WISDOM LOST LIKE FROST IN THE SYRIAN SUN

NATO and Russia wanted to limit their military involvement in the Syria-Iraq area with the argument that you cannot escape from the violent complexity once you get involved there.

But now that ISIS has killed a small number of Russians and French, vastly smaller than the number of victims made by the Syrian government, the snake nest argument vanishes like frost in the dessert sun, and Russian and NATO governments preach yet another large-scale and old-fashioned military intervention in Asia.

These governments lose their wisdom because they are better at joining the overexposure of terrorist attacks and primary emotions of the population than keeping an eye at proportions and counting the numbers of victims.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/islamic-state-has-killed-many-syrians-but-assads-forces-have-killed-even-more/2015/09/05/b8150d0c-4d85-11e5-80c2-106ea7fb80d4_story.html

THE MUTUAL EXCLUSIVITY TRAP IN DEALING WITH TERRORISM

In the comparison between terrorist attacks and road accidents, the main difference is how victims die and the main similarity is that victims die.

The challenge is to avoid getting absorbed by one or the other reality, while acknowledging that two realities can exist next to each other. But as in more cases, we can fall in the trap of mutual exclusivity: either one reality is true or the other reality is true.

Perhaps this trap of mutual exclusivity has to do with the fear that creates the ‘us-them’ divide: "Them is what can turn dangerous any time, and us is what I can always trust." Such fear can make us blind for the bad things of us and the good things of them.

WARFARE OR ROAD SAFETY

It is illuminating to compare terrorism with dangerous roads and when we say we cannot make that comparison we misunderstand what is a comparison, lump together cause and effect and forget false government policies. 

A comparison has similarities and differences, and in this case the similarities relate to effects and the differences to both causes and effects. 

SIMILARITIES

If it comes to a similarity, people killed by terrorists and people killed by cars are similar: they all died.

Next similarity is that people killed by terrorists and people killed by cars all deserve to be mourned, individually or collectively.

DIFFERENCES

If it comes to differences, terrorists and cars are obviously not the same kind of killers.

Another difference is that if we give widespread attention to terrorists they will like that, whereas killing car drivers usually do not.

If it comes to make the world a safer place, the difference is that cars are way more dangerous than terrorists. So, not the fight against terrorists but the fight against car accidents needs our first attention and for a long time.

But unfortunality, yet another difference is that killing by terrorists makes many of us more nervous and indignant than killing by cars.

Difference number four is that governments use terrorist attacks to further breach privacy, employ more secret service officers, wage wars and give the arms industry more profits, instead of using car accidents as reasons to improve road traffic and save more than a million lives each year.

FEAR AND EXCLUSIVITY

In the comparison between terrorist attacks and road accidents, the main difference is how you die and the main similarity is that you die.

The challenge is to not get absorbed by one or the other reality, but to acknowledge that two realities can exist next to each other. But as in more cases, emotions can make us fall in the trap of mutual exclusivity: either one reality is true or the other reality is true.

Perhaps this trap of mutual exclusivity has to do with the fear that creates the ‘us-them’ divide: "Them is what can turn dangerous any time, and us is what I can always trust."

Such fear can make us blind for the bad things of us and the good things of them.

RELIGION DOES NOT WEAR CLOTHES

Religion is not a concrete entity existing as a social unit on the ground or as a cloud up in the air. Religion is a word that we give the status of concreteness because we fall in the trap of reification, treating an abstraction as if it has a material existence. Some even fall in the trap of anthropomorphization, seeing religion as if it acts like a human being.

But religion is an emperor without clothes. Human beings are the really existing entities. It’s people who share their spiritual experiences with others in certain rituals and buildings and have installed certain codes of conduct.

Therefore, religions do not bring violence or peace. People do.

RELIGION IS NOT A DRIVING FORCE

Religion is not an actor, not a force. It is a field where human action takes place, just like the fields of economics, politics, arts, sports, education or the media where human action takes place. At those fields, human action is organized by common patterns of internal, psychological processes and externally observable behavior.

For want of better terms, some call those two common patterns culture and behavior. If we adopt those terms, we can say that culture and behavior influence each other in individual people and in more or less recognizable systems.

Systems of cultural and behavioral interaction change over time, often or in the end with interaction between such systems as well. Then it may seem that, for instance, changing religious behaviors also create behavioral changes at other fields of society.

But behavioral patterns do not change behavioral patterns directly, they do that through culture. Culture remains to be the medium. Behaviors change culture, culture changes behaviors and so on.

Such systems of ongoing causation happen at any field in society, including at the field of religion. Just like at other fields, the field of religion has a system of culture and behavior.

Systems of culture and behavior can have internal patterns of ongoing causation but usually interact with other parts of the entire society.

To add, common patterns of behavior are not only shaped by culture, but also by contacts with neighboring societies, by genes and by such physical influences as the types of available food, the weather, the sun and the moon.

Another important caveat here is to notice that social life does not consist of closed systems. More less recognizable systems have gradual overlaps, openings and lose ends. And there is a vast variety of individual action. Finally, there are the individual, subjective outlooks and experiences.

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