Conflict motivation counts, of course, but take into account also the role of “malignant narcissists” in creating around themselves both a context and desire for conflict that serves to aggrandize themselves, support their own messianic delusions of grandeur, and provide control over what we call “narcissistic supply” (the love of the masses, if you will) at any and every expense to those seduced and those disinterested in their so-called glory.

To get an image of the destructiveness of a conflict may encourage a stepping back to at how the component parts of a conflict actually work physically, politically, and socially; also at what tempo (N bombings, N shootings, N firefights, N rockets, etc. / hour – day – week – month – year); at what level destructive of people, places, and things differentially; and how corrosive or eroding of communal, business, and personal relationships; and, finally, how effective or transforming either for rape and rapine or the enterprise of a good society.

With the cloak of religion overlaying other motives, including the want of divine exception for one’s own existence, i.e., a facet of narcissistic pathology, a problem in the head drives the conflict, and until it can’t produce violence or has been examined and resolved, the fighting will continue because it has no credible or reasoning end outside of the insanity of the driving egomania.

There are other ways of approaching a conflict for layout, including by way of the behavioral and linguistic characteristics encountered — i.e., one may look at cultural programming and related “habits of mind” — like attitudes toward Jews, for example — and approach that “content of mind” apart from the physical elements involved in conflict.

On any given day, conflict analysis involves some cohort of beginners: those whose attention has been caught and whose eyes want to open and see what they’re not being shown and then with intellectual methods and tools that improve in accuracy and independence, for themselves and others, a more authentic and valid interpretation of states of affairs.

I encourage along those lines a combined dimensional and statistical basis for examining ideas in light of accurate and comprehensive data and working with both to address a range of conflict-related challenges extant, including the critical “content of mind” or language-behavior elements that would seem to foster contempt and enmity out of the most artificial and superficial of bases.

The civil and sub-state conflicts that comprise the Islamic Small Wars have been the most difficult for seeing.  These guerrilla-style / low-intensity conflicts involving cabal and mafia-type methods for getting things done — bribery and patronage, intimidation and murder — nonetheless turn out configurable from a reverse-engineering standpoint: a good detective taking note of statistics and some human intelligence besides may start to see the factory process — the origins of motivational programming and thought; the assembly of vendors (essentially); the trade routes and shops; the embarkation points — as plain as day.

It takes always too long, but the knowledge comes along even so.

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