The difference in conflict axis discriminator may be found in the confusion between the worldview and intentions of personality (as with Ahmadinejad or Khamenei, also Assad, also Putin) and affinity or affiliation with nominal class (Shiite). While the American approach repeatedly tries to null discrimination by class (so our Protestants and Catholics now get along as regards the civil purpose that is governance), I don’t think that either the surface of the American leadership either pursues or promotes analysis in political psychology with an emphasis on our troubling “malignant narcissists” and, with ISIS, plain criminal sociopaths and psychopaths.

Whether Pope or Ayatollah, their respective adherents invest a great deal of faith in their perception and judgment, and sometimes to the extent of treating the same as infallible, at which point the same pick up the medieval chips, and unbridled, or nearly so, they can bring great damage to others.

To obtain freedom of worship within a secular system may mean addressing the despotic in persons — and specific organizational personalities — and channeling the same off to positions more safe for everyone else. In that regard, ISIS represents the criminal side of egotism unchecked and way beyond limits. That what they do works its way through an affiliate community, sufficient for the same to demur from battle with them, speaks to normative and social grammar. Barbarians and pirates may be criminals to all whose paths cross with theirs, but within their own enclaves, they are the normative reality. They think they’re just fine — and that God loves them most of all.

This is related to “civilizational narcissism”. Mobarak Haider has continued fighting the good fight against what I call the “God Mob” — the mafia that leverages religious faith into immense — and deadly and often soul deadening — power over others.

Mobarak Haider’s Diagnosis — Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg

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The chat had to do with Iraq, the Sunni-Shiite schism, and, loosely, the ISIS alignment with Sunni Islam.  Be that as it may, the response corresponds with the interests of this blog, its notes in the area of “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”, and its cycling to and around “malignant narcissism” and the psychology of dictatorship and fascism.

Rodney King’s question, “Can’t we all just get along?” has been long answered in the main: not only “Yes, we can” but “yes, we do!”

Most of the time in America, it’s true: we are not at one another’s throats except all across the board and through the complex labyrinth’s of open civil and criminal courts.

We Americans have all the problems of the rest of the world but in much, much smaller measure, and for those smaller measures — whether having to do with blowing up abortion clinics or blowing up marathons at the finish line — we have our Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The lethal mix of external influence and incursion has also, alas, led to our supporting a massive domestic and foreign intelligence apparatus.

Still, that’s not because of us — it’s because of the world Out There!

Why can’t all the rest of you just get along?

🙂

The truth is most do but not on the basis of religious or other common affinity but rather according to moderate-middle sensibilities and temperaments that may be then free and secure to distill issues and promote policies and law that work for most on the basis of their shared general humanity.

Those that cannot do that deform into other and malignant souls.

Environments that encourage and sustain the latter, however, distress and mire themselves in conflict defined by dismal rounds of rule and subjugation.

Indeed, they are “dumb wars”.

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