If it has to do with mind, it has also to do with language and language culture, and that in turn has to do with listening behavior (programming) and learned expressive behavior (scripting). If that could not be changed, we would all be speaking Latin or Lithuanian.

Poets work to change the cultural and intellectual technology we call “language”; however, poets seldom agree on how one should read or listen (except in awe of their own overwhelming intellectual powers, perhaps) or what stance one should acquire in life and course take.

However, if conflicts were primarily about “whose programming” and “whose script”, they would peter out for the distribution of populations across the globe: as many as we are, Russia is not crowded, Mongolia is lonely, practically, and one may still find solitude within an hour or two of the boundaries of a great city.  If “my kind vs your kind” drove conflict on the basis of proximity, I should think it India that would be constantly embroiled in fighting, but, no.

Today’s primary driver: criminal willfulness.

I want your land too.

I want the proceeds from your gas and oil wells and from your creativity and productivity in business, also your illegal tunnels, arms, and heroin trades, and perhaps too, your building rents.

It seems there’s a lot of wealth Out There for a few who have brought themselves up to do business with a grasping hand and a ready fist.

When it’s just one guy alone, call the cops or a psychiatrist and isolate the same in criminal or other institutional confines; when it’s one guy alone with an army, a treasury, and, perhaps, a state, cordon the country, send in humanitarian aid, trade with it delicately, and leave the same and the people of the place to miserable fate, although most tyrants who keep it in the house make it to old age and the privilege of dying in their sleep (I can’t name any but could put a few dictators on the waiting list for that).

When the whole culture has gone sociopath rotten, THEN someone might want to fiddle with the sound of the music of the language seducing their ears.  Perhaps as children they should not have listened so meekly or passively to garbage; perhaps they are living a bad dream — as bad as it gets in Syria, in the Central African Republic, in Somalia, etc. — and need to wake up either to their better humanity or to their tormentors.

Earlier this month, Richard Spencer writing for The Telegraph took note of a recent tweet out of Syria:

Here is what one jihadist wrote recently as a caption to a photograph of some blindfolded captives: “Got these criminals today. Insha’Allah will be killed tomorrow. Cant wait for that feeling when U just killed some1.”

Syria anniversary: the psychopaths are unstoppable – Telegraph – 3/13/2014.

How the hell did that get into that noggin?

Hormones, one might say, with naturally unstable young teenagers.

With adults, I would suggest that as children, even as infants, they picked up on something early, later heard or read something to add to it, and then in their late teens and early twenties and beyond arrived somewhere to play a part in an inside-out theater and thereby fulfill their programming and their scripting.

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Related on BackChannels: Conflict – Language Uptake – Social Programming and Scripting – A Suggestion | BackChannels; Language Uptake – Programming – On Learning to Listen | BackChannels.

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