How are we to understand what drives some Muslim men towards radicalisation? In making my documentary, Jihad, I spoke to many former Islamist extremists. As a woman of Muslim heritage who has lived with death threats from Muslim extremists most of my life because of my activism for women’s human rights, I spent many years afraid of men like this. But these conversations, while not comfortable, were vital.

One of these dialogues was with Abu Muntasir, a famed recruiter and jihadi warrior, veteran of insurgencies in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Burma. I learned that the young men and women he recruited often had a history of trauma, feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability, which drew them to connect their individual and personal pain with the suffering of Muslims worldwide.

These feelings were assuaged by joining a movement – they were replaced with a sense of purpose, belonging and camaraderie. This was reinforced through violence with a utopian aim: a cleansing fire. Jihadis want to watch the world burn, to bring everything crashing down, to destroy the establishment, and rebuild it after their own pitiless vision. This misguided utopianism is what makes them such effective bogeymen.

Political and economic insecurity inevitably translates into insecurity in people’s everyday lives

Where there is fear, there are people ready to exploit it, to present themselves as the protective father of the nation. It was probably such a need that led Donald Trump’s senior aide Kellyanne Conway to fabricate the “Bowling Green massacre”. While there was no such event, two Iraqi citizens (Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi) were caught by the FBI in 2011 in Bowling Green, Kentucky, as they attempted to ship arms to al-Qaida. A year later, in Bowling Green, Ohio, police uncovered a plot to assassinate prominent black and Jewish citizens hatched by white supremacist shop-owner Richard Schmidt, who had assembled an enormous cache of weapons for the purpose. (Schmidt was sentenced to six years in prison, Hammadi for life, and Alwan for 40 years.)

The arrests of Hammadi and Alwan triggered Barack Obama to institute immigration restrictions, precursors to Trump’s blundering Muslim ban. Yet men like Schmidt, and many other white nationalist terrorists, trigger no such radical policy changes. On the contrary, the current administration seems very comfortable with white nationalism. Britain sets up “jihadi jails” – while no thought is given to the rise of white nationalist sentiment which led to the death of Jo Cox.

We ignore the similarities between the religious extremism and ethno-nationalism at our peril. Timothy McVeigh was, as the author Pankaj Mishra identifies, the harbinger of a new age. The Oklahoma bombing killed 168 people and injured more than 600. In prison, McVeigh befriended Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the architect of the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, which killed six people and injured over a thousand, and is regarded as a dress rehearsal for 9/11.

Abu Mohammad al-Adnani al-Shami, then Isis spokesman, in a 2012 YouTube video. Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images

This relationship reflects the deep similarities between the two, supposedly opposed men. Both their systems of identity, whether ethnic or religious, pivoted upon their own sense of victimisation and entitlement, a sense of their own superiority, their loyalties to their group, and their hatred for those outside those boundaries.

The Grey Zone, a 10-page editorial in the Islamic State’s magazine Dabiq, puts these connections between extremists at the heart of their strategy. Within their simplistic black-and-white, good-and-evil narrative, the idea is to sort everyone into sides, through eliminating the “grey zone” of the mushy, tolerant middle ground in which most of us live our daily lives, thereby recruiting us all to play a role in their imagined apocalypse. When your concept of utopia is based on the idea of a war between civilisations, the real enemies are not the other side: they are the conscientious objectors, those of us who continue to extend their human sympathies beyond categories of identity.

It has been a grave mistake to talk about Islamist extremism as if it were an isolated phenomenon; as if there were, perhaps, something uniquely toxic within the faith; or as if the circumstances of growing up in Muslim lands and Muslim homes were uniquely likely to generate political violence. Other extremists also have books they read, countries they live in, and families they belong to. Ideologies may differ, but the extremist mindset is similar wherever you find it. The pressing question is, why there has been such resurgence in extremist identity-centric politics over the past decades.

Jihadism and ethno-nationalism are expressions of crisis on a global scale, in an era in which many young people’s lives are marked by a sense of uncertainty – the increasing lack of social and financial security that is characteristic of neoliberalism and globalisation. Political and economic insecurity inevitably translates into insecurity in people’s everyday lives, from lack of access to welfare to the increasing lack of security in the workplace. The tendency to create inward-facing, exclusive, and even aggressive identity groups stems from this sense of insecurity and self-righteousness in a world where people feel that there is no place for them, and that their futures are uncertain. The issue of populist, fear-driven politics – from Hindutva to Likud, from Le Pen to Trump – is global in scale.

The peaceful world order risks falling apart because of our fears – and our desire, built on delusion, to restoring a simpler time. But this “simplicity” is a rejection of pluralism, and away from democracy towards authoritarianism. This is the world of our contemporary caliphs: Putin, Erdoğan, Modi and Trump, and the many other leaders of populist parties waiting in the wings. This does little to confront the real economic, social and environmental issues which are the greatest threat to human flourishing – and often deliberately exacerbates those threats so as to create more fear, and so more acolytes.

There is nothing more intrinsic to human life than diversity. Our splintering humanity has to reunite to protect our future. The bizarre and regressive utopias of extremists – whether they are drawn from a pre-civil rights America or a medieval caliphate – risk drawing us into a global civil war. We must refocus on a more modest vision of a utopia, based on a recognition that what makes us different is what makes us the same.

The way to stop the radicalisation of young Muslim men is the same way to stop the radicalisation of young men drawn to Steve Bannon’s “alt-right” ideology: politics that works for an equitable distribution of the world’s resources, and which resists the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. This is my utopia. We need to move away from the fear of the evil “other” – the vehicle of all our fears and resentments – and instead work to restore the unfulfilled promise of equality. We need to address the massive disparities of power, education, status and opportunity between individuals, regardless of colour, sex or faith. We need to build communication between the groups, to foster understandings through our dialogue, through art, our poetry, our songs: our shared understandings of what it is to be human.

That involves having more uncomfortable but necessary conversations, with those who, on the surface, seem utterly different from me. The question then becomes not why did Conway make up the Bowling Green massacre, but why do so many people feel so disenfranchised that they are willing to believe such lies?

Some lies – the ones we tell in desperation, for fear of the hurt that the truth will cause, in well-meant but ill-fated attempts at comfort – are hopes that don’t happen. But these lies are far more dangerous: they are pernicious and malicious. Yet the will to believe them is what we on the left need to understand in order to counter them, and provide an alternative to the warped utopia that Trump and his ilk promise their followers.

We need a politics of hope and unity against a politics of despair and resentment. If there is a utopia, we must build it in the grey zone, far away from black and white politics, and then paint it with all the glorious colours of the human experience.