Note: see the blog
post for Monday, October 3, 2016, for an explanation of how and why this
manuscript came about. If it seems dated in places, especially chapter 3, it’s
because most of it was written about 10 years ago. You are welcome to copy this
material, use it for any non-commercial purpose, and distribute it as widely as
you want, so long as you give me author’s credit and indicate the copyright
date. The chapters will be posted periodically, I hope once every week or two,
but a couple of them might take a little bit longer. Thanks for reading this
material; it’s my personal response to the political craziness that seems to
have swept our great nation. JJJr
Explanation for IF I
WERE A TERRORIST – See blog post for October 3, 2016
Foreword – See blog
post for October 10, 2016
Chapter 1. Why I
Wrote This Book – See blog post for October 10, 2016
Chapter 2. Evolution:
The Most Effective Weapon – See blog post for October 11, 2016
Chapter 3. Women: The
Most Feared of All Natural Disasters – See blog post for October 17, 2016
Chapter 4. Energy:
The Achilles Heel – See blog post for October 23, 2016
Chapter 5. The Human Factor:
Individuals vs. Mobs – See blog post for November 8, 2016
__________
IF I WERE A TERRORIST
John Janovy, Jr. ©
2016
Foreword
1. Why I Wrote This Book
2. Evolution: The Most Effective Weapon
3. Women: The Most Feared of All Natural Disasters
4. Energy: The Achilles Heel
5. The Human Factor: The Individual vs. The Mob
6. Hero Worship: Stupidity in High Places
7. Fear: The Mother of Fundamentalism
8. Distractions
9. American Vulnerability
10. The Ultimate Fate of the United States of America
11. Solutions and Options
Appendix:
I. Evolutionary Principles Summarized
II. How to study evolution
III. Sources and Resources
6.
Hero Worship: Stupidity in High Places
Ordinarily
he is insane, but he has lucid moments when he is only stupid.
—Heinrich
Heine (commenting on an ambassador to Frankfurt, 1848)
Among the most mysterious of all
phenomena is the rise to power of narcissistic simpletons. Napoleon Bonaparte
is an excellent example, Adolph Hitler is another, Benito Mussolini is a third,
and of course, Donald Trump, the 2016 Republican Presidential nominee (now President-elect),
is a fourth, although there are undoubtedly several million people, maybe
several tens of millions, in the United States alone who believe that George W.
Bush is a fifth. But Hitler is the hands-down winner in this narcissistic
simpleton competition because he’s one of the best known figures of history,
his rise and fall are documented so extensively, and he’s the perpetrator of
humankind’s most indescribable evil, at least in modern times. Accessible views
into Der Fürer’s mind can be found in John Cornwell’s two books: Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius
XII and Hitler’s Scientists: Science,
War, and the Devil’s Pact, especially the latter, primarily because science
is a strong selector against those who ignore evidence in favor of ideology. Both
of these books reveal processes that not only are at work in the world today,
but also probably have always been a feature of human societies, processes associated
with hero worship and the power of charismatic but deeply flawed leaders. So
perhaps we should ask ourselves: What were Adolph Hitler’s defining
traits?
I believe the answer is very
simple, almost as simple as, apparently, was Hitler’s mind, and I also believe
that answer should be a warning to us all, not because we are Neo-Nazis, but
because Hitler was able to reach deep into our most damaging fears and compel us
to become an irrational mob—by “our” and “us” of course, I mean human beings. First
of all, there is plenty of evidence the man was outright dumb (again, see
Cornwell’s Hitler’s Scientists). Second,
there is also ample evidence that he was quite uneducated, which, we all know,
exacerbates the condition of dumbness. Third, he didn’t want to hear anything
that was counter to his beliefs. This particular trait could easily be a
manifestation of stupidity and ignorance, although perhaps tinged with a slight
sense of self-recognition that leads to insecurity and delusion. Finally, and
perhaps most important, he was a superb actor. Any one of these traits should,
in any rational society, disqualify a person for public office; any two of them
together are a potentially dangerous combination; and, three are a sure-fire
disaster just waiting to happen, especially in a technologically powerful and
self-righteous society. If you’re reading this paragraph and thinking “Donald
Trump” you are probably not alone.
The combination of simplicity and
acting skills is especially deadly to a modern civilized nation. The world is
not simple; it is exceedingly complex and becoming more so daily. Humans in
general, however, probably because of some genetic characteristic, seem to fear
complexity, or at least become quite uncomfortable in the presence of
complexity. Thus regardless of a few truly complex individuals in our midst,
and in our history, the vast majority of us gravitate toward situations in
which it is easy to make distinctions between like and dislike, approve and
disapprove, good and bad. Perhaps the best illustration of this phenomenon is
the political discourse in the United States during the late 20th
and early 21st Century. If I were really a terrorist, I’d be working
overtime to enhance the partisan hostility that has paralyzed our government
since the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
I predict that if there are
historians—as we currently define the term—three or four hundred years hence,
they will mine the diatribes produced between January 22, 1973 (the date of
Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion on Roe
vs. Wade) and sometime around 2050 in an attempt to discover exactly what
happened to the most militarily and economically powerful nation to have ever
evolved. I also predict that most of what they’ll find will be easily placed
into either of our current, highly polarized, “values” debate categories
loosely labeled “liberal” and “conservative” because—I contend—the average
person in the United States quickly translates these terms into good or bad, us
or them, right or wrong, dumb or smart, gay or straight, friend or enemy, me
and “the other,” etc.
This binary view of the world is
indeed primitive and not particularly flattering to a great, sophisticated, and
powerful nation, especially one that houses universities such as Harvard,
Princeton, Stanford, and the University
of California Berkeley. Back when we were evolving our behavioral traits and
associated mental equipment—probably three to five million years ago—there was
no Bach to confuse but mystify us with his fugues, no Escher to challenge our
sense of cause-and-effect with his insoluble visual paradoxes, and no Einstein
to transform reality into abstractions and equations that defy common sense. In
the late Miocene, our primate ancestors didn’t have the luxury of arguing over
whether a bear at the cave door was gay or pro-choice or maybe both; quick
yes/no decisions were as essential to our survival back then as food, water,
and shelter. Furthermore, we are a species with extended immaturity, so stability
is also one of our basic needs, regardless of the fact that when we first
evolved, stability was in short supply, like it is still for all animals that
play ecological roles of both predator and prey.
Even though we’re five million
years beyond the Miocene, stability is still in short supply, as is the
simplicity commonly associated with it. Compounding, if not actually
complementing, our frustration over instability is our concept of
transcendence—a trait that is probably of genetic origin (see Dean Hamer’s The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into
our Genes)—that inevitably leads us to see an alternate, and usually
“better” (except for those we believe are going to Hell!) existence, an eternal
condition and eternal purpose to our temporary Earthly existence, and a
personal vision of nobility, good, and evil. Routinely, throughout history and within
this transcendent context, change has been seen as undesirable if not outright
evil (see Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the
New). And in our Western view most of the instability and complexity are
provided by people who are not Americans. But what we Americans need to
remember is that not only are we a melting pot of ethnicities and were long
before the US-Mexican border became a political issue, but also that we are the
grand suppliers of complexity and instability for the rest of the world. Thus
whatever fear we feel because of our so-called enemies, that fear is mirrored,
because of our own behavior, by those people who call us their enemies.
This reciprocal fear is the
reason why great actors who can paint the world in good = us/bad = them, terms,
using only inflection and body language, are probably the ones we should be
fearing instead of the targets these actors have chosen. Twentieth Century
history contains a number of such people, most of them dangerous. Unfortunately,
during the early years of the Third Millennium, the United States of America
was “blessed” with one of the greatest actors of all time, George W. Bush, as President,
although his acting skills were not strong enough to hide the fact that he was
not particularly smart, nor was he able to use the English language with
Kennedyesque ease. It’s somewhat debatable whether he’d have acquired his
acting talent without the 9/11 World
Trade Center
attack, but that’s a moot point. Such acting skills give a President great
power well beyond whatever power may accrue to him or her as a result of
holding the office and having his or her finger on the big “nuc-u-lar” [= “nuclear”]
trigger. On the other hand, if I were a terrorist, I would have campaigned for
Bush like crazy in the 2004 election, and I would have campaigned like crazy
for his closest clone in both the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections,
promoting as much fear as possible, not only of suicide dirty bombers potentially
in our midst, but also of intelligent, well-educated, people, especially if
they are women (see Chapter 3, again), e.g. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Why would I be doing this
seemingly incongruous behavior? Because
at the time Mr. Bush was spending the nation into bankruptcy, and not only in
terms of hard currency, but also in terms of the human currency so necessary to
survival as a relatively free nation over the next century. The powerful
Neo-Conservative movement, with its heavy-handed application of pure power—both
political and military—thrives on polarization, especially when they can link
the debate to fear of “the other.” That
human currency we need so badly is reasoned debate, a well-informed and cunning
interaction with our fellow humans instead of a brutal and polarizing one, and
a statesmanlike admission that our ideological adventures have staggering costs
and no clear evidence of any value to what I defined, in the first chapter, as
the Great American Experiment. A few people cannot destroy the United States of America with bombs or
airplanes; a very few people can easily destroy the United States with words and ideas.
History will show, as it has in
several previous cases, that the fundamental Neoconservative Republican ideas
are quite destructive to any powerful, complex, technology-dependent, nation. What
are these ideas? They are the ones
expressed by numerous writers, paraphrased here:
(1) Government is inherently bad;
(2) Trickle down economics works
and money does flow from rich to poor;
(3) Science is just another view
of the world;
(4) Religion trumps science;
(5) We are a good and chosen
people at war with the forces of evil.
Perhaps we should examine these
principles as objectively as we can, from the perspective of an intelligent,
well-educated, person, but admittedly using examples to illustrate the points. The
ideas are interrelated in the sense that actions intended to promote one tend
to also promote another. For example, if you are a very rich conservative
Republican, there is a great statistical probability that you are not very scientifically
literate, that you have an unshakable belief in the trickle down theory of
economics, and that you practice a powerful religion. It is a hallmark of
conservative and powerful religions that texts are the word of God, and in
particular a God defined by a group with which one agrees. Thus, in your mind, because
God is omnipotent and omni-present, texts constitute a legitimate authority in
all matters, including ones related to the natural world. Competition between
texts (Koran vs. The Bible)—inanimate objects exerting enormous power through
the medium of language—sets the stage for conflict that history has shown time
and time again to turn violent.
Religion is most useful, and
least destructive, when allowed to retain the mystery of myth for individuals. See
Karen Armstrong’s writings (A Short
History of Myth; The Battle for God), for an explanation of this phenomenon.
Religion is least useful, and most destructive, especially to individuals, when
myth and fact become indistinguishable in the minds of believers. The so-called
inerrancy of Genesis as cosmology, geology, and biology is an outstanding
example of this equation of myth with fact. Similarly, most conservative
churches’ condemnation of homosexuality, a position supported by various
Biblical characters, completely ignores all we have learned (the facts) about
human biology in the last thousand years, especially that relatively modern
information on sexuality. There is nothing inherently wrong with faith,
transcendence, and adherence to values that promote tranquility and stability
in interpersonal relations; use of religious faith as a political weapon,
however, especially when done so effectively, leads inexorably toward an
intolerant, vindictive, judgmental, and ultimately dangerous world. This
assertion need not be supported by reference to scholarly works; the validation
is in your morning newspaper and on Fox News.
Here are some illustrations of
these fundamental ideas at work:
(1) Government is inherently bad:
If, in addition to being a
financially stable conservative Republican, you are also owner or CEO of a
relatively large, perhaps complex, business, then you encounter almost daily
the regulatory arm of government, and it quickly becomes obvious that the
climate created by this regulation has a negative impact on your human resource
management, thus your profits. Today, regulatory compliance is indeed a burden
on virtually every kind of endeavor, including non-profits, government
agencies, businesses, religious organizations, and especially education. It’s
not completely clear how the United
States arrived at this condition, but it is
easy to spread the blame among attorneys and liberals, especially liberals with
environmental and humanistic agendas. But an alternative view is that for the average
individual, the office and factory are now safer, more humane, and dignified
places than perhaps they were fifty years ago, and certain environmental issues
of obvious public health significance, e.g. lead and mercury contamination, are
being addressed. Among the most burdensome of all regulatory initiatives,
however, is one perpetrated by the poster kid for conservatism, none other than
George W. Bush himself, namely, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation.
Regardless of how this
legislation, and its goals, might have evolved, or been in fact modified by the
way states and schools deal or dealt with it, the concept is still very much
alive in American education. Thus we have regular testing, Common Core and its
political ramifications, and the over-arching idea that by testing students,
all of them with the same instruments, we can then assess the “quality” of their
schools. Remember that on these tests, there are no questions about home life,
nutrition, books in the home, parental finances, etc., all of which have major
impacts on the performance of students.
In its basic design, NCLB is a
system lifted almost directly from conservative Christian doctrine: You are
tested, uniformly, as we all are by the Supreme Being; you are expected to
perform up to a high standard imposed from above; you are to be held
accountable (disaggregated statistics and reporting); and, if you fail you are
punished. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that this combination of
uniform testing and punishment, or the threat of punishment, is effective
pedagogy, especially for a nation facing demographic upheaval. There is plenty
of evidence, from throughout history, not only in education but also in social
realms far removed from inner city public schools, that an intellectual
environment characterized by uniformity, testing, and punishment stifles
creativity, inhibits innovation, and is a wholly inadequate model for highly
diverse audiences.
Furthermore, any system of
testing and punishment is highly vulnerable to subversion, especially if the
testing is a standardized multiple-choice academic exercise (or equivalent)
carried out in the public schools, and the punishment involves something short
of imprisonment or death. What NCLB has created is a system in which it is in
the strong vested interests of educators and educational administrators—for
once, allies against a common enemy that seeks to take one of their most
precious resources: time!—to evade, by any means possible, the stipulations and
consequences of NCLB. In a very large number of cases, these educators and
administrators are people who have spent their professional lives dealing with
problems little understood by the consumer public, problems that have served
them well as a training ground for survival in a NCLB environment. If I were a
terrorist, I’m be singing the praises of NCLB or its clones in every venue
available to me, with particular emphasis on standardization and punishment—the
hallmarks of repressive states. That’s a sure fire way to increase the
ignorance and lower the creativity of a nation that desperately needs less of
the former and more of the latter, especially in terms of foreign policy.
The striking number of government
actions based on anti-terrorist efforts, including those resulting from application
of the Patriot Act, are a second and fairly obvious example of a strongly
conservative government doing things that seem, inherently, given the wording
of the United States of America Constitution, bad. To quote the ACLU web site
regarding the Patriot Act: “There are significant flaws in the
Patriot Act, flaws that threaten your fundamental freedoms by giving the
government the power to access to your medical records, tax records,
information about the books you buy or borrow without probable cause, and the
power to break into your home and conduct secret searches without telling you
for weeks, months, or indefinitely.”
Admittedly, the American Civil Liberties Union is not a completely
unbiased observer of government actions, but in the opening years of the Third
Millennium, ACLU sounds far more like a mainline, hard core, conservative (Government is bad) than like a
subversive, anti-American, leftist group.
This exposition
of phenomena that illustrate heavy-handed government actions instigated by
Neo-conservative, highly religious, and ideological elected officials could go
on for several pages. At the end of that exposition, the take-home message
would still be: by bad, as in government is bad, elected officials can
be, if not regularly are, highly selective in their characterization of
government actions as bad. If I were
a terrorist, I’d be picking out those actions that truly erode the American
Dream and make us more vulnerable to collapse, and touting those actions as
good, while at the same time condemning those actions that would truly
strengthen the American human resource pool—think some kind of universal health
insurance, for example—as bad, if not
outright un-American and decidedly unpatriotic.
(2) Trickle-down economics works and money does
flow from rich to poor:
Unfortunately, for Marxist-type
critics of Neo-conservatism, there is some merit to this assertion. When money
is invested, by the very wealthy, in corporate structures that provide decent
employment and generate buying power then the principle is working relatively
well. When corporations benefit the stakeholders—employees, suppliers, associated
service personnel—instead of, or even in addition to, the shareholders then
money trickles down, somewhat. On the other hand, people with money, or the
skills to make money, tend to make it regardless of reasonable constraints
(given that we can disagree on the definition of reasonable in this case), successful hip-hop performers being a
prime example. But this principle of financial success—money accrues to those
who know how to make it—applies not only to drug cartels, but to more staid
occupations such as investment banking, insurance, and construction. The state
of Nebraska,
for example, with one of the most predatory tax structures in the nation, has
neither stripped Warren Buffet (Berkshire-Hathaway) of his billions, nor run Mutual
of Omaha out of business. This taxing machine has not really crippled ConAgra
(although that company moved its headquarters from Omaha to Chicago), or defeated
Peter Kiewit and Sons’ efforts to become one of the world’s major construction
firms.
The socialist-type concerns over
trickle-down economics are focused primarily on the working conditions and
opportunities for those less fortunate than the upper financial 10% of our
population, and particularly on the access of economically middle-tier families
to amenities such as health insurance, adequate housing, effective
transportation, and high quality public education. In other words, when the tax
code achieves an equitable balance between progressive taxation, as in many
states’ and the nation’s income tax systems, and regressive taxation, as in
sales taxes, the result usually is a fairly healthy society. The political
discussions, of course, focus on how progressive and how regressive a taxation
system should be. I don’t have an answer to that question, but in 2016, it might
be informative to compare Kansas and Minnesota in terms of economic health.
Kansas is a disaster; Minnesota is doing okay; their approaches to
wealth-sharing are very different.
On the other hand, when corporate
power answers to shareholders instead of stakeholders, the trickle-down system
is shut off and there is little or no trickle down. Instead, there is a
relative torrent of buying power that flows upward (see Hedrick Smith’s Who Stole the American Dream?), the
result being a constantly growing financial gap between rich and poor. That gap
drives social and political unrest, especially in certain urban areas, and
eventually that unrest will boil over into violence. Any elected official who
does not recognize this problem and try to find a solution is unworthy of
public office.
(3) Science is just another view of the world:
This view is quite remarkable,
given the United States’ scientific prowess, its ready and abundant supply of
truly remarkable scientific minds, its politically active (at least in Ivory
Tower terms) scientists, and its extreme dependence on technology (the product
of science). The explanation probably lies in the distinction between human behavioral
traits described by the terms “want” and “believe” on the one hand, and “know”
and “understand” on the other. Politicians, preachers, and psychologists have
demonstrated repeatedly that if we want to believe something strongly enough
then such desire easily converts belief into a perception of knowledge and
understanding. Conversely, when knowledge and understanding are prerequisites
to belief, and belief is always considered negotiable depending on knowledge
and understanding then want tends to be tempered to match reality.
What I have just described is the
difference between and the basis for conflict between, religion and science
respectively. Behaviors driven by such distinctions—between religious and
scientific thought patterns—are not particularly important when they are
confined to academia or local arenas such as a small town. The two types of
behavior become extremely important, however, when they are played out on an
international stage with sophisticated weaponry.
If I were a terrorist hell-bent
on destroying the United States I would exploit every opportunity to demean and
devalue the scientific habits of mind and exalt the religious, especially in
public life at high levels. Although not directed specifically at scientists,
or even the scientific mind-set, Ann Coulter’s book Godless: The Church of Liberalism should be the envy of every
terrorist who wants to bring this country to its knees but is afraid that
blowing himself up won’t quite do the trick. I am not claiming that whatever
comes to mind when we use the term “liberal” is correct, or even desirable. But
if there were any way to measure the so-called liberal attributes, and analyze
them statistically, I strongly suspect they would map fairly closely onto
concerns for people with real problems, appreciation for the arts, tolerance of
various (non-criminal) life styles, and serious questions about the value of
military action as a one-size-fits-all problem-solving device.
(4) Religion trumps science.
As the popular television
personality, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the “science guy,” says: “the good thing
about science is that it’s true whether you believe it or not.” It’s the
disbelief that makes religion a problem for any society heavily dependent on
science and technology. However, even scientists can agree that religion is, or
at least seems to be, a deeply embedded human trait, likely of genetic
(evolutionary) origin and sustained, at least during pre-industrial times, by
the need for strong leadership. If kings, dictators, and tyrants accomplish
nothing else, they simplify life on Earth. Freedom complicates matters
considerably for human beings, and the intellectual, social, and political
freedom of the Great American Experiment complicates matters very considerably.
So it’s pretty easy for a reasonably uneducated and socially insecure
individual, stressed out over immigration, loss of buying power, LGBT rights,
and abortion, to take refuge in religion.
Such refuge-taking does not make
these people dangerous unless, of course, they become so numerous they believe
they can elect people who will simplify their lives by unifying those lives
around some idiotic ideology. If you need an example of this phenomenon at
work, study the United States Presidential election of 2016, with a focus on
Donald Trump. His simplistic rhetoric is exactly what frightened and uneducated
people like to hear, and they easily translate the phrase “Make America great
again!” into “Get all those Mexicans, blacks, gays, Muslims, and liberals out
of my neighborhood and out of my life!” Remember that not too many decades ago
you could have added “Catholics” and “Irish” to that list and been well within
the majority of your neighborhood voters.
Sorry, folks, Neil deGrasse
Tyson, the “science guy,” is right when he says: “the good thing about science
is that it’s true whether you believe it or not.” Scientists measure and count
things, including people. That’s what scientists do. They use a wide variety of
techniques to make these measurements and counts in order to test hypotheses
about all kinds of natural phenomena, ranging from the effectiveness of new
cancer drugs, to the movement of planets around distant stars, to the
acquisition of traits during human development.
So what have scientists
discovered about our species Homo sapiens?
The short answer is: a lot. In fact, our knowledge of humans is so vast it’s pretty
much indescribable. We can summarize that vast body of knowledge in a very
simple way, in a few words, and that summary can be checked for its veracity by
anyone in the world with an Internet connection. Here is a brief and correct
description of the human condition in 2016, and there is absolutely nothing
you, or any President of the United States, can do about it:
The human population is growing
exponentially against fixed planetary resources of land and water, and most of
that increased population consists of people with brown and black skin, living
in relative poverty. The result of this growth is movement, competition for
resources, and genetic diversity. What you’re seeing on television is Obama’s
fault, or the result of a liberal media. Instead, it’s a fact of life on Earth.
Any minimally-educated biologist could tell you that. So Donald Trump
supporters: get over it.
(5) We are a good and chosen people at war with the forces of evil.
It does not take much of an
effort to find this concept, or belief, everywhere on Earth. Do a Google search
for the term “ISIS” and you’ll quickly come up with
