There is a significant part of the Muslim world that exists in a state of paranoid fantasy in relation to the west and especially to the United States and Israel. Victor Davis Hansen describes it, in his article, Our Two-Front Struggle; Pre-modern plus postmodern equals riots in Afghanistan in the following terms:
...our Afghan rioters, and the Islamist organizations that have endorsed them, live in the eighth century of rumor, sexual and religious intolerance, tribal chauvinism, and gratuitous violence — but now electrified by the veneer of the 21st-century civilization that is not their own, but sometimes fools the naïve who it is.
He also addresses the Western mind set that says:
Some Western intellectuals, I think, need a bin Laden to illustrate and confirm their nihilistic ideas about their own postmodern society, just as he needs them to explain why his culture's failure is not its own fault. So just as al Qaeda will always find an enabling Westerner to say, "You lashed out at us in frustration for your unfair treatment," so too a guilty Westerner will always find a compliant terrorist to boast, "Yes, we kill you for your sins." America was once a country that demolished Hitler and Tojo combined in less than four years and broke the nuclear Soviet Union — and now frets and whines that a few thousand deranged fascists want an apology.
I have written about our Western elites who are doing so much to make this already extraordinarily difficult war, even more complicated. Our military must fight an enemy that gives no quarter, hides among women and children, in mosques, schools, and hospitals, and uses any mistakes by our side as propaganda fodder for those who are eager to believe the worst of us. It amazes me how well our soldiers do in such circumstances.
My interest today is more on the workings of the mind of someone with a less sophisticated structure with which to understand the world.
Paranoia has a number of virtues to offer a frightened individual who secretly worries he is worthless. Consider a hypothetical Paranoid Schizophrenic patient, admitted to the hospital with paranoid delusions that the FBI, CIA, and Mafia are out to get them.
Their illness, in reality, has estranged them from their family, made it impossible for them to maintain long term relationships or productive employment, often leaving them prone to drug and alcohol abuse, frequently victimized on the streets, in general with a bleak future outlook. A person who suffers the devastation of Schizophrenia, with rare exceptions, is emotionally and cognitively crippled. The delusion that they are being followed by the FBI suggests many compensatory attributes. They are never alone (there are always people thinking about them), they are clearly extremely important (the FBI doesn't waste time following people who are inconsequential) and often, they have grandiose fantasies that they are the key to world peace, or some other such problem. We admit them to the hospital, give them powerful medications to help them return to more appropriate reality testing, and often, have to deal with a severe, sometimes dangerous, condition referred to as a Post-psychotic Depression. Giving up their position of power and importance, and facing the bleakness of their lives is terribly distressing; for this reason suicide is a significant risk in young patients who recover from a first psychotic episode.
Now, how do I apply this to societies that function at a more primitive level of rationality? I described how a significant part of the Islamic world exalts us as the Great Satan. Their relationship to rumor borders on paranoid delusions; we do not characterize people int he Muslim world as psychotic when they "know" that Israel and America caused the Indonesian Tsunami because it is a shared idea, promulgated by their media and politicians and they have no way to perform basic tests of its fit with reality. Someone who has been brought up believing that the Great Satan can control the waves with our almost magical powers has no way to test the hypothesis against reality. They know nothing of plate tectonics, wave propagation, energy output of landslides, etc. The problem for us arises from the unique way in which the mind organizes data according to what I have referred to earlier as mental "templates".
The Paranoid in the hospital has organized his world around his delusional system. A first break Schizophrenic often has a prodromal period of increasing confusion and disorganization, followed by an "Aha" moment when everything falls into place and makes sense. The delusion that some power organization is causing his grief not only relieves him of the responsibility for his limitations, but also helps his mind make sense out of chaos. If one were to challenge the patient's delusional system, the usual response is that the patient simply fits the Psychiatrist into the delusion. Now, the Psychiatrist is one of "them", part of the secret conspiracy to damage the patient. It is only when the patient has recovered some of his reality testing that he can face that there is no conspiracy, the FBI, CIA, etc do not have any particular interest in him and he is just a person with serious mental troubles, not the center of a powerful network of conspiratorial connections.
What happens when the Psychiatrist, perhaps inadvertently, supports the delusional system. A Psychiatrist might comment to his patient, in an attempt to be empathic and gain the patient's trust perhaps, that it does seem peculiar that the newscaster on the TV was talking about the FBI today and he could see how the patient might take that as a secret signal. The Psychiatrist (generally a young Resident) has made a serious mistake which will ultimately make his job much more difficult. By confirming even a small part of the delusion, he has lent his authority to the patient's psychotic mind, enabling the psychosis to be come more powerful. The point is that giving up the delusion would return the patient to their chaotic, unstable, pre-morbid state, a terrifying state in which the person was afraid he was losing his mind. They are not eager to give their defensive delusions up in the best of circumstances; when we offer our support tot heir psychosis, we make the trip back to reality much more difficult and lengthy.
I would suggest that this is very similar to the process whereby the Islamic fascists use the clumsy mis-steps of our media to support their paranoid fantasies. The reality for so many of the poor, Madrassa educated, youth of the Islamic world is that they are completely unprepared to become part of the global economy, where their culture is failing across multiple parameters, and where the hated infidel Americans and Israelis can perform magical feats on a regular basis. Their paranoid fantasies incorporates some powerful compensatory ideas. They are the chosen of Allah, the one true religion. They have permission to carry out violent acts (Jihad) and if they die in the effort, they will be rewarded with 72 virgins in Heaven. I s it any wonder these ideas are so hard to dislodge? Which would you prefer to believe?
Since all things American and Israeli are exalted, when an American media outlet reports something that fits their template of the world, it strongly reinforces the template. When they hear from our media (or any official organ of our state, keeping in mind the idea of an independent press is foreign to hem) an item that contradicts their template (the schools and hospitals we build, our generosity), it is easy to minimize it in their minds; it is either a lie or an aberration. Perhaps the weight of opinion in Iraq will be slowly tipped by the steady accretion of good deeds our soldiers do in country, but one mis-step, magnified untold numbers of times by our media and theirs, will undo innumerable good efforts. Furthermore, all of our good works in Iraq and Afghanistan, under-reported and derided throughout the Islamic world, will do little to offset all the damage done by Newsweek, the New York Times, and various others in the MSM whose animus toward the military and the present administration blinds them to the consequences of their actions.
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