Re: tribal violence (was: RE: would you vote for this man?)

From: Jeff Davis (jrd1415@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Sep 02 2003 - 16:36:05 MDT

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    --- "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@aeiveos.com> wrote:

    > But *what* then is driving these people to
    irrational behavior? Is it simply "salvation" in the
    afterlife, e.g. really gone wrong mental programming?
    Social pressure? Desire for power by the
    leaders?.......

    ..... It simply does not seem rational.

    What precisely is the behavior you consider
    irrational?

    Suicide bombings?, with the attendant
    willingness--even enthusiasm--for the sacrifice of
    one's own life? They call it martyrdom, which goes a
    long way toward explaining it, if you consider that
    similar ideas in different cultures are expressed
    differently. We call it "the ultimate price" or "the
    ultimate sacrifice" or "the glory of war" or "our
    patriotic duty": the risk and sacrifice of soldiering.
     These risks are motivated by patriotism, a desire to
    earn 'glory', or heroism, or the attendant acclaim of
    our nation(tribe), or social acceptance and promotion
    to full adulthood, and--perhaps cynically--by the
    inherent naivete of the very young.

    Was the war in Afghanistan, provoked by 911,
    irrational? I'm guessing you would say "Clearly, no."
     And that answer would be based on your intimate
    personal experience of, and thorough understanding of,
    the events which motivated that war.

    I suggest that if you were as thoroughly versed in the
    Muslim experience, from living within it and being
    informed by its information 'environment'
    (memetics), you would find the Arab/Islamic view to be
    as self-evidently logical as was the Afghan war.

    It boils down to our media trains us, their media
    trains them. Misunderstanding, prejudice, and then
    finally, conflict, result from the mutual invalidity
    of half-truths. The mutual invalidity of tribal myth.

    [I haven't yet read the rest of this thread, so if I'm
    behind the curve, covering territory already surveyed,
    please excuse; or as Rosanne Rosannadanna used to say,
    "Nevermind."]

    Best, Jeff Davis

          "We don't see things as they are,
                 we see them as we are."
                            Anais Nin
      

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