The fabrication of imminent danger as a means to break people out of the norm and into their matrix reality may make their ability to evaluate real imminent dangers perhaps?
They were terrified of some AI Roko's Basilisk they imputed some fantastic power to.
They had issues with so many different groups and causes they may as well have been raging against society as a whole. A dozen or so kooks resorting to violence against the world will only ever end with their demise. They thought themselves rational but were in fact totally insane to think their course of action was anything other than elaborate suicide.
I don't think its necessarily suicidal if the leadership is competent.
Mao Tse Tung when he decided to become a "mountain bandit" and formed the basis for future Red Army may have had no greater advantage. Except he was a military genius and these guys were just geniuses.
