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