Retarded Social Natures and Terrorism
In many places in the
world today we do not even When our social level of intelligence is retarded it leads to a lack of social feelings, to exploitation of fellowman, enslaving of others, cruelty to animals, destruction of the environment, inhumane laws, authoritarianism, and terrorism of many kinds. Social ignorance tends to be ugly, mean, nasty, brutal, and cruel. There are many examples of social cruelty in modern day life and plenty of people fighting battles on ever front against it. Mirroring on a lower level the cruelty we often hold out for each other we have factory farming and feeding lots, where animals like cows and chickens are subjected to terrible confining quarters. Dairy farms are atrocious as well as dangerous to the environment while producing foods of highly doubtful quality. We have other good examples in the senseless killing of dolphins in tuna nets and the inability to feel for the plight of many species that are facing extinction around the globe. It’s not that much different when we face the human suffering or plight of political prisoners or anyone who is suffering from the injustices of the world. When we cross the threshold of human relationships we add an extra dimension that applies only to our treatment of each other; we make enemies out of others whom we hate. Hate and caring are contradictions in terms for when we enter the world of hate we close our hearts to the universe of caring. Indifference and apathy are on a similar continuum as hate, all of which are as far away from love as you can get.
We accept so much uncaring and sometimes even hate because it is convenient to do so not knowing the price. Most of us have a hard time caring about the poor cows, whales and dolphins, not to mention the thousands of species that are quickly disappearing from our planet because of our excesses. Uncaring is uncaring in no matter what form it comes. When we begin to look at people as mere ciphers or numbers that live ‘out there’ we separate and stop caring for them. When we separate we do not have to care or consider with our feelings but as Gandhi indicated above, we separate from some part of ourselves when we cut ourselves off from others with hate or even with simple uncaring, indifference and apathy. The very concept behind corporations reinforces uncaring for it protects owners from taking responsibility for their actions. This means that directors within corporations can dump waste chemicals in our drinking water, or keep our work environments in fatally dangerous conditions, without any personal feelings or actual legal liability. Even today the American government is passing a law that will exempt pharmaceutical companies, who have placed toxic poisonous preservatives in vaccines, from being held legally responsible for the hurt and damage they have done. There is a long tradition of hurtful corporate behaviors that finally needs to be addresses and confronted in the most serious way. From this jumping off place it is not such a gigantic leap to understand the consciousness of a terrorist who does not or cannot feel for his potential victims. The rapist or mass murderer has no empathy for the suffering of their victims nor does the terrorist that throws a bomb into a crowded restaurant or the hijacker who holds a plane full of children as hostages. These people have stunted social levels of awareness, closed or bleeding hearts that have cut them off from higher levels of caring and consideration. There was no social feeling among red communists about the conditions in the prison camps of Siberia or among the Nazis for the conditions and fate of 20 million killed in their concentration camps. The Chinese similarly had little feeling for the Tibetans, the Cambodian communists for their own people, and most Americans are insensitive and blind to the terror that their own democratically elected government has done around the world in the name of imperial capitalism and blind lust for power. The US government does not care about the terrible consequences of its War on Drugs. We
are the targets of terrorists because we stand for dictatorship, bondage, and human
exploitation in the world.
Dr. Robert M. Bowman This kind of uncaring we see across the board in human activities is universal in humanity and operates as powerful now as ever. Today the Chinese government is being accused of covering up their AIDS epidemic that is resulting in the suffering of millions and threatens millions and millions more. There the government’s steps seem tantamount to murder as does the actions of many others around the globe. Too many corporations do not care about the dangers of their products nor the damage done to the environment (which eventually causes suffering and death in both animal and human kingdoms) as long as they make a profit. Thirteen years ago I
watched the Chinese Army The social level of life is where much of the pain and suffering in humanity is generated and it certainly is the field upon which terrorists of all stripes are setting their campaigns of terror. There is a deep instinctive fear that operates unconsciously on the social level of awareness. (See levels of intelligence in the Einstein Galileo School to compare and contrast one level of awareness from another). The basic social instinct is beyond most peoples awareness but if we could imagine a damaged or absent social instinct we would see that humankind would loose what drives him to congregate in groups, churches or parties. Animals would not herd together, birds would not flock or fly in formation. Though this instinct is a survival one, of coming together to eat and hunt for food and for the propagation of the species, it is also involved with the fear of other species that offer danger and threat. Early man would huddle together for safety but today we keep all the dangerous animals in a zoo caged up behind bars. But if we suddenly found ourselves back out in the jungle full of wild beasts, each and every snap of a twig would awaken in us this drive to survive and this fear of other species. Man has mostly transferred this fear of dangerous animals to a fear of his own species, to a paranoid respond to anyone who is different from us and we separate strongly along these lines of difference even in tolerant societies like the States, which is not as tolerant as its self-image holds itself out to be. But if a wild beast were walking down the street we would suddenly not mind the differences and would join together against the common foe. This is why war propaganda is so successful in uniting a society onto some feelings of oneness because the banding together of creatures against a common foe lies deep in our evolutionary past. Today the whole game of life is changing because we now have more dangerous beasts than ever walking invisibly down our streets. We have more criminals and rapists then ever before, terrorists that can set loose a bomb while we sit in a restaurant or let loose a biological weapon as we open our mail. Fear not love is on the increase and the United States government is using this fear to manipulate its own population in support of its policies, which are, in essence, ideologically bankrupt, and full of secret terror which it has exported to the rest of the world for decades. The brutality of harming others is the terror of terrorism. The brutality of harming others begins in our uncaring attitudes and in our fear. Fear is really the opposite of love so this basic fear of others who are different destroys the basic vibration of the heart. We could say that fear and hate are intimate cousins so in the hate and fear of others we sow the seeds of our own destruction. We close the doors to our own hearts with our fear and hate of others. Doubt and fear are married to each other in our internal worlds of consciousness as hate and fear are married to each other in the social worlds of experience. It is just because we are stunted in our understanding of such deep things that mankind has not learned that to destroy others will eventually generate those forces of aggression which will destroy us. "Whatsoever you do to
the least of my brothers, This wisdom from the bible speaks of the oneness of humanity that in World Psychology is called The Oneness of Being and this subject will come up in several chapters throughout this series. Though incomprehensible to most it speaks of the highest social wisdom and is the very basis of quantum physics, the oneness or absolute interconnectedness of life. The “me” that was talked about above is you and I; it is not just Jesus Christ. When we separate we do violence to our being and of course violence to others. Andrew Schmookler of Harvard University teaches that all forms of violence, whether verbal, psychological, or physical comes from a kind of thinking that attributes the causes of conflict to wrongness in ones adversary. When we are standing in judgment of the wrongness of others we then loose the ability to see in terms of others and our own vulnerability. We loose the ability to relate to and identify with the feelings, needs, fears and yearnings of others. In short we loose our capacity for empathy. Wisdom on the social level of consciousness leads us to the conclusion that our violence will boomerang back on us yet this is a conclusion that the terrorist abandons because of the terrors of his or her own heart and the conditioning in their minds and brains. And yet the most common response to terror mirrors the ignorance of the terrorist and actually confirms the terrorist in his actions. The old eye for an eye knee jerk type of consciousness that leads to retaliation is bankrupt and will not serve the security or survival of civilization, as we know it. Retaliation is a trap; it just leads to more retaliation, to violence without end. We need look no further than Ariel Sharon's futile war with the Palestinians to understand the folly of retaliation. “By far the world's best anti-terrorist apparatus is Israel's. Measured in military terms, it has been phenomenally successful. Yet Israel still suffers more attacks than all other nations combined. If retaliation worked, Israelis would be the world's most secure people,” says Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, (retired). In Israel an Israeli soldier shoots a Palestinian stone-thrower. The Palestinians retaliate by killing a settler. The Israelis then retaliate by sending a murder squad to kill a Palestinian gunman. The Palestinians retaliate by sending a suicide bomber into a discotheque. The Israelis then retaliate by sending F-16s to bomb a Palestinian police station. Retaliation leads to retaliation and more retaliation, it leads to a war without end. Though it seems that some of the world’s leaders believe otherwise, this problem cannot be solved through war or responding with counter violence. Has it not been proven beyond all doubt that this is so? Yet violence is that response of people, organizations and nations who cannot stand the idea that there is something they might need to change. In life we are constantly challenged when facing people who are further into the darkness then we are, and terrorists who strap bombs to their bellies certainly are a little more lost in hopelessness and darkness than most. But that does not change the fact that the American government will be making a serious mistake if it makes fighting terrorism its main objective. A fight is exactly what terrorists want because it furthers their cause. Terrorists are the ones after all who have given up all hope of conflict resolution through peaceful means. And it seems like some of the big people in office have done the same. In their heart of hearts we find the same drive to violence as we do in the terrorist of the most common type. Fear of terrorism coupled with the drive to destroy them will not get us where we want to go. It will not bring security of any kind. Instead of letting our leaders bring on more terror we need to begin to communicate and listen to the terrorists in the world and disarm them with our true listening and our heart felt response to the cause of their pain and suffering. We have instead of openness and compassion for their complaints a tendency to refer to terrorists as "mindless," for if we did not, we would have to explain what is going on in the minds and hearts of these people. “Only one thing has ever ended a terrorist campaign -- denying the terrorist organization the support of the larger community it represents. And the only way to do that is to listen to and alleviate the legitimate grievances of the people,” says Dr. Bowman. It is the way of a Gandhi to find a manner that will disarm the violence and diminish the terrorism. In him was sufficiently developed a love of his fellow man, a social type of consciousness that understood the folly of mindless violent reaction to violence, something that the principle powers of earth have not learned yet. We would like to call terrorists horrible monsters, the same with the sniper in the DC area. We call the Baton Rouge and other serial killers monsters. We fear monsters, not seeing them as ordinary people common in many respects to the rest of us. Patricia Cornwell recently wrote, “As a perennial student of crime, I am here to tell you that there is no such thing as a monster. Neither the sniper nor the Baton Rouge serial killer is cold-blooded. These killers are human beings, as warm-blooded as the rest of us. It is unlikely they bear any resemblance to Frankenstein's creation. These murderers probably look perfectly normal. Someone reading this article could very well have met one of these killers and found him polite, helpful, charming or, if nothing else, forgettable.” Though debateable there is a point to what Cornwell is saying here, it shows that these seemingly inhuman people are still human. Said another way, we, the rest of humanity is not without our tendencies that darken the human landscape in one way or another. In HeartHealth we get deeply into this question by seeing all of humanity as on a continuum with their being no absolute separation between the worst and the best of humanity. The heart can see and understand this but the human mind rebels terribly against such an idea. Patricia, also a writer for the Times gives us the key. Terrorists are people as we are people and they are responding to frustrating and impossible conditions in the only way available to them. There are root causes to conflicts and when those roots are not addressed in creative and productive ways deep frustration, anger and violent feelings tend to take form. Different people take different avenues when faced with the frustration of their real needs. Though open and honest communication is the answer, it is no answer in a world that does not want to listen. Instead of listening to what other people are needing and not getting, and instead of understanding how the terrorist is caught up in incredibly life alienating types of communication (violence), which reduce the chances that they will realize what they both want and need, we ourselves default into separation, judgement and further violence. We would prefer to fight than listen. It’s the same in families, between husbands and wives as it is between enemies. Would it not be an incredible change in human awareness and government if instead of getting hysterical and fighting mad, the American people and government stopped and listened to the grievances of the rest of the world. Or in present circumstances, listened to the grievances of its enemies. Now this of course is difficult to do if they will not listen in return. For communication, listening and conflict resolution to work all parties need to be reasonably advanced in their consciousness and they need to be honest with their motives and hidden agendas. This obviously is not the way of fundamentalists who deep down at heart cannot care for others who do not believe in what they do. The
Islamic world today is being held prisoner, We need to break this silence all over the board, in our homes, between friends, in business organizations and in the very halls of governance. This silence Rushdie is talking about is the absence of the type of listening and communication that breaks the hold of the few upon the many. In the separation of silence we are divided and this is the food that dictators, and all authoritarian governments thrive on. Though Rushdie, an Arab, discounts above the abuses of the west on the third world, ignores American and European support for the reign of tyranny that Arab leaders hold over their own people, he makes a basic point. How
fortunate for governments that He might as well have said they don’t listen carefully for in listening we begin to think. In listening we hear the lies and deception as well as the answers that we need to follow. By the end of this book we will practice breaking this silence through listening to beings we would rather reject as total criminals, men like bin Laden. It is through this listening that we will stumble on what to say to break this silence, which is just another word that expresses our basic apathy of being. What happens when we put up with our governments misdeeds instead of confronting them? This is the exact mechanism by which political leaders gain more and more power; they capitalize on our silence and weakness of being. We become weaker as the strong get stronger, we give away our strength to them. Apathy is the natural partner of the power-seeking drive in human beings and the two energize and feed each other. In America we do not care that we are taxed more and more every year while the government gains strength in becoming increasingly bureaucratic so that we eventually find ourselves merely victims of all the red tape. We look at the size of our government and feel helpless, but how did it get to that size? The more powerful the power structure grows, the more hopeless and apathetic one feels, which only makes the government stronger still. Finally there is nothing left, either at the individual or the social level but rage and resentment. Christopher Hills We now have a world where apathy and the personal isolation and uncaring it brings is no longer a choice. The choice is lying in the rubble in downtown Manhattan, or in the empty space now that the rubble has been removed. After Lincoln was assassinated Herman Melville wrote: There
is sobbing of the strong, We do need an iron hand in dealing with terrorism but it is not the future terrorism of retaliation and more violence that is needed. Instead it is the iron hand of the heart full of strength to withstand the weak and easy impulse of knee jerk reaction that is needed. It is the incredible strength of our will to really listen and look seriously at what is wrong and what needs to be changed inside of each and every one of us, in society and in the world as a whole. In reality there are people weeping all over the world, in ever corner, rich and poor, powerful and weak, a weeping whose cry is still waiting to be heard.
|
|