Fighting terrorism

How do we deal with terrorists? After the fact, we find them and disarm or, if necessary, eliminate them. Before the fact, we try to find them and then we do the same. That is, with real terrorists: people who kill, maim and rape unsuspecting, usually unarmed others.
Then we try to contain potential terrorists. We find them among the psychopaths: people without conscience, without remorse, without compassion, without empathy. Most psychopaths are made: by humiliation and torture, that is, by other people who are already psychopaths. And sometimes by extremists: people with lofty goals who consider everything acceptable that will lead to their goals. Extremism is fanaticism turned into action. More often than not, fanaticism is religious. What is wrong with religion?
There is not necessarily anything wrong with religion. We could state, more fundamentally, that out there is no such thing as religion, only religious people, people with certain convictions.
The most practical way is to look at religion as a booster. It makes broad-minded people more broad-minded, even incredibly so. And it makes narrow-minded people more narrow-minded, even incredibly so. It makes humane people more humane, and inhumane people more inhumane. It makes the wise wiser and the fools more foolish.
The problem of the superhuman is that it has so much to offer to the inhuman. The inhuman feels at home in the superhuman. And so the strongest light attracts also the strongest darkness. The most peaceful religions, like Buddhism, are more mental hygiene than religion. Confucianism is even more so. Though it can be stifling, it is rarely violent.
Religions that touch our soul the deepest, evoke the most enthusiasm, have the darkest fringes. Christianity and Islam come to mind. Fortunately, Christianity seems on the whole to have passed its psychopathic excrescences, Islam still has it. But when Christianity was as old as Islam is today, the religious wars were still in the future. An the first centuries of Christianity after it came into the open, where more violent and mad and cruel than Islam was in its first centuries. During the Crusades, the Europeans were much more primitive and cruel butchers and the Saracens were relatively enlightened, cultured and mild-mannered.
It is not religion that is decisive, but the mind-set of the believers.
Suppression of women in many non-Christian cultures is unbelievable to modern Europeans. When did we start to appreciate and value women? Around 1200 the Church began to teach that women should not be forced to be married against their will. That enlightened view started in the South of France and became part of chivalry, later of the cult of the gentilhomme, the gentleman. And where did the troubadours get it? From the highly cultured Moors in Spain. The people that were later, together withe Jews, wholesale murdered and subjugated by the barbaric Spanish Christians. The Spanish Inquisition and its auto-de-fés made even Rome look tame.

How many psychopaths are there? A reasonable estimate is around 2% of the population. Some may be born that way, others become psychopaths by growing up with psychopaths, or mixing with psychopaths in war, guerrilla, revolution or organized crime. The nazis emptied the prisons and offered the inmates work in the concentration camps. A few psychopaths in positions of power may unleash the others on the population at large.

Terrorists as we know them the last decades are small fry. The big thing is when regimes are run by psychopaths. Usually they remain at the intermediate level: warlords and crime bosses in failed states. Sometimes they come to the top and unleash a reign of terror. Not all dictators are psychopaths, but many fill the description, most, I suspect.

When, around 1980, I tried to identify the main international challenges, the first was cruelty, torture and terror, especially terrorist regimes. If you are interested in the history, the psychology and the sociology of terror, you may read the third chapter of  How People Make the World.* It includes what we should do about it.

The debate if Islam is a violent or a peaceful religion, is besides the point. It is both, of course. It is a source of inspiration for peaceful people. And also for violent people. For a full appreciation of women. And for a rampant suppression of women. As is true for all religions. Also the Bible is full of texts supporting one point of view as well as the other.

By the way, what is the easiest and the fastest way to grow and promote psychopaths? Consistent, mean, immense humiliation. We may have to confront terrorists and to isolate potential terrorists, but on the long run we have to eradicate humiliation - of any kind, in any shape.
To solve terrorism, fear doesn’t help, anger doesn’t help, prayer doesn’t help. A modicum of respect does. Also for the unwashed, the unkempt, the backward, the angry. If necessary, we should even kill respectfully.

Weird? Read Big Six Henderson by Jules Loh.* This feature ends: He was a legend in his time, all right, and not just because of his uncanny skill and his zealotry. He also had e reputation for fair play and decent treatment of the moonshiners he caught. ‘I never regarded them as doing something evil, just illegal,’ Big Six Henderson said, ‘and I never abused them.’ The big man thumbed through a sheaf of his faded daily reports, looking wistfully at the names. ‘Killed a few, but never abused them.’


*Hans TenDam - How People Make the World: The Ten Global Challenges, an Essay on Politics, Civilization and Humanity.   http://www.lulu.com      http://www.onlineoriginals.com
* Rene J. Cappon - The Associated Press Guide to News Writing

The Ten Labors of Hercules Today

Accepting that we can reshape our world only little by little, we, as tragic lovers, have to know where to concentrate our efforts. We have to know what is important in the myriad events and problems in the world around us. What are the challenges of our time?

I take one list typical for the period after Limits to Growth, showing probable international crises for the coming decades:

1.     Monetary crisis;

2.     Scarcity of raw materials and energy;

3.     Food shortages;

4.     Degradation of the natural environment;

5.     Inadequate distribution of wealth;

6.     Nuclear war.

Many such lists have already been made. In identifying the most important challenges, I have applied to global challenges the business technique of strategic issue analysis. Important clues are to look for developments that:

1.     Snowball, having consequences that worsen the problem;

2.     Have almost irreversible consequences;

3.     Affect the problem-solving capability itself.

As an illustration of these three dynamics, I cite some examples from the criminal justice system. Use of hard drugs leads to drug dealers. Drug dealers have an interest in selling more. Drug addicts have an interest in becoming drug dealers. So there is a feed-forward loop, or a snowballing. Prisons do deter crime, but they also make many convicts more criminal. Lack of prison capacity increases the chance that petty criminals will meet hardened criminals. The more that prisons stimulate crime, the more fed up with the subject are the public and politics, and the less they tend to increase capacity. When drug dealers or other criminals have reached a certain critical mass in organization and finance, they will be much harder to convict. Eventually they will buy their way into the police and the justice system. Corruption of police and the justice system is the classic example of a problem eating into the problemsolving capability itself. Many forms of corruption and demoralization fall into this category.

A natural environment such as a freshwater lake may become so polluted that its capacity for self-recuperation breaks down. Deforestation leads in many places to immediate topsoil loss, making reforestation almost impossible. The spread of a desert is a similar process that is practically irreversible, as is depletion of oil resources. We may find ways to address the problem, but we cannot find ways to create new oil reserves in the time it has taken to deplete them.

After some study and much thought I have come to a list of ten major challenges to the development of a sane, humane, civilized planet. Maybe ten is the limit of my imagination, and maybe it is the limit of the complexity I can handle. Maybe unconscious or aesthetic principles are at work. Maybe ten is the magic number for social challenges, but ten it is. Anyway, the more challenges, the fuzzier the picture; the fewer challenges, the poorer the picture. So here is my balance between mental fuzziness and mental poverty:

1.     Cruelty, torture and terror;

2.     Lack of control and loss of control;

3.     Depletion and pollution of nature;

4.     Transition to the post-industrial society;

5.     The ailments of democracy;

6.     Social injustice;

7.     Nationalism and international tensions;

8.     The probability of another great war;

9.     Global emergency planning;

10.  Nihilism.

The next ten chapters will deal with these ten challenges. So, I am taking the road of the evolutionary strategies. In each chapter I will sketch the key problem as I see it. I will give a historical brief, analyze the dynamics behind the problem, try to project the future consequences if we do not meet the challenge, and suggest our most promising avenues for responding to the challenge.

To provide a general picture, I will give short descriptions of the challenges here. They are the ten dragons to slay, the ten sphinxes to confront.

1. Cruelty, Torture and Terror

Terror is the oldest challenge. ‘A tyranny is worse than a devouring tiger’. Terror brings with it the world of cruelty, of torture, of atrocities, of wanton slaughter. Civilization begins where terror is stopped. Civilization ends where terror starts. Terror is the prime challenge, the basic inhumanity, the first and most terrible sphinx. It raises the deepest doubt; it generates the deepest despair about the possibility of real civilization. Cruelty, torture and beastly slaughter are the worst nightmares in broad daylight. They are, in a sense, the ultimate reality.

Real is what makes a difference. Fear, despair and excruciating pain make all the difference in the world. The bestial or demoniacal or mechanical infliction of pain by other people is an experience so intense that no serenity of armchair thinking can make up for it. In the body of civilization, terror is the most malignant, open festering sore.

Joan Grant in one of her novels about old Egypt describes a resistance network. This network is called The Eyes of Horus, because its participants should be able to see with one eye the rising sun, and with the other eye the worms in the belly of the crocodile. That is what this challenge is about, facing this sphinx steadfastly with one open eye. Our other eye should be free, so that we do not succumb to the sickening power of this horror. As long as terror exists, it will always be the first challenge.

2. Lack of Control and Loss of Control

The second challenge is that many developments we once started seem to get out of hand. Whatever we do seems to worsen the problem. This is the problem of the vicious circles, spirals that accelerate or jam. This challenge is about those snowballing developments and accelerations that appear to be the hallmark of our time. Everything seems to increase and go faster.

In 1944 more bombs were dropped than in all years before 1944. During one year in Vietnam more bombs were dropped than during the entire Second World War.

Today there are more scientists alive than there have ever been in all the years of the past. The best IBM personal computer of 1987 cost 12, 000 dollars and had the same capacity as a huge computer that twelve years earlier had cost half a million dollars. A PC of 1, 000 dollars today will do better.

Many processes enter a loop after their takeoff stage. Machines produce other machines that are better and faster, computers produce other computers that are better and faster, and software produces software that is better and faster. In the population explosion, more people produce ever more people (though not better or faster).

Loops are processes that have feed-forward -- consequences that intensify the process itself. This process is one of snowballing or spiraling out. It is similar to inflation that may ‘spiral out of control.’ Other processes do the same when two parties react to each other in a way that intensifies their current reactions. We call this process escalation. The arms race is an infamous example of such spiraling.

Inward spirals also exist and lead to jamming. Bureaucracy leads to more bureaucracy, legislation leads to more legislation, more lawyers lead to more complicated justice and so to more lawyers. Some of these loops lead to desirable results, such as economic takeoff and ever-decreasing prices. More often, loops spiral out of control, as in the classic story of the sorcerer’s apprentice.

This sphinx is one that is hysterical, with a contorted, twisted face like a whirlpool. It is not a basic challenge to our humanity, as was the first sphinx. This sphinx is the basic challenge to our capability to respond.

3. Depletion and Pollution of Nature

The next challenge is the depletion, pollution and destruction of our natural environment. In the first place, this depletion and destruction is a result of the population explosion. In the second place it is a result of the scale and nature of new industrial processes. In the third place we have a throwaway and who-cares attitude that has decreased more slowly than the two first factors have grown.

The best-known aspect of this challenge is the pollution of air, water and soil. In the end, however, the degradation and destruction of nature beyond recuperation may be this challenge’s most important aspect. Destruction includes erosion, deforestation, desertification. One other effect, even more extensive, might be a global climate change.

This sphinx shows an ugly, barren, polluted wasteland.

4. Transition to the Post-Industrial Society

The fourth challenge is the massive change of our economies and consequently our social life, because of the advance of technology. Just as the Agricultural Revolution ten thousand years ago sparked a wave of changes in how people lived, so did the Industrial Revolution. A further wave of massive changes is occurring right now with the latest phase of the Industrial Revolution, that of microelectronics, computers and telecommunications.

In the industrialized world this change means a transition to the post-industrial society described by Bell, Toffler and Naisbitt. This post-industrial society requires different products, different work, less work, and above all, a vastly different life.

This sphinx has a puzzled look, anxious and alienated.

5. The Ailments of Democracy

The fifth challenge is to continue to run societies in a way that prevents both anarchy and repression. Since the second half of the sixties there has appeared what Herbert Simon calls a ‘loss of nerve’ in our democracies. The most important challenge of modern democracies is to prevent their degradation into oligarchies, or worse, into totalitarianism.

In a democracy we cannot easily blame others for social imperfections. Nothing prevents any one of us from becoming prime minister or president. The feeling of impotence that an individual citizen may easily harbor in any political state becomes more paradoxical in a democracy.

The face of this sphinx is our own unimportant face, the face of one lost among many.

6. Social Injustice

The sixth challenge is injustice - institutionalized injustice, social injustice. The first level of injustice is that of people becoming victims of violence: the social violence of gangs, the political violence of paramilitary groups and terrorists, and the commercial violence of organized crime. To live in a neighborhood that is under control of the Mob is near to living under the threat of the first challenge, which is that of torture, cruelty and terror.

The second aspect of social injustice is grinding poverty, the poverty that breeds despair, demoralization, indifference, and loss of human dignity.

The third aspect of social injustice is discrimination based on background: race, religion, language, sex. Race and sex discrimination are probably the most vicious, because race and sex are conspicuous and impossible to change.

The fourth aspect of social injustice is the arrogance of power of official institutions over individual citizens, in the machinery of government, especially of the law enforcement agencies themselves. This is an old challenge indeed.

The face of this sphinx is one of unfeeling arrogance.

7. Nationalism and International Tensions

The seventh challenge is the challenge of nationalism and of its resulting international tensions. Since nations have armies, international tensions may cause or aggravate armed conflicts. With the present global economy and access to global transport and information, all of us are interdependent. Policy decisions are made within national boundaries, and many of these boundaries are hardening. Think of growing protectionism. Political states are considered to be machines to stimulate wealth and dispense welfare. Each state wants economic growth. Thus fierce competition, distrust and outright envy are present, but so is mutual dependence. The GNP race that has followed the old colonial race has many runners. All of them are struggling to get to the top, but they are interconnected with strings of trade, of finance, of knowledge, and of people.

After any revolution of rising expectations, disappointment in progress becomes widespread, and much scapegoating appears. McCarthyism was just one example of the universal tendency to look abroad for causes of domestic problems and frustrations. Behind each problem are the commies, or the CIA, or the multinationals or the heathens. However, as Daniel Boorstin reminds us: ‘All social ills are indigenous, especially in our time, in which each nation asserts its divine right to go to hell in its own particular way.’

8. The Probability of another Great War

This leads us to the eighth challenge: the chance of new global wars, possibly nuclear, ultimately with the potential of destroying our civilization. By its nature, this challenge is the biggest.

The face of this sphinx is as awful as that of the first one, but this sphinx is incomparably larger. This monster rises sky-high, with a metal face and a slumbering volcano inside. It is like a lethal spirit in the bottle, but on a planetary scale. This sphinx is tied to a viciously spiraling arms race, which enlarges both the spirit and the bottle that holds it. We are long past the stage of trading off the opening of a limited bottle now for the chance of having a bigger one opened later. More specifically, the challenge is to make the outbreak of a new world war less probable, and to decrease the extent and intensity of such a war.

9. Global Emergency Planning

The ninth challenge is global emergency planning, to prepare for relief and reconstruction after a global war or any other global disaster. This challenge is partially a problem of means of medicine, transport, industry, agriculture, and most basically, of knowledge. It also is a problem of ends. The survivors of such a disaster may be miserable, confused, demoralized people, lacking spirit and guts to battle the odds.

This sphinx is a collection of shifting shadows at the horizon.

10. Nihilism

This brings us to the last challenge - nihilism. Why bother? Is there any meaning in all this struggle for a better world? All of these earthly problems may just be part of an educational experience or an experimental laboratory. Or maybe they are a chance happening in a chance universe, in which some creatures have the strange fate to be self-conscious and doomed to choice. This is the sphinx with the empty eyes, black holes that stare from nothingness into nothingness.

Of course, there are many doctrines, mostly religious, which offer escape from this sphinx. But if we do not want to escape it, if we want to confront it, then nihilism is the ultimate challenge that separates the men from the boys, as well as the women from the girls. I will explore those modern developments that seem to bring this presumably unsolvable issue at least into focus, and that appear to offer new material.

From: The Ten Global Challenges: How People Make the World. An Essay on Politics, Civilization and Humanity. Ordering the book