When she looked into the lives of people who had become political fanatics, she found two things: loneliness and spiritual emptiness. “Loneliness is the common ground of terror,” she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. True loneliness, Nabeelah Jaffer writes, is not only solitude; it is also a sort of spiritual emptiness, the loss of faith in oneself to come up with answers, “the loss of one’s own self.” It is a feeling of “uprootedness and superfluousness.” Jaffer posits that many militants join the Islamic State because they have no place where they can experience a sense of belonging,
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