Being extreme is never a good thing, but we are seeing many more extreme activists on streets. What pushes people to become extremists? Extreme activities generally create costs to the society. Due to extreme activities, the society needs to spend more policing, lots of inconvenience is caused and lives can be lost in most extreme cases. I think that it is fair to say, although we think many extremists are not rational, their activities still follow some certain strategies to help them achieve the goals they want. When they are conducting these extreme activities, they have costs as well and the only sensible reason for them to do so is that they believe something that they strongly oppose (or support) has an extraordinary cost (or benefit) to the society, giving up some private costs they put into extreme activities will help the society reduce the cost (or increase the benefit) and they will also gain from their extreme activities by “correcting the wrongdoing”.
Then we have two steps to tackle extremism. The first step is to study whether these extremists hold some reasonable thoughts. Although these extremists are highly likely to overweight their beliefs, it is possible for us to underestimate the importance of some issues to some degree (e.g. environment). If the society generally underestimate the importance, then it is our responsibility to correct our estimation. This may not satisfy the extremists, but it can help to reduce the degree of extremism. The second step is to correct the estimation of extremists. This is very difficult, but this is I think the key to eliminate extremism.
In my opinion, the extremism is caused by the gap between the society belief and the extremists’ belief, once we are able to close this gap, we are able to eliminate extremism.
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