With reference to language behavior, the Islamic Small Wars bring to observation the profound divide between the principle of loyalty at any price, starting with lying, and the principle of integrity — truth telling — at some known price, including the loss of access to power. This arrangement works because the tyrant’s power — the power developed by the malignant narcissist — is about control based in the enforcement of fidelity to the narcissist as central to survival and the narcissist’s subsequent enjoyment thereby of limitless narcissistic supply.
Simply put: where despotism is ascendant, it is easier to live with a loyal lie than weather the consequences of telling an uncomfortable truth.
That such a form in power corrupts western institutions, i.e., as with Hamas tacit arrangements with the UNRWA that have the terrorist organizations stockpiling rockets in UNRWA schools; also as with Hamas tactics in war including the direction and inhibition of once independent journalists, appears to come about through some combination of greed (the press wants the story and is willing to settle for a constrained slice of it) and weakness (as perhaps journalists and their organizations wish to come through physically unscathed and politically in position to go out again with the same skewing constraints in place).
Such journalism may be the best practicable under a circumstance managed by Hamas, but it’s also a compromised journalism that has bought into evil, even so, and diminished itself and made its product less trustworthy for that.
“It is ridiculous that Israel opens Jerusalem for foreign tourists, while millions of Palestinian Christians and Muslims are being banned from entering their occupied capital,” said Nabil Shaath, a confidant of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.” — We humans do ourselves in with our mouths, and our mouths do in others through their ears. When hate is the cause, the cause is poison, the body politic, should it care to care for itself, takes appropriate measures.
Answer “why” first — and the answer may have to do with the roles played in language by loyalty and what might be called “secure feeling”. When people lie, which concept includes false accusations and omissions, it is to hide something or to get something.
Always.
Around the world, what competes with loyalty? Principle.
However, if dissimulation accedes to bullying (by the local god mob), if fibbing means being fed, if deflection of responsibility forestalls opprobrium and shame, if vicious slander summons murder and plunder to one’s greater glory, thuggish though it be, well, heck, lying works!
All of that is part of “social grammar”, which you are trying to change where it’s needed. Perhaps, unfortunately, social reality — with which language behaviors are integrated — trumps principle by maintaining and reinforcing the behaviors cited for scolding. To get to a better place, the reward system has to change in a pervasive way.
From the above, one may sense how and where propaganda fits in and why it’s so important for autocrats to manage their state’s media to whatever extent may be possible: the systems they create in their own piratical interests are made to depend on their patronage and protection without exception, and for that, their subjects, the subjugated, must be made and maintained as the most loyal of believers: our “malignant narcissists” cannot afford the freedom of free minds when it comes to maintaining their “vertical of power” and their vision of expanding and limitless “narcissistic supply”.
Are “grandiose and messianic delusions” actually delusions if the person possessed of them makes them even somewhat real?
Be that as it may, the challenge and puzzle posed by Tezyapar’s jihad of the pen nonetheless involves the unraveling of complex and long-lived systems of pandering and patronage on the part of the powerful — who for their own aggrandizement lie to their people to keep them manipulated — and systems of subjugation within which the weak may grovel or play — and pray — as required and reap the benefits of an imperious acknowledgment, one by whom that if defied would be just as pleased to “barrel bomb” the children of the loyal every bit as much as the disloyal.
That last behavior, the throwing of an ungodly tantrum, I would not call indicative of “social grammar” but rather “criminal infallibility”, a state of being and regard most appreciated by dictators.
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.”
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.
Empathy with an emphasis on compassion, and here with that as related to casualties and displaced from Syria’s agonizing civil war, signals something good in the general humanity, but it’s not going to be enough to promote band-aids when the war is sustained on the absence of an armed force of a middle and perhaps now modern temperament.
It’s notable also that Russia pledged $10 million to refugee relief in Syria while spending $52 billion, the largest amount ever, for the winter Olympics at Sochi.
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My partner in the short conversation then said, “Humanity in the true sense has lost all its values.”
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Not really although it sometimes seems to. We’re a wild species suspended in about, oh, 6,900 living languages, each of which represents a cultural invention and technology and conveys from one generation to the next a behavioral program fit to the character of the language community in a given circumstance in place and time.
I believe the variance in that language-driven and language-derived behavior shapes consciousness and conscience and with regard to empathy, may emphasize the cultivation of that ability to meld emotion and imagination on behalf of someone else, or it may harden the heart against the same.
Other qualities may obtain similar support and the tapestry of whole cultures, whether that of, say, a living sun king or that of a god remote and separate from the mortal, becomes made of such threads. With the aforementioned 6,900 differences in cultural cognitive style wrapped in language, it’s amazing we don’t have more conflict on our plates than we do, but, ever optimistic here, if we drift toward a moderate middle together, we can clean up and forestall a lot of this kind of mess.
The modern dictator’s values — any side (one chessboard – same player on both sides, lol) — build on heroic myth to develop power over others for the purpose of obtaining continuous and inexhaustible “narcissistic supply” — the adoration and adulation of the realm: and they often sail themselves and their own to disaster on the wings of a grandiose messianic delusion.
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The inspiration for the above portion of threaded conversation appears to be a contrivance but quite pointed:
The best way to save the children is, alas, to save the adults, get enough on to about the same page in their attitudes, ethics, ideals, and values with regard to others, and then get them to challenge, eject, or evolve the kind of deeply narcissistic and lost personalities who have attempted to paint reality for others through what they do in the pursuit of war.
Of the Assad regime and the al-Nusra et al. counterpoints, I’ve remarked “different talk: same walk”: each will use the lives of noncombatants for political chips. Perhaps nowhere in the whole sorry tragedy has that been made more clear than in the approach of each side to the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp, where one side laid siege as part became a rebel base, and the rebels, true to form, used the helpless and unarmed residents as their own human shields.
Is there anyone reading this post that might want to see that obscenity again?
Attitudes and beliefs, including beliefs about Jews, about loyalty, about the west, about the Baath Party and the Soviet Union (or its ghost from 22 years ago) play a role in impeding the development of an effective and true Syrian people’s army. Moreover, but along similar lines, the three sides — Assad; more secular revolutionary forces; and, of course, the al-Qaeda types — have found themselves trapped in the immense shadows cast by the glorious wars of yesteryear, which for each is different: Bashar al-Assad has been trying to fight his father’s war, an armed insurrection against the state; the battles in mind, perhaps literally, for the al-Qaeda affiliates need little introduction and would seem to be expressed in battlefield and political behavior; and the moderates who seem to be carrying around the load of combined internationalist and Islamist hate for Israel, Jews, and “The West” just haven’t found their way to daylight.
I don’t know where to change that “Jew hate” that signals so much else about the three parties sewing Syria with destruction, and I’m not sure it’s my job alone to locate those cognitive switches in the languages alive on the fields of battle, but finding that would be a good place to start.
Syrians needs Syria — I know of no culture free of a relationship with its land and landscape — and they need to own it for themselves in peace.
To obtain that ownership and peace, the defense Syrians may need most of all, the defense most absent in the three years of continuous and brutal fighting, is not defense from Israel, which is treating Syrian wounded today, but defense from those among themselves who would seek their own excessive aggrandizement at the costs now well displayed in death, displacement, and suffering.
Related (updated 3/18/2014) from The Torah, Exodus 31-32:
31The LORD did as Moses asked, and removed the swarms of insects from Pharaoh, from his servants and from his people; not one remained. 32But Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also, and he did not let the people go.
Here’s an interesting divide: do we choose the security of a loyal untruth over the presence of a disloyal but uncomfortable truth?
As you know, because you have read “Shimmer”, I track Pamela Geller as a friend (friendly) but not as the final word on Islam: I know and love too many “Islamic Humanists”, Muslim Americans living with all Americans no differently than Christian Americans or Jewish Americans or Sikh Americans or Hindu Americans (the list of religious affiliations and differentiation in America gets quite long). I enjoy the effort of Irshad Manji and and Mudar Zahran and others to know the location of their hearts and ethics and find it in their lives as Muslims.
The American anti-Jihad and counter-terrorism and related communities — not to mention the consultant-watchers of NSA and other organizations about — is fairly extensive and scholarly in their reading (I haven’t friend Robert Spencer) in their reading of Qur’an and Hadith in something like the manner in which those elements are interpreted by terrorists who are Muslim and who carry out their crimes with what they believe accords injunction found in the Qur’an.
Geller rakes muck, perhaps doesn’t follow up as meticulously as she should, and she writes with interest, so we may frame her in the “special interest” press, not far off the Coptic press, the Catholic one, the Jewish one, or, alas, the jihad ones with the black flags. Nonetheless, and having looked, I must accept Jeremy D. Mayer’s criticism, she’s on a right track IF we’re chatyping about al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the Muslim Brotherhood as exemplified in the policies and practices demonstrated so swiftly by former Egyptian President Morsi, etc. She asks — as Sinem Tezyapar might ask — what kind of human, what kind of Muslim, troops into Mumbai, for example, and commits the atrocities committed there? Were those humans Muslims or not? New York – London – Madrid: same question. Westgate Shopping Mall, Nairobi, Kenya: Muslim? Not Muslim? Something else?
Here’s where I differ some from Pamela Geller: I’m willing to recognize the humanity in my humanist, reformation, trying hard Muslim friends because they recognize humanity in me, a Jew, a Zionist, and have in their deeds and in their words both goodness and integrity.
It’s that last word that the fighting — all of it, from the Gaza Strip to to whatever’s going on today in Iraq — is all about.
Is it permissible to deceive the infidel? Or not? In the name of Islam?
There’s a lot of money tied up in conflict, and not all of it — probably little of it — goes into fighting. It goes into extraordinary self-aggrandizement (count the number of Saddam’s palaces – and we rue the day we did business that way: that’s an era that has passed, God willing). It goes into “skimmers” who use their political power to dip their hands into the state’s wealth, or leverage it (Putin-Assad-Khamenei could not be more different in their talk, but for the character of their person, they are the same person, until one, and only one has the power today, turns around).
So what manner of Muslim these days – “Carlos” solidarity, OBL base, out into the universe with Rumi (I like him), tenuously holding on to balance like Musharraf, promoting the whole program like Zia Haq? This is hard stuff. The Jews, for the most part, are arranged differently: we don’t take the word of God at face value (because we believe He doesn’t want us to but rather means for us to discover His meaning from one generation to the next: it doesn’t give us a lot of room for launching offensives in the manner of Constantine or other generals; we don’t conflate men with God; and we search tirelessly for better answers in accord with Hillel’s question: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, WHAT am I?”
Pamela Geller isn’t about hate. She’s about love. So I believe are many others I have met and what they have in them may be less the province of religion and more the nature of a decent and still emerging humanity.
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Most conversations like the above that I’ve encountered take place in a spectrum of what I call “middle east hate-peace peace groups”. Some are nasty. It’s easy to meet through chatyping the most strident of Israeli nationalists and the worst of hidebound anti-Semites, not that I’m about to name names. Some are closed and collegial and inclined to scrape up the documents and narratives of hurtful histories but, alas, with parochial spin.
I co-moderated one such group on another social network a long time ago (or, here in cyberspace, what seems like a long time ago). Since then and with the memory of my first encounter with deeply embedded anti-Semitism have arrived at some thought that is close to the heart of this blog, i.e., that “attitudes and beliefs” are contingent on early language uptake programming — how we are taught to listen and to know what is important to listen to — and scripting, which is the transmitted way of a (language) culture. To navigate through and out of conflict that has its life primarily in the mind means addressing some early programming and scripting with the knowledge that some things need to become the artifacts of age left behind.
I may suggest i the way of theory that language behavior universally divides into “programming”, which has to do with listening, formulating, and learning, and is an underlying cognitive process in our humanity, and “scripting” that involves instructions discerned from each language’s “language culture”, which starts with the culture between mother and child and family and moves outward to expanded social circles. In that view:
–What mothers impart to children as they are listening may well determine predispositions throughout life. I don’t think we can pin that (yet) but we know infants may not have a specific look for listening — life is life, not a classroom — but we know they’re listening, “taking statistics”, and with programming learning language as they hear it and figure it out.
–What Mr. Oktar refers to as “mass psychology” may involve the internalized cultural programming (not yet scripting) predisposing the adult to adoption of a proffered script that seems favorable to survival _even if it is not so_. That’s where many Germans found themselves in 1933 and where Hungarians today within the Jobbik Party find a similar voice. This gets closer to home with less hate assumptions, mine about aristocracy and genius, and about which I have to like, Mr. Oktar’s about bloodline, conventional and traditional clerics about intellectual lineage, and so on.
We all have our pride.
If what is private and prized — I think every person has some cause for that element in self-concept and self-esteem — becomes communal, deeply contemptuous of others, and, right on that path, destructive for others less concerned with the concerns of the zealot, then that very early area in language uptake — programming first, then scripting — needs work, and the work is woman’s work, the work of the one unconsciously and unselfconsciously teaching her infant how to think and speak.
I dread the computer’s getting ahead of the human story in language behavior, but for the sake of diminishing conflict that has its life first in the “mouth – ear – mind – heart” system, we would do well to pay attention to this area in which infants, soon to be children, later teenagers, and adults first assemble their social world, its manner of communicating, and the base-level attitudes and beliefs that may accompany them on their journey to the end of their own days.
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