It makes sense: keep the fighters stoned, and they’ll be desensitized when they commit barbaric crimes against innocent humanity. And they will feel that they are invincible. And they won’t feel the hunger pangs and sleep deprivation that comes with being in the trenches. In short, they will be robots.

That, according to a Macleans article, pretty much sums up what is “fueling ISIS” members. It’s not the first time drugs have been used to get “warriors” to murder people. It’s a technique that has been used through the ages.

And it answers the question many in the West have been asking: How could young people who have joined ISIS with some dream of making the world a utopia become monstrous killing machines in the twinkle of someone’s eye?

Well, we know now, and it puts the foot soldiers of ISIS in a new light.

But what about the sick brain(s) behind the organization, the ones who are not on drugs? What motivates them to delude people and use them in such fashion? Do they not have a conscience?

Obviously, there is a psychological issue for them, some sort of dissociative disorder. They compartmentalize distasteful things, lock them up, as if they don’t exist.

We see the same sort of disorders to greater and lesser degrees throughout society: the individual in a very profitable company who makes the decision to slash hundreds of jobs a month before Christmas, for example, in the name of increasing eps by a few pennies. How does that person look at himself or herself in the mirror afterward? Answer: they don’t think any further about what they have done.

We live in a world in which people compartmentalize a lot of things. Even the good, simple salt of the earth types have to compartmentalize things: we don’t allow ourselves to think of the slaughterhouses when we eat meat, for example. I could cite more examples, but you get the point.

And so it goes . . .

We humans are not as evolved as many might think we are.

— Jillian