Existential Threat

An existential threat is the thing an endogroup is formed to meet, which makes it a component of endoreality rather than only a fact about the world. Endogroups are an emergency power structure created to withstand existential threats. The group self is formed in everyone's mind so that all will be willing to sacrifice for it, and the power accumulated in the endo-ideal is meant to increase the group's capacity to fight off the enemy. Every part of the structure is justified by the threat, which is why the threat is worth maintaining whether or not it exists. Marsh is careful not to say threats are always fictional. Sometimes an existential threat exists, and sometimes a revolution or war is fought against a real one and the fighters become tyrants afterwards, but it is rarely necessary to keep a dictator in order to combat threats. The failure is in permanence. An endogroup was never meant to be a permanent structure and becomes one as a means of transferring guilt. Idols use the same lever deliberately, since the risk of being martyred by their own followers can motivate them to secure the endogroup with an external existential threat while weakening rivals. At the level of a person the term has a second use. An infant cannot define a membrane around their own body alone, since that is in no way autonomous, and would feel overwhelming existential threat, which is why the first membrane must include a lifegiver.

Securitization theory, developed by the Copenhagen School and Ole Waever, holds that naming something an existential threat is a speech act that moves an issue outside normal politics and licenses emergency measures, which is very close to Marsh's account. Carl Schmitt's state of exception and Giorgio Agamben's work on emergency powers becoming permanent cover the same durability problem. Terror management theory studies what mortality reminders do to group attachment experimentally. Marsh's version differs by making the threat structurally necessary rather than politically useful. In securitization theory an actor chooses to securitize, whereas in her account an endogroup cannot exist without a threat to justify it, which predicts that one will be produced wherever a group needs to persist.