Violent Nihilist Extremism

These days there are online sects of young people who try to convince other youth to start cutting Satanic marks into their skin and ultimately to commit suicide. Often they blackmail girls with nude imagery and then the girls themselves are recruited into these sects and encouraged to recruit more people. The most notorious of these sects was called 764, but with most prominent members thrown in prison, the phenomenon has now gone underground under different names.

There’s a documentary from the Netherlands in English that you can watch here:

It ends with the interview of a father whose daughter committed suicide as a result of these people. Essentially these are Discord cults of teenagers who want to destroy the world. A handful of kids have been arrested in the Netherlands for joining these cults. A couple of mass shootings in the United States are thought to be linked to 764 too.

This is not something that’s going away anymore. You’re not going to see the name of this phenomenon change anymore either, it’s going to stick to 764 because under this name it achieved sufficient notoriety. But what interests me is how people become attracted to this worldview. What drives teenagers and young adults, to convince others to murder their pets, cut signs into their bodies and commit suicide?

Most likely, these are people who were traumatized as teenagers and now they seek to fix the imbalance in their mind by moving from a position of victimhood to victimizer. The most likely source of trauma would seem to be bullying by other teenagers, as happened to the founder of 764.

The problem is that when social exclusion is severe enough, you don’t want to be readmitted into society again. Instead you just wish to lash out at the world. There’s a societal niche of people who wish to see the world destroyed and there are various names and ideologies competing over those people. Neo-nazism, anarcho-primitivism, ecofascism, anarchism, nihilism, communism, islamism, the names these people give to their ideas are less interesting than the underlying motivation: The world has to burn.

764 seems to converge on a kind of neo-nazi/satanic ideology, which has a strong tactical advantage. Unlike other forms of extremism, you don’t really have to learn anything to get started. An islamic extremist needs to learn the Arab language, a communist needs to read literature. But the literature of 764 consists of grooming guides.

I think the kind of cruel violent nihilism showcased by 764 is going to grow dramatically, for a number of reasons. To start with, there’s a growing demographic of youth living in conditions with no genuine perspective for a future. Unless you graduate college, you’re nowadays stuck with dead-end jobs or unemployment for the rest of your life.

Second, every other ideology has become unbelievable. Nobody genuinely believes in Catholicism or Communism or Islam anymore. We’ve all been touched by modernity, so everyone is LARPing. And if you’re destined to LARP, why not LARP as a satanist?

And third, this is a kind of extremism anyone can easily jump into. Teenagers are digital natives, they can find these discord servers easily. They’re better at organizing around these things than the adults tasked with keeping a watch on what happens online.

The important thing I think is that by the time these people are setting up discord servers to convince others to kill themselves, you’re already too late. Shutting down the servers is too late in the game. If you want to stop this phenomenon you need to prevent the kind of psychological transformation that took place in this boy:

This was once a boy with interests in life other than wanting to see the world burn.