Getting Beyond Threat-based Beliefs

Why don't immigrant cultures assimilate into the culture of the country to which they move? Besides the obvious process of two cultures learning about each other, and learning to trust each other, which can take decades if not several generations, the failure of an arriving culture to assimilate has only a few causes. This subject enters discussion today often in the context of Muslim peoples coming into Western cultures. While all the usual factors impede the blending of the involved cultures, in the case of Muslim cultures one additional element operates. Muslim immigrants have a particularly difficult dilemma: whether to relax into the culture to which they have moved, or to preserve their religion. And by "preserve their religion" I refer less to efforts to create and maintain the structures of Muslim practice -- mosques; certain ways to conduct social and business life; holy days, etc. -- than to the need as perceived by the faithful to fulfill the mandates of their faith so they reach heaven.

To a greater extent than any of the other major religions, Islam is a religion of enforcement. Threat operates in Islam the way guilt operates in Christianity. While Western pluralistic cultures have in recent years come to perceive Muslim cultures as threatening, few in the West recognize how much the average Muslim feels vulnerable because of Islam. The frequent violence in Islamic cultures around the world is only an outer expression of the pressure each Muslim believer feels imposed upon him by existence. A Muslim is taught from early childhood that his only refuge from the whole of existence is to satisfy the requirements of his faith. Now some might -- quite rightly -- argue that at least part of the Christian community is similarly burdened. It seems relevant that perpetrators of Christian-based violence have a view of the world similar to the vast majority of Muslim believers.

Other worldviews have failed to provide a convincing -- convincing to those who have been raised in communities that endorse what might be called a threat-based faith -- alternative. The problem is similar to what happens to a child who is born into an abusive family. The child commonly becomes himself or herself abusive and perpetuates the violence and abuse that was suffered in childhood. This is sometimes called the cycle of violence. Threat-based faiths operate in exactly this way, and continue to exist for exactly the same reason.

In recent years sociologists and psychologists have adopted the concept of a meme, an idea or action that is self-perpetuating and contagious. Some have described love as a meme. Threat-based beliefs can also be meaningfully categorized as memes.

It might be argued that Christianity at one time was almost entirely a threat-based faith. The historical event called the Reformation can be viewed as the turning point for Christianity when faith based upon threat was neutralized. Or at least an alternative was proposed. More informed scholars of religion than I will need to elaborate on this premise, including just how significant the Reformation was in this regard, and what specifically the Reformation accomplished or failed to accomplish. Today Christian faith is almost entirely a faith of moderation and inclusion, and one that is able to examine itself. This is why today it is able to confront many aspects of sexual behavior within its clergy and congregations. It is also why the threat-based elements of the faith gain so little traction culturally.

In Islam, the influences of moderation remain under threat. People who live within a threat-based faith live lives of fear and/or exaggerated bravado. That such faiths almost always subjugate women shows the extent to which threat is perceived everywhere. In threat-based faiths, men see themselves as the protectors of the faith, and worry that women might disrupt that protection and put everyone at risk. Similarly, any emergence of religious moderation within a threat-based faith is itself seen as a threat.

It can be argued that today's culture wars come from a confrontation between threat-based beliefs and people who understand their existence differently. But what is going on is often slightly different. Were there no threat-based faiths in the world, many different faiths might well coexist peacefully, even if their respective worldviews are very different. But today faiths based upon threat interact like adversaries in a ring, bound by commitment to confront that which is threatening them, lest failing to do so condemn them to a hellish eternity. And people who have no skin in the game are forced to watch and are at some risk of being caught in the crossfire.

Someday, this will all be a historical footnote viewed with bemusement.

Health Care Reform vs Improving Democracy

A couple days ago the health insurance reform bill, an analysis of the bill, and a cost analysis of the bill were all released to the media. I have looked at all three documents. What most impresses me is the degree to which these documents are written in a specialized language. A medical equivalent would be a report between specialists containing all of the highly technical language and assumptions that professionals know -- the abbreviations, the jargon.

Documents like this show up in medicine all the time -- for instance, a surgical report, or a report from the doctor who did an emergency room assessment. The casual reader of this type of document would be able to decipher less than half of what's stated because of a lack of an understanding of the language. The same seems to be true for those recent documents about the healthcare bill -- that the authors are so immersed in the specialized jargon of legislation that an average citizen will be unable to decipher them. At least the task is beyond the reach of the citizenry within the timeframe required by the decision process.

This situation does not nourish democracy. Making public documents that are indecipherable serves no one but vested interests that want to keep their agenda hidden from the public. Of course this is one of the basic dynamics of government as it exists today in American democracy -- that people who have an interest in an outcome that advantages them over the general population wish to keep that advantage hidden, protected. This behavior is so common that it is now considered normal, and people generally think that any alternative to it is naïve or impractical.

No one recognizes that democratic government has an obligation to provide the citizens a clear and coherent exposition of the laws it is working on – not an analysis that’s so obscure or general as to be meaningless to most everyone. This is no small amount of work, but it’s one that could be done by real people with a useful outcome. Because it isn’t yet a priority, American democracy suffers.

This situation can be summarized as follows: most people in American democracy do not believe in, trust, or support the democratic process except and to the extent it advantages them. Most people today think that if laws were enacted or policy developed that enhanced democracy generally, they themselves would lose out, would lose influence, importance, even significance. This is why we never hear a politician talk about improving the democratic process except when that phrase is a euphemism for selective advantage. If a politician were to state her interest in strengthening democracy -- and by democracy is meant equal representation and opportunity for all -- she would almost certainly go down in defeat before those who would point out how individual groups would suffer.

America today does not trust democracy. It trusts a government shaped and controlled by vested interests. America thinks that an equitable society would cheat people. This situation does not bode well for the American dream or for America continuing to serve as a global icon of liberty and opportunity. I'll leave it to the reader to contemplate the alternatives.

The current healthcare reform struggle has been shaped by these attitudes. The product of that struggle is sure to bear the scars and distortions resulting from them. Such is the complexity of the health care reform bill that it will be a matter of debate for many years whether democracy has been served by it. It seems likely the best one can hope for with this legislation is that democracy will be only minimally harmed.

Of course central to the whole intention of the health care reform legislation is the idea that society has a responsibility for the health of its citizenry. Certainly there are some in the US who think society has no such obligation. The most extreme of these people may well even argue that departments like public health should be abolished, that it's each person for him or herself, for the whole of their life. At the other pole are people who believe society is obligated to provide for the health care of every citizen. Between these two extremes is a vast range or spectrum of options; the healthcare struggle has been about where in that spectrum society should be. This entire issue would not have become important except for the problem that the current arrangement is bankrupt. The proposal under consideration has been sold as a path moving the country away from that bankruptcy. Alas, but there is yet no agreement about what all contributes to the current bankruptcy or its avoidance. Hence, the political food fight we have witnessed.

Thar' She Blows...

There is a country -- one country -- that is hunting aboriginal creatures for science. It is killing a small percentage of these beings each year during a certain season when they are foraging for food. They say their research cannot be done except by killing these creatures. No small number of people outside this country strongly dispute this argument, and assert it is but a foil to obscure the fact this country wants to feed its citizens the flesh of the innocent creatures. In its defense this country says it is not appreciably affecting the total population of these creatures by its research. Obviously, it has no sense these creatures have individual worth. Finally, in response to well verified reports that the flesh of these creatures finds its way into the markets and grocery stores of this country, this country insists it is within its rights to harvest a species that has traditionally been a source of food for centuries.

This country consider itself exempt from the proscriptions accepted by all the other countries of the world (there are a few exceptions) that have now agreed it is immoral to kill these large brained sentient creatures for any reason, particularly for food. But like far more technically primitive countries that continue to harvest bush meat -- which usually means monkeys, apes, and sometimes even gorillas -- and despite the obvious sophistication of their primate victims (to say nothing of how similar they are to humans), this country that continues to harvest the aboriginals of our planet also sees its traditions as taking precedence over any increased understanding of the natural world that has entered human knowledge and consciousness. It is as if this society has decided to follow the ways of its ancestors and ignore human advancement. And perhaps not unsurprisingly, this country becomes quite indignant and righteous when its practices are discussed openly in public. They not infrequently assert their point of view, awareness, and understanding is superior to that of everyone else. It's as if they simply cannot acknowledge an error, that it is too demeaning, too humiliating, to do so.

This country has chosen to defend its actions politically and wage a campaign in support of its traditional practice by finding small largely helpless countries and providing them various forms of aid in exchange for their political support. Apparently they find no burden in exploiting the helplessness of small poor countries as a method to perpetuate their traditional violence against these aboriginal creatures. It seems as though they have chosen to adopt a role of being a bully not just against those aboriginals who they harvest each year, but against all who object to this practice.

Perhaps the people of this country suffer from an inferiority complex since it seems they also cannot accept the findings of those in the psychological sciences who have shown that bullies and those who feel humiliated often suffer from some deep unrecognized and certainly unacknowledged sense of inadequacy. Thus it appears, despite their often loud assertions to the contrary, that they are constantly comparing themselves to all others around them and by that measure find themselves inferior. So in response to this deep existential anxiety and sense of inferiority, they engage in arrogant postures and irrational actions including ones such as this practice of killing. Almost certainly there is no way that their continuing to do this will make them feel superior. Rather, they are condemned to burden their children with heavy indoctrination in their way of thinking lest these new members of society finally be forced to face the error and violence of this traditional and arguably barbaric practice.

Perhaps someday all this will change and this country will join the community of nations who understands humanity has a sacred obligation, one that also returns to it many benefits, to nourish every sentient being. Part of humanizing ourselves is recognizing when traditions more based on our animal origins can be put aside. We all carry such an ancestry. We all are working on advancing ourselves from whatever position we find ourselves in. What is not understood -- and this applies to individuals too -- is that each society, particularly those that cling to abuses out of some sense its identity will be lost if it ceases doing so, fails to appreciate the extent to which it perpetuates its own suffering (and feelings of inferiority) by such practices. Perhaps someday this nation that insists it has a right to continue its violence will recognize how much it is burdening its people by continuing these abuses. We all who are not so burdened hope this awakening will come soon.

Incentives In US Health Care

Until the health care system is rewarded for delivering good quality care, and more importantly for delivering exceptional care, US health care overall will continue to languish if not deteriorate. The problem is not (only) for doctors to find more efficient ways to take care of people; rather, it is to find some way for doctors and the entire health care system to get paid for care that improves people's health.

As it is now, the health care delivery system gets rewarded for doing "stuff", regardless whether it helps people's health or not. Sometimes it does stuff that improves people's health, then doesn't get paid. How long do you think that's going to continue? Other times, it does stuff that adds little or nothing to people's health. So -- no surprise here -- the payment system has in response erected many steps by which the "stuff" health care does gets scrutinized and evaluated: does this make (economic and/or medical) sense?

To correct for its faulty reinforcement of tech-y procedures, the payment system has created obstacles to the delivery of services. This results in a reduction of care, arguably in the quality of care, and poorer outcomes, despite all the money being spent. Only when the system brings back the goal of improving people's _health_ will this situation change. Of course this brings up the very real question: what measures establish health? What defines health?

We might do well to make a list, and then change whatever needs changing to meet that standard. Things like the US government's GPRA measures were created in part to do exactly this, but any even momentary examination of these standards shows the great gap between some of these measures and the system that's designed to meet them.

Only when measures are created that correctly match health care actions with patient health will a system of performance measures improve health care. If the health care system does certain things, and those things are directly connected to patients' health, then it makes sense to reward the health care delivery system for doing those things. But if there are things the health care system does that at most only indirectly support the health of patients, then the only measure of the system's performance should be whether the system has done those things, NOT whether patients' health has improved. Further, to the extent the health care system's performance is measured by those actions that only indirectly contribute to patients' health, that system will "learn" to either ignore or "game" those performance measures, and patients' health will not improve.

Specifics makes this clear: If it is known that the Z vaccination reduces the incidence of a condition that causes poor health, then the monitoring system can use either the delivery of the Z vaccine OR the occurrence of the condition (that the Z vaccine prevents) in the population to assess how well the health care system is working. However if, in another situation, it is known that avoidance of health condition X requires an action by each patient, and the monitoring system chooses to measure the performance of the health care system by using the incidence of health condition X, then it no longer is enough that the health care system's performance include merely informing patients to do this action; they must have some means to compel patients to follow their recommendation!

Enforcement does enter health care today when there is an epidemic illness. But in most other situations, patients are allowed and expected to make their own choices, and live the consequences of those choices.

So in many health care situations, the health care delivery system can only make available resources that people might or might not choose to use. To expect more from the health care system introduces a new department into health care: a sales force coercing patients to act in certain ways. Certainly in both product- and service-oriented industries quite apart from health care, the marketing division plays a major role. Advertising and "sales" has only recently become a facet of health care, and then only in certain arenas within the health care industry. Laser and cosmetic surgery, drug promotion, and tobacco cessation are examples.

The marketing of actions people can take to preserve or improve their health has never previously been industrialized. Until very recently, common perceptions of marketing in health care were connected with shady remedies -- "snake-oil" salesmen and their ilk. Now we see every day promotion of drugs, non-regulated (OTC) treatments, and myriad other health-related products and services that have at least as much investment in self-promotion and profit as they are concerned about people's health. And regulation has entered this arena as well, and politics too.

The result of the marketization of health care is that people no longer are certain about who has authority -- who has the truth -- about staying healthy. Further, ever increasing scientific and technical advancements now confuse the patient with new possibilities and new paradigms. No wonder people are becoming numb to the barrage of entreaties by health advocates. All these changes have transformed the patient into a customer, one who often simply wants to press the mute button.

This arrangement has had one major effect socially: it has released almost everyone from responsibility! Against this tide, various agencies have created the outcome measures discussed above, with both useful and unexpected effects. Further, we now see a national dialogue that seeks to establish how much responsibility, if any, society as a whole has toward the health of individuals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is a contentious issue, with some people endorsing a collective effort and others insisting it's "every man (and woman) for him(her)self". Judging from the progress in our government on this issue, it is not going to be resolved or go away any time soon.

Meanwhile, health care for the nation overall appears to be far from optimal and possibly worsening, and health care financing plans seem certain soon to reduce funds for health care (under any system). Without a radical shift, or at least a concerted shift, from how this industry functions today, the health of US citizens -- where health is one of the pillars of every nation's strength -- seems likely to weaken and make less certain within a few decades the continuation of this nation as an egalitarian society.

Consensus Superstitions and Supremacy Groups

Hate groups. What are these things anyway? Support groups for the mentally ill? Conspiracies? How to understand the mind that regards some specific group of people as worthy of eradication? How does this mind come into existence? What sustains it and nourishes it?

The news of the last few days have been filled with numerous stories about supremacy groups and the recent murder by a white supremacist. These people are upset, the news tells us, partly because the US has a black president and partly because the economy is weak. This suggests that supremacists attract new converts when people are stressed and feel alienated. So it should be no surprise that their behaviors -- expressing and sometimes acting out violence -- can themselves be viewed as acts that distress others and alienate others from them. Call it (psychological) projection.

This situation brings up a larger topic: what constitutes mental illness. As a society we are struggling with this feature of our existence, and have relegated its definition and most of the actions implemented by society's psychology-linked institutions to a relatively small group of professionals whose work we vaguely understand and to some degree find repellent.

As a society we have not confronted the concept of mental illness nor its relevance to day-to-day life. We tend to mock a mentally health life as bland, even moribund, certainly not worth our individual concern. Only people whose lives have been directly touched by mental illness -- their own or that of people in their immediate environment -- have some sense that mental health is valuable and worth nourishing. But even among these relatively enlightened people, most have a nearly medieval view of what mental illness is, albeit one now somewhat veneered by well-advertised drug promotions.

One way to understand this situation is to consider who we conceptualize ourselves to be, or, perhaps better said, what we understand ourselves to be. After all, one can hardly begin to examine mental health and illness with no sense of what it is that is healthy or sick. Since the vast majority of people have a core sense of themselves only expressible through traditional consensus superstitions like soul and spirit, no one should be surprised society is having a tough time bringing this subject into the 21st century.

If we choose to put aside all superstitions in pursuit of a comprehensible and comprehensive sense of mental health, we need a way of speaking about ourselves that is free of those superstitions. Arguably, little exists to aid us. Instead, there is a near cacophony of voices with what has to be labeled as political agendas, articulating ancient or traditional viewpoints frequently embellished with quasi-scientific flourish. These people need to be ignored, or grow up.

But it is understandable that these ancient absurdities persist so loudly in contemporary thinking. Why? Because little else is available to consider or develop. This essay is in part an effort to explore or provoke new thinking or concepts that might function to refine our appreciation of illness and health in what is called the mental realm.

If one puts aside superstition -- basically 'belief', to be distinguished from 'conjecture' -- our existence needs to find its source in the world we know. This is the world of Earth and atoms, of electricity and cells, of patterns and complexity. Abandoning superstition, we are left with the material world in all its glory and mystery as the cause of our own existence.

Immediately it is obvious why our subject has not long ago matured; it treads deeply on territory of belief and faith, and challenges the teachings most have heard since early childhood. If we persist despite these hindrances, we are faced with accounting for our existence by linking it to how the body works. We are forced to admit we are in some marvelous way the creation of our body and brain. We cannot yet explain this except in very fragmented ways that struggle to satisfy someone who is aware of their own functioning moment to moment. So one naturally hesitates before the assertion that we exist because of the body's activity only; it's almost beyond comprehension.

Yet any even modest examination of what we know about ourselves makes this conclusion compelling, even if we still lack much knowledge about how it is accomplished. And while this perspective may provide some foundation stones upon which we can build a clear and comprehensive understanding of health, it still offers little to distinguish mental health from mental illness. However, some assertions can be made, and perhaps not surprisingly, many of these echo the wisdom we humans have gathered across the ages, wisdom often found in those very traditions we have otherwise tossed aside lest they hinder our understanding.

Returning to the topic of supremacy groups -- their attraction to violence; their stereotyping; their repulsion toward the culturally and racially alien -- it is easy, though not complimentary, to explain such attitudes as rooted in the animal-world antiquity we all share. As such, these responses -- shall we call them supremacy behaviors? -- must have long ago provided survival advantage in those aboriginal settings when human beings only existed in small groups that were constantly threatened by their neighbors and other predators. Since this viewpoint rests on an assumption that everyone not in supremacy groups must have an ancestry similar to those drawn to supremacy groups, we must ask how it is those in supremacy groups have failed to acquire the understandings and social skills of those not in such groups. Why have these folks not developed the way everyone else has?

This question brings into focus another contentious topic: is it nature or nurture that defines us? As any student of human development now recognizes, the answer to this question is "not 'or', but 'and' " -- meaning, both nature AND nurture define us. This of course means that we are as much defined by how we are raised as how our genetics forms us.

Framing our subject of supremacy groups and mental illness with these ideas allows us to ask: are the members of supremacy groups the product of genetics or an upbringing different from the rest of society? There may be some research that illuminates this question but it is not extensive nor widely distributed. Thus we are all left with hunches and subjective impressions. For me these include several features of aberrancy including psychosis and histories of abuse. That is, members of these groups often bear evidence of these afflictions.

Current understanding of psychosis suggests that it is often a symptom of neurophysiologic dysfunction arising from an organic cause such as intoxication (i.e., intentionally or unintentionally ingested intoxicants) or anatomic abnormality of the brain. For example the common psychotic illness called schizophrenia -- which almost certainly is a catchall term for a whole group of conditions -- has both a genetic, i.e. familial, incidence pattern as well as strongly suspected experiential correlates, some even gestational such as certain viral illnesses occurring during the individual's gestation. Of course these effects don't exclude what these people endure and experience once they are born.

Similarly, situations of abuse very frequently have a lineage consistent with early life behavioral imprinting, meaning the person is taught at an early age to view and regard the world and others in ways that are dysfunctional, and this education is traditional in certain families. Only sometimes do people successfully outgrow such early life traumas.

It is not difficult to regard people who find themselves drawn toward supremacy ideologies as wounded. That these people can bring great hurt on others does not take away their own suffering. Of course the term "suffering" itself may be misrepresenting these people's experience; there are many mental health conditions where suffering is not acknowledged (or acknowledgeable?) by its bearer. Psychologists speak of a lack of insight when they describe such individuals.

So the social problem of supremacy groups and the existence of mental health conditions of such severity that their existence puts society at risk present special challenges. Current technology for recognizing mental health conditions remains rather primitive. Too often it relies upon the art of psychiatric impressions rather than robust objectives tests, though recent advances in imaging technology hint that objective psychiatry is no longer far away.

The whole of human society is now regularly confronted by people driven by supremacist ideologies that in general appear to be supported by overt delusional rationalizations compelling terrorist actions. Though these people often wish to restore some perceived previous society that enthroned their preferred social group, it seems far more likely their actions and rhetoric is going to accomplish something quite different: an enhanced and more commonly-accepted understanding of human frailty and the nature of human development, especially what contributes to mental health and a diverse harmonious society. From the perspective of supremacists, this outcome may be disappointing though something in their ideologies may be found to have sufficient value to become a precious part of our future. An example? Devotion.

Society's Mental Illness

What is the problem with the mental health care system today? I think it's a spiritual one. People do not understand, often are unwilling to consider, that we are biological beings, not only in terms of our body but in terms of our being. People don't want to admit that we are inextricably linked to our bodies. Most people would rather imagine we are somehow attached to the physical body. Most of us prefer to see the human spirit as a passenger riding in the body's shell. We would rather imagine that we are something bigger and more robust than, really something more important and superior to, the physical body. Admittedly some of this thinking arises because we don't yet understand very well how we could manifest from the body's functions. This gap of understanding, this gap in our knowledge, seems to be narrowing as science increases what we know about the brain.

When we can accept that we are the creation of our body (mostly our brain), our perspective on many social and cultural difficulties will change radically. When we accept that the function of our brain determines who we are, we will be much more interested in how our nervous system and our brain can malfunction.

Today we give a sort of lip service to the idea that our brain causes us sometimes to behave and think in abnormal ways. Of course we used medications to affect our brain so that we can improve our mood and sometimes our behaviors. But behind this usage of medicines continues an undercurrent of magical thinking regarding who we are and how we function. So most people today still think that how a person functions in the world -- really who he is in the world -- is a function of his character, more specifically his God-given character. And we regard character as something we each are responsible for despite our vague sense that even how we are able to exercise that responsibility can be influenced by how our brain and body is functioning. Alcohol intoxication is an obvious example.

When we accept as a society that how people function reflects how their brains are working we will make a priority of examining people's brains when we find people functioning in ways we recognize as dysfunctional. Then when someone does something harmful to themselves or to others we won't need to accumulate a dossier of their misbehaviors before we consider they might have a brain condition. We will examine brain function whenever someone misbehaves.

Now this sort of viewpoint freaks no small number of people out, because it can be viewed as an invasion of privacy and an erosion of personal freedoms. Further, for those people who regard the best society to be one filled with individuals operating in their own self-interest with little or no oversight by their communities -- a sort of libertarian perspective -- attributing these behaviors to the brain's functioning imposes on society an obligation to manage each person's brain function. After all, if the brain's dysfunction prevents a person from managing themselves (including keeping their brain healthy), then that task has to fall upon others.

"What," you say, "you mean I have to pay my taxes to take care of other people's mental dysfunctions?" Of course today this already occurs to some extent but how it occurs can quite arguably be described as inefficient and even sometimes abusive. For instance, many people with mental health problems reside in the penal system where their mental health care is often minimal. That many of these people end up returning to their communities with their mental health problems unmanaged means that, as is the case for ordinary criminals, the mentally ill prisoner really has no enduring rehabilitation.

This arrangement, which is our current social response to the significantly mentally ill, means that nothing fundamentally changes for these people when society's intercession ends. Today, society's arrangements for the newly-released probationer do little to change the risks to the larger population; recidivism rates approach three cases in four. And if anything it is worse for people with significant mental illness when they return to society. Today such "state-of-the-art" medical care for the mentally ill exacts a heavy price on how our society appears and functions.

Changing this situation requires us to see ourselves in a new way where our mental functioning is viewed as a product of brain activity. Rather than relying upon our wishful religious traditions to guide us when a person misbehaves, in every case we need to consider, then look for, evidence of brain dysfunction.

There is a reason this hasn't already occurred, and it has two facets. One is that it requires us to see ourselves in a new way, a way distinct from tradition. Second, it means we need to learn a great deal more about how the most complex organ in the body, the brain, works. That requires resources -- people, equipment, money -- to advance the science. To the extent this work rubs up against the beliefs of tax paying citizens, it is likely to be hindered. Arguably that is happening now and it is likely to happen even more as the science advances. Religions that are offended by this science are faced with a challenge at least as great as the one they see coming from evolution. Truly they are faced with obsolescence unless their viewpoint and message adapts to modern understandings.

While this adjustment of religious thinking and advancement of science proceeds, we will have to live with the consequences of our current policies toward the mentally ill. Unfortunately, that will mean no small number of lives shattered. This is our situation today.

Islamic Conservatism

The word “conservative” when used to described factions in Islamic (and often other) countries defines a sort of repressive retardation. It is basically a philosophy of fear, one evoked by fear, and one operating outside the awareness of its proponents, sustaining fear. While this is occurring in Turkey only to a moderate degree, many other countries more passionately Islamic than Turkey live completely under such fear.

And among the ways this never gets confronted is the practice of identifying (and blaming) external threats for society’s suffering. Cultures of this type effectively function like people with no immune system – they are forever vulnerable to disease and must build for themselves a sealed world lest an external agent infect them. But a person with no immune system also can get in trouble with cancer – that is, with self-created “invaders” – because an active and healthy immune system monitors and eliminates such wayward tissues when they first appear. If there is no immune system, those malignant cells can proliferate. The Islamic world today suffers from such cancers.

Alternatively, if the immune system is too active or just dysfunctional, it attacks the body itself as an invader, as foreign. In some ways Islamic countries have a dysfunctional immune system. But mostly they have almost no immune system at all. And so they struggle to survive in the world amid a sea of other “cultural organisms”.

The conceit of Islamic countries is thinking their current practices are a solution to their problems, rather than contributors to them. They would benefit from reviewing the maxim: repeating something that doesn’t work and expecting a different result is a sign of mental illness. Islamic countries are mentally ill in this way, and as a result never manage to confront the real issues before them – how to realize a vision of cultural harmony, comfort, and purpose. They do have these ideas, but the first and second are imagined to be achievable only after life has ended – in their heaven – and the third has been hijacked by their misunderstanding that repression is a nourishment.

The fantasy of the global caliphate many Muslims are drawn to, or are encouraged to support – this is the vision offered by Al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalists – fails to consider the condition of Islamic societies at the time of previous caliphates. If that history were known, few if any Muslims (perhaps those few in the highest positions of power would be exceptions) would view a new caliphate as a worthwhile goal.

Considerations such as these only lie quietly in the hearts of Muslims around the world today. Their whispers give Muslims hope even as the whole of the Muslim world remains drugged on the poisons of belief and repression. Perhaps someday they will find a way besides suicide to be free.