in Bjørgo’s (2025) terms, exactly what makes the barriers to leaving so high for this type. Black’s exit stretched over years and was possible only because classmates kept inviting him to weekly dinners, slowly building an alternative social world that could survive the loss of his family. Unlike the ideologist, who needs the cause to collapse, or the follower, for whom a rival social bond can tip the balance, the traditionalist has nothing outside the group to return to: no social skills, no network, no alternative world. He does not need to be argued out of an idea or offered a rival belonging. He needs an entire social infrastructure built around him before the floor of his old world can give way.
The hybrid
As said before, real people are almost always hybrids of these ideal types. This is well illustrated by the contemporary lone actor Brenton Tarrant, who I discussed in a previous essay2. By conviction he reads as an ideologist: he wrote a manifesto, worked the Great Replacement into a strategy, and cast his slaughter as the defense of a group of people, anger on behalf of others rather than himself. Yet what drew him was also the adventurer’s pull: the gamified, livestreamed spectacle, the craving to be a hero rather than a nobody. And, less obviously, the follower’s need sounds too: he was pulled in by belonging to an online community that had become his only social world. Even a faint note of the misfit can be heard in his father’s suicide and the isolation that followed. Brenton Tarrant is the reminder that one person can be held by a cause, a thrill, and a sense of belonging at once, and that these ideal types are analytical tools, not boxes that real cases fit neatly into.
No master key, but a broader method
To put it simply, the ideologist is held by a cause, the follower by belonging, the adventurer by a thrill, the misfit by a wound, and the traditionalist by inheritance. They do not all relate to sources of meaning in the same way. The ideologist and the follower each lean toward a distinct dimension — self-transcendence or relatedness. The misfit reaches for meaning too, but for all of it at once rather than any single dimension. Two sit apart: the adventurer is moved more by temperament than by meaning, and the traditionalist by inherited social ties that hand him meaning from the outset rather than any searching for it. And what holds each of them in differs just as much.
The honest implication for exit work is that there is no master key — no single content that fits every type. But there may be a method that is more flexible, and thus more widely applicable. This is the logic of the Sources of Meaning Card Method (SoMeCaM; la Cour & Schnell, 2020), an exit-counseling tool built on Schnell’s framework: to find whichever source of meaning matters most to the person seeking to leave, and use it as the starting point of counseling. A former extremist works through the possible sources of a meaningful life outside the group and identifies the ones that might anchor a future after leaving, so that a counselor can help rebuild around them. Because it starts from the individual rather than a one-size-fits-all offer, it is well suited to the ideologist, the follower, and the misfit — the three whose pull runs most closely through sources of meaning, however differently. It is least suited to the two that sit apart: the adventurer and the traditionalist.
We are currently testing it with exit counselors across Germany in the first randomized controlled trial of its kind. Whether it works is still an open empirical question. But the wager behind it is the one this essay has argued throughout: people leave extremism much as they enter it, pulled by unmet needs — and those needs include, among other things, a need for meaning. What answers them is not a single message but fitting sources of meaning, ones the ordinary world can often supply just as well — with more effort, but without the cost.
References
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Basra, R., & Neumann, P. R. (2016), Criminal Pasts, Terrorist Futures: European Jihadists and the New Crime-Terror Nexus (ICSR, King’s College London)
Bjørgo, T. (2025). Conceptualizing diversity among violent extremists: A typology and a model for explaining change. In M. Obaidi (Ed.).
Box, D. (2018; 26 November) Failed Exeter bomber Nicky Reilly was ‘easy target for radicalisation’. BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-46344833
Doward, J. (2008, 25 May) Inside bizarre world of the Big Friendly Giant. TheGuardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/may/25/uksecurity.terrorism
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La Cour, P., & Schnell, T. (2020). Presentation of the Sources of Meaning Card Method: the SoMeCaM. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 60(1), 20-42.
Saslow, E. (2016, October 15). The white flight of Derek Black. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-white-flight-of-derek-black/2016/10/15/ed5f906a-8f3b-11e6-a6a3-d50061aa9fae_story.html
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