Some people aren’t looking for money or political power; others just want to watch the world burn. A new study confirms the existence of a new personality disorder that turns your fellow Americans into agents of chaos. What happens when these Chaos Agents gain political power?
What does stochastic terrorism mean?
Stochasticterrorism is “the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted.”
The word stochastic, in everyday language, means “random.” Terrorism, here, refers to “violence motivated by ideology.”
Here’s the idea behind stochasticterrorism:
A leader or organization uses rhetoric in the mass media against a group of people.
While hostile or hateful, this rhetoric doesn’t explicitly tell someone to commit violence against that group, but a person feeling threatened is motivated to do so.
That individual act of political violence can’t be predicted as such, but that violence will happen is much more probable thanks to the rhetoric.
This rhetoric is thus called stochasticterrorism because it incites random violence.
Public speech that may incite violence, even without that specific intent, has been given a name: stochastic terrorism, for a pattern that can’t be predicted precisely but can be analyzed statistically. It is the demonization of groups through mass media and other propaganda that can result in a violent act because listeners interpret it as promoting targeted violence — terrorism. And the language is vague enough that it leaves room for plausible deniability and outraged, how-could-you-say-that attacks on critics of the rhetoric.
