Written quite a long time ago: This was accepted for inclusion in a terrorist historical textbook but I never did see the result.
Many people have many different suggestions for the roots of terrorism. All of them have one thing in common.
“Education is the way to eliminate terrorism.” Elie Wiesel [1]
“At the bottom of terrorism is poverty.” Nobel laureate Kim Dae Jung [1]
“We fight against poverty, because hope is an answer to terror…” George W. Bush [1]
Terrorism “will not be won until we have come to grips with the problem of poverty and thus the sources of discontent.” James D. Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank. [1]
“…the continued failure to thrive, as rates of economic growth stagnate, while the cohort of unemployed young men under 20 continues to increase.” Al Gore, at the Council on Foreign Relations [1]
“Instead of viewing terrorism as a response — either direct or indirect — to poverty or ignorance, we suggest that it is more accurately viewed as a response to political conditions and longstanding feelings of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economic circumstances.” Alan B. Krueger, professor of economics and public policy at Princeton University & Jitka Malecková, associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at Charles University, in Prague. [1]
Every single bit of conjecture, searching for the root of terrorism explains what that root is by its very explanation.
What causes a terrorist to kill is something or someone else’s fault.
What causes a husband to beat his wife or a mother to beat her child is something the wife or child did.
What causes a boss to bully his or her employees is always the employee’s fault.
The actions of a person are the responsibility of the victim.
It starts with rejecting personal responsibility for one’s misfortune and grows into rejecting personal responsibility for one’s actions and it all stems from the dominance of long term reactionary memory.
The person who bumps into you repeatedly when questioned will give the reason that you did not move. You did not cause that person to bump into you, but you are blamed for that person’s inability to control their own reactionary memory.
In simple terms, memory can be considered as a circle, a loop. What happened before is matched with what is happening at the moment. If the result is the same, long term memory is controlling physical action. If the result is the same and is quickly exerted then long-term memory is in control. That is reactionary long-term memory.
Human beings are equipped to be far better than that.
Loops in memory build up with repetition. The more exposed a person is to a certain similar thing, the less interesting that similar thing is. The more a person is exposed to pushing a boundary the less the boundary has relevance at all.
Men (and women) who grow up to be abusers do not have to be abused themselves to become abusers. All they had to do was ignore their own responsibility in small things to make ignoring responsibility normal. The larger things as life progresses are addressed in the same fashion, by ignoring responsibility. When things are wrong, the reason can never be their own fault, it therefore has to be someone or something else’s fault. Not accepting responsibility for their own misfortunes, leads to the next step.
Not accepting responsibility for one’s own actions leads to justification of those actions, regardless of what they are.
The terrorist is the root of terrorism. The wife abuser is the root of spousal abuse. The wicked mother or father is the root of child abuse. Nothing they claim to be the reason can ever be the reason as they have not accepted their own responsibility in the act.
With mothers, fathers and spouses there are no groups of like minded self inflicted victims of others. If there were, there would be mother and father terrorists; husband and wife terrorists and middle management terrorists.
A common connection that brings together people who separately refuse to admit personal responsibility breeds the hatred of the perceived cause of their mutual suffering; it is what causes racism, bigotry and class warfare. It is also what causes organized terrorism.
As a child, each one of us was exposed to limits of one degree or another. A good parent will instill limits as a requirement to know what not to allow to become normal as the consequences of those things can lead to harm or improper action. Experience of the parent sets the limits based on what has become normal to the parent. Permissive parents who set no limits are breeding a child with no limits and no sense of consequence, therefore no potential for self preservation when faced with an incident that appears normal but can cause serious physical or mental harm.
Ohio State’s Todd Stewart, in ‘Conceptual Frameworks for Analyzing Terrorism: Its Motivations, Mechanisms and Consequences ‘ lists these ‘motivations for terrorism’: Political, Religious, Ethnic and racial, Social and cultural, Economic and others including personal power, revenge, greed, etc. [2]
Michael Kinsley asked: “This is an astonishingly philistine, know-nothing posture, blocking any deeper understanding of the terrorist’s mentality and motives cannot be good for the war effort. If the essential truth about terrorism is that some people just hate the United States, the obvious next question is: why?” Are we right to probe for root causes of terrorism or is that very effort misguided?” [3]
The more dependent a person is on their own history, (long-term memory) the more liable that person will succumb to it.
While terrorists are merely repeating their normal belief that others are at fault, over and over again, with literally mindless control: the pundits are attempting to explain terrorism by essentially considering the terrorist to be a mindless robot doing the duty of the cause.
In a way, they are right. In a way, they are wrong.
Nations where terrorism is strong are not free societies. Those societies are ruled by leaders who control the lives of their subjects. They can control the lives of their subjects as the subjects have no control over their own lives. They are living in their past. Their long-term memory. They have always been controlled. The leaders continue that perception of reality by maintaining control. When a personal belief enters the picture and others agree the common thread of justification for the condition is planted. When the leaders use that justification to maintain control, the individuals become tools.
No society can be taken over by a dictator unless that society, and therefore the majority of its population, are convinced someone else or something else is responsible for their condition. Political attempts to place blame elsewhere lead to that potential.
Terrorism stems from societies where that condition and that state of political domination have been the same for hundreds of years. Children are raised totally convinced that their plight is not their parent’s fault, but the fault of some enemy that must be destroyed to make their lives better.
Enter Associate Professor of Public Policy Alberto Abadie, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard: “Abadie examined data on terrorism and variables such as wealth, political freedom, geography, and ethnic fractionalization for nations that have been targets of terrorist attacks.” [4]
“Before analyzing the data, Abadie believed it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in poverty, especially since studies have linked civil war to economic factors. However, once the data was corrected for the influence of other factors studied, Abadie said he found no significant relationship between a nation’s wealth and the level of terrorism it experiences.” [4]
“Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.. Like those with much political freedom, nations at the other extreme – with tightly controlled autocratic governments – also experienced low levels of terrorism.” [4]
A society under fear is a society controlled without regard for the individual. A society under the delusion of victimization at the hands of someone or something else is a society that is controlled by the long term memory of its citizens.
The young child who grows up convinced his or her very limited perspective of the world is what reality is, is the adult who will fight to maintain that reality, even though the real thing is not affected by the perspective.
A habit is simply a loop in long-term memory that continues to dominate the short-term ability to override its repetitiveness. Depression is a loop in long-term memory that controls the reactions of those who are aware in short-term but not enough to override long-term’s reactionary responses.
A terrorist is a person who’s long-term memory is in total control with short-term functions nearly devoid of influence. So is a wife beater, a bully and a child molester.
If the time ever comes that the limit is raised that permits abusive behavior in western society, the groups that will form of similar self-inflicted victims will cause the demise of western society.
For now, we have terrorists willing to give up their lives (which they have no awareness of individually without an active short-term memory process) in order to maintain the long-term loop of their past and support its self-created perspective of reality.
As more and more people succumb to depression and attempt to repair the result with artificial chemical treatment; and a science of psychiatry and psychology that does not understand how the brain works and in turn, works to find blame other than the use of the brain itself: we will find more and more people joining the growing list of controlled drones, seeking fulfillment at the expense of others, seeking personal satisfaction at the expense of others and receiving exactly what they seek with every act of ignoring their own responsibility.
Terrorism’s roots are the terrorists themselves. The cause of their condition is nothing short of an act of devolution, not using the abilities the human brain has to overcome the past and improve for the future. Those who employ terrorists are using tools that have no awareness of being used as they have no awareness of self controlling the garbage they have stored in long-term memory.
Humans are far better equipped than that.
The solution? Understanding a very simple concept: Absolutely everything a human being does is a result of their brain. If you understand how the brain works you can understand how to improve the use of other brains and that, over time will return the human species to evolution through the use of intellect. It is what’s for the future.
References:
[1] http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39b01001.htm
[2] http://www.rcgd.isr.umich.edu/roots/Stewart%20Presentation.pdf
[3] From the Uncommon Knowledge program Pulling out the Roots Filmed on November 11, 2002. Transcript at http://www.uncommonknowledge.org/700/723.html
[4] http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/11.04/05-terror.html