Lone Wolves in the USA (new title)

[AmericanPride]

AP

your an economic determinist and Bob is a political determinist, and you both blindly cling to your models as simplistic views to explain the world. Just because you reject idealism as motive doesn't mean everyone does. Our arrogance is insisting the world conform to our democratic and economic views, so we continue to make policy decisions on our rather naive views because we can't perceive that others may actually be inspired by ideology. I guess in this case because he convert his coworkers or convince them that stoning women to death made it a hostile work environment?

There's a fine line between determinism (economic or other) and agency. For investigative and criminal justice purpose, the focus will be on the suspect's agency in order to establish culpability. But if we're concerned about identifying the root causes of this problem (whether it's religious extremism or workplace violence) to reduce future incidents, then we also need to investigate all of the contextual factors that led to this incident. As I said, it may or may not be related to a hostile workplace. That information is not yet available. But it has some of the indicators of other workplace violence incidents. And workplace violence already has well-researched and established causes.

And since you mentioned idealism and ideology; the general consensus in academia is that ideology emerges from social practices and human activity not vice versa. So we can grant that an individual may act on idealism, but to understand the specific ideology, its characteristics, and its appeal, it's also important to explore its relationship to the material world. Why radical Islam and not radical Christianity? Why beheading and not shooting? Why target the workplace and not neighbors? Why did the suspect feel compelled to promote conversion at his workplace in the first instance? People do not behave in a vacuum and they are constantly responding to and assessing their material conditions.