ShrinkWrapped

Terror and Societal Regression Revisited

During the discussion of The Suicidal Core of the Anti-Semite, themanthemyth left this response to one of Charles's comments:

Chas--there haven't been nearly enough Palestinian children killed. You're like the guy who laments the death of poor misunderstood Cho--after all he had a hard childhood--so who cares about the 30+ people he blew away? Islam is a potentially fatal cancer on the human race, and the sooner it can be eradicated from the planet by any means necessary the better.

As Bob helpfully pointed out, we don't feed the trolls, whether they come from the left or the right, and my initial impression was that this comment did not deserve to be directly addressed.  However, upon reflection, including consideration of Charles's follow-up, it did provoke me to give some thought to a recurrent and very serious danger, one that, luckily, we have thus far avoided, but is ever-present.

It is possible to address the comment at the manifest level.  The first part of the comment is true in the sense that, presumably, if the Palestinians felt enough pain they would lose the will to fight and the war would be over.  In reality, advocating genocide is evil, whether it is Muslims espousing genocide of the Jews, or Westerners advocating genocide of the Islamic world.  The second comment, that Islam is a cancer, which is similar to the Nazi justification for their attempted annihilation of the Jews (ie, that a victim race, culture, ethnic group represents an illness which must be eradicated) is noxious on its face and belied by the fact that there are in fact many millions of Muslims who want nothing more than to live in peace with their neighbors and join the modern world.  The Kurds, who have been building a modern, relatively free society under the blanket of American protection since the first Gulf War, are an obvious example; Kurdistan is a Muslim nation.  Kazakhstan is the very definition of a moderate Muslim nation and an increasingly important ally in the fight against radical Islam.   Clearly the problem is not Islam but particular vicious brands of political Islam which represent as great, or greater, a danger to Moderate Muslims as it does to Americans and Israelis (not to mention non-Muslims around the globe.)

However, it is the psychology that the comment reveals that is more troubling than its overt content.

Terror and Societal Regression

During the 2005 Winter Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a panel on "Terror and Societal Regression" was convened.  A summary report on the panel, by Ira Brenner, appears in the current issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.   

[The JAPA is only available by subscription and the current issue is not yet on line.]

It has long been recognized that in the face of trauma, a person tends to regress.  This essentially means that when highly stressed, we tend to fall back on more primitive mental functioning to face the trauma.  Once the situation has resolved, reasonably intact people, in the absence of the most severe trauma, are able to slowly reconstitute over time and regain their prior level of functioning.  When people have trouble doing so, they often seek Psychiatric/Psychological assistance. 

This is similar to the point I have made so many times that our rational minds are thin, fragile, veneers over the deeper, unconscious, strata of our more primitive emotional minds.

To offer a generic, yet common, example: Consider a person who escapes with only minor injuries from a serious car accident.  No one would be surprised that they would have some anxiety and hesitancy about getting behind the wheel again.  However, if they are unable to drive 3 months or 6 months after the accident because they are terrified of getting into another accident, it should be clear that the initial, expectable regression has not resolved.  The capable adult has regressed to the state of an anxious and frightened youngster unable to drive and has become psychologically stuck there.

In the same way, Societies, as highly complex structures, can regress from their optimal functioning in the face of a trauma.  The American Psychoanalytic Association panel considered just this question, and while their focus was on various traumatized societies (Albania, after Hoxha, and Argentina, after the military coup of 1976 and the ensuing suppression of the left, were of special interest) there is obvious relevance for America, post 9/11.