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
__________
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
5.
The Human Factor: Individuals vs. Mobs
Let’s
talk sense to the American people.
—Adlai E. Stevenson (Accepting the
Democratic presidential nomination in 1952)
Humans are very smart animals
that routinely act in truly dumb ways that are counter to their own vested
interests. Thomas Frank’s book—What’s the
Matter with Kansas?—is an easily read and devastating analysis of this
phenomenon. But if you take a serious look at the really dumb behavior, you’ll
see that most of it occurs when people are in groups, and especially so when
relatively uneducated, simple-minded, often highly religious, and seemingly
insecure men are in leadership positions. When alone, individuals usually act in
much smarter and more rational ways than when they are in groups, mainly because
individuals don’t always have as much power as groups, and furthermore,
individuals have memory, which groups evidently do not. Finally, individuals
typically have some sense of reluctance to get engaged in dangerous acts;
groups—especially groups of men—seem to possess an illusion of power that
overrides individual judgment when it comes to danger.
A corollary to this assertion of
the difference between groups and individuals is that a truly well-educated,
emotionally secure, rational, and mature king is probably better for a nation
than a highly ideological, populist, and anti-intellectual elected president. If
you are a terrorist, and want to accomplish your goal of destroying the United
States, then you should be working overtime to make sure that mature,
well-educated, and emotionally secure men and women do not rise to public
office in America. You don’t have to assassinate such people; you simply have
to dehumanize them somewhat by ridicule, especially if you start when they’re
at an early age and can find any way to later label them as “liberal” or
“socialist.”
If you’re a terrorist, you have
plenty of help in this subversive endeavor aimed at neutralizing the United
States’ human resources. That help comes largely in the form of social institutions
that tend to promote conformity and, in the process, often enhance one’s self
esteem or sense of worthiness because of membership: certain religions,
athletic teams, etc. The help also comes from our pre-occupation with
money—perhaps the most powerful of all homogenizing forces—although it’s fairly
common knowledge that any claim for the destructive effects of such
money-worship goes back at least to Biblical times, namely, to the Apostle Paul
in his letter to Timothy (I Timothy, 6:10). Paul’s warning about the love of
money being the root of all evil is actually a statement about this
homogenizing force and he could just as easily have been talking about
religion, including his own, as a means of making people behave like a mob.
It is simply a fact of life that
we easily convert just about anything, including any social phenomenon, into
common currency, and then can easily converse in such terms. The word “tax” for
example, is sure to polarize any discussion of civic needs and
responsibilities, and to do so very quickly, regardless of the really
interesting relationships between people and their governments. But let’s
really be honest, ladies and gentlemen: money is boring, and I do mean really boring. Indeed, money may be one
of the most boring of all human constructs, although admittedly it is also one
of the most useful of all technologies, one that contributed most significantly
to the rapid distancing of ourselves from our lower primate relatives.
Humans differ in many ways from
monkeys and apes, but possession and use of this technology called “money” is
among the most distinctive and powerful of these. Money allows us not only to exchange
items of value over vast distances and great lengths of time, but also to
accumulate power and property far in excess of fellow primates. Money is also
largely symbolic and trafficking in money is actually a highly metaphorical
activity because there is very little about humans that cannot be bought or
sold, including their time, talents, property, and even body parts.
Monkeys can’t do this kind of
exchange, at least completely, with their currency, which is largely food. Lower
primates exert power by use of their body size, coloration, emotional
intensity, and age, all of which eventually disappear and cannot be saved, used
to generate more, or passed on to heirs, although obviously some behaviors and
physical traits are inherited. Humans, however, exert power largely by use of
money, property that could be converted into currency, or legal access to other
people’s money. A politician does not have to be rich in order to dabble in
money; all he or she has to do is have words and ideas that make other people
want to traffic in money, either through giving it up willingly, spending some
that doesn’t belong to them, or saving some of their own.
Paul’s warning to Timothy is
probably based on our readily observed ability to subordinate everything tangible
to its descriptive language or image, an ability most strikingly manifested in
computers and digital files. Thus money was an early version of symbolic
information. For example, a scrap of paper with poetry written on it is of no
intrinsic value regardless of the fact that it might be of extreme value to the
person who wrote the poem, although a few close friends and lovers may also
greatly appreciate the item. Depending on the personality of the poet, anyone with
enough money could buy it, including all rights to the use of it forever, copy
that poem into an e-mail message and send it all around the world in a few
seconds.
Conceivably, what originally
appeared on that scrap of paper, which could easily have been a bar napkin,
could be read by millions of people within an hour or two. Conceivably, those
lines of verse could end up as song lyrics, recorded, and thus converted into
lots of money. Many more millions of people would then hear the music and enjoy
it for whatever personal reasons induced them to listen in the first place,
having no clue that the sounds began as pencil marks on a bar napkin. If you
think this scenario is unlikely, visit the National Country Music Hall of Fame
museum in Nashville, Tennessee, and see some of those familiar platinum-record
lyrics as they were first composed, often on bar napkins or whiskey-soaked
cheap motel receipts, by an individual whose name you probably don’t know or
care about.
But none of those millions who
bought or listened to the music or read the poetry would know what it was
like—mentally, emotionally, intellectually—to sit in that smoky bar, sipping a
glass of wine, looking over the bare shoulder of your gorgeous girl friend at
the long-haired college student, slumped in another booth scribbling something
on a napkin, something that turned out to be that poem about a lost love,
before dropping his head down on the table top and heaving with sobs and
knocking his half-finished draught of Sam Adams onto the floor. (We’ll come
back to this kid later.) Money does the same thing to our humanity that, in
this example, the Internet or the recording industry has done. Both homogenize,
dehumanize, and cleanse us of our individuality. Money and communication
technology take away our memory, our individual emotions, often our creativity,
our willingness to act in a manner counter to that endorsed by prevailing
cultural influences, and our sense of shared responsibility for the natural
world that supports us.
Thus we can easily consider money
to be one of the major events in our cultural evolution, but there are others,
too, that tend to homogenize us, building us into larger and larger clans that
eventually, in turn, fracture into arguing, if not outright warring, groups
devoid of rationality and memory. Communication technology is probably the
defining trait of human existence in the 21st Century, so much so
that we are in instant contact with people all around the globe. This contact
provides an opportunity to rather easily see those who are different from us, a
vision typically overladen with commentary. The real question, of course, is
whether this access to other cultures, and individuals within those cultures,
makes us want to communicate with them, perhaps in person, or whether it
strengthens our fear and suspicion of “the other.” In this case, I contend, the
speed of electronic communication strips us of an investment in the cross-cultural
experience, thus enhancing our fear and suspicion. We’ve done nothing but
clicked on a machine to see a Muslim mother in Syria crying over a maimed
child, and something about our current national discourse suggests that both
mother and child deserved their fate.
But this disconnection between
money and experience—access with a click—was not always the case. For example,
if you lived in Philadelphia two hundred years ago and wanted to actually see
Muslims in Baghdad, for example, you’d have to undertake a long, sometimes
arduous, and relatively expensive journey. You’d have spent a whole lot of your
own time, energy, and resources into acquiring an experience that because of
the investment would seem valuable and enriching. You’d have been convinced that
your money was well spent regardless of the outcome because you’d chosen to
spend it on that trip to the Middle East. Today, from Philadelphia, it takes
about as much time and effort to see a Muslim halfway around the world as it
takes for your TV to warm up and you to flip a channel. In other words, the
ease with which you believe you acquire experience through information
technology devalues the experience itself, making it vulnerable to being shaped
by local cultural forces, including forces that reach deep into your natural
suspicions and tap your fears for political gain.
That ease also allows cultural
forces to manipulate information in an effort to influence large numbers of
people, i.e., the mob. We have evolved into a species in which events and
situations can easily be disconnected from their original context and put into
another, perhaps totally misleading, one. On a show originally aired on March
24, 2006, for example, Bill O’Reilly, the king of conservatism in the United
States, decried the secular assault on Easter, citing, to support his
contention that there was indeed a secular assault on Easter, a case in which a
St. Paul, Minnesota, city employee was asked by her supervisor to “remove a toy
rabbit, colored eggs, and the words ‘Happy Easter,” presumably from her work
station. We were not told on Mr. O’Reilly’s web site where these items were
displayed, or what other city employees—including a devout but legal and
law-abiding Muslim citizen whose mother might have died on Easter Sunday—may have
had to look at them. We are told, however, that this truly minor and relatively
trivial incident illustrated a “secular war on Easter” and “Easter under
siege.” Nor did Mr. O’Reilly enter into any extended discussion of the legal
and political differences between government—i.e., tax-supported—offices and
private ones.
The fact that the suggestion to
remove the “Happy Easter” sign was made by Tyrone Terrill, the city’s human
rights director, also was completely glossed over. Today, anyone who holds the
title of “human rights director” in a government agency is hyper-sensitized to
details of the workplace environment. In terms of human resources, the cost of
asking an employee to remove a bunny, eggs, and sign is likely to be far less
than the cost of handling a complaint from an affronted employee, visitor, or,
for example, a deeply religious, and powerful, Jewish politician. In a litigious
society, Mr. Terrill could just as easily have been commended for wise
management. Instead, O’Reilly suggests that St. Paul should be renamed “Comrade
Paul” as a result of this incident, even as the nation’s conservative,
evangelical, and borderline cult denominations are growing like Topsy and filling
mega-churches with rapturous mobs.
If I were a terrorist I’d be working
overtime to promote such organizations as Focus on the Family, the Berean
Church, and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. Even if I were inclined to be
a suicide bomber, however, I’d draw the line at acting like Fred Phelps (www.godhatesfags.com, web site still
active in October, 2016); this man was so dumb he was not an effective
terrorist ally, and although his descendants might be effective, they have been
largely eclipsed by the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump and whatever
social hangover persists in this country regardless of who wins (won) the
election and ascended to our nation’s highest office.
In the opening years of the 21st
Century, two Americans published books whose messages have spread throughout
certain segments of our society, especially those offices concerned with
economic development. The two people are Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize
winning New York Times columnist, and
Richard Florida, currently (as of this writing) a professor at the University
of Toronto. Friedman was an accomplished and well known political pundit before
his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization established
him also as a legitimate futurist and theorist; his Lexus was followed by a powerful, if sobering, statement about the
power of individuals, entitled The World
is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century.
Friedman makes a strong case that
a very smart and well educated young person in Bangalore, equipped with a
laptop and wireless Internet access, is an economic force with which to be
reckoned. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that shortly after its
publication, every college and university administrator in the country seemed
to be reading The World is Flat, for
the message, at least of the first half of the book, is aimed directly at the soft
American education system, especially higher ed. The second half of that same
book is just as futuristic and just as sobering as the first half, but far more
focused on the humans who do not have ready access to adequate food, shelter,
safety, and education, and on these people’s potential negative contribution to
global stability.
Florida’s first high impact
contribution to our national discourse was entitled The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work,
Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, and it was soon followed by The Flight of the Creative Class: The New
Global Competition for Talent. Florida claims that tolerant societies have
economic potential not available to intolerant societies, and indeed he puts
tolerance on the same level as talent and technology when it comes to economic
development, innovation, and business competitiveness in a highly charged and
rapidly changing world. Intolerance, Florida claims, inhibits innovation, but
in the information age, innovation drives business. Florida’s critics, and
there are a number, often react to his definition of “tolerance, which includes
tolerance of “life style” (code for sexual orientation, particularly homosexuality),
for the arts (and thus artists, often stereotyped—not without some reason—as
bohemian in dress and behavior), and for ideas (always a prelude to something
new, thus to something potentially disturbing of the established order).
Florida could easily point to rap
music as a perfect example of his thesis, namely that in a technological age, ideas
and people, not necessarily manufactured goods and natural resources, make
money and change society. Clearly the first rappers were not looking to imitate
either Mozart or Stephen Foster; just as clearly rap evolved from deep cultural
roots within the African-American population, roots that probably extend well back
into the early days of slavery. I know there is a vast literature on rap, hip
hop, jazz, and other forms emanating from American black community and that
written analysis of all music—its history, meanings, phraseology, tonal
structure, harmonic structure, and cultural impacts, just to name a few
areas—fills our major libraries, including that virtual library known as the
Internet. That we can analyze and study music without necessarily playing it
ourselves, is not my point. My point is that music originates with individual
human beings who assemble discrete packages of sound (notes), rhythms, and often
words, and that once assembled, these products are sometimes worth a great deal
of money.
Creativity in science is not as
obvious as in the arts, but it still functions in about the same way, although
the economic and social impact is not always immediate, or immediately obvious.
The academic discipline known as History of Science shows us many cases in
which curiosity drives exploration and the exploration in turn is sustained by
creativity. The invention of the laser is a commonly cited example. Einstein’s
theoretical work, published in 1917, provided a conceptual basis for the laser
by suggesting the possibility of stimulated emission of electromagnetic rays. A
number of physicists from around the world followed up on this suggestion (I
know, it’s too weak a word!) during the 1950s, but it was not until the 1960s
that what we now know as a laser, e.g., the familiar grocery store checkout
scanner, came into existence as a practical, socially and economically
important, as well as militarily crucial, device. So that kid in the bar,
instead of writing that poem to a lost love, could easily be thinking about
some esoterical subject that will completely alter the way humans conduct
business half a century from now. That’s how creativity in science works.
Mobs, in general, neither
understand nor tolerate the kind of creativity displayed by that young man
who’s just knocked over his draught of Sam Adams and the mob doesn’t care
because it wants answers, and results, right
now. The mob also acts on emotion more than rationality. There is a massive
literature on this subject of group action, and none of it is particularly
encouraging. Many, if not most, if not all of the noble human traits you can
observe routinely in individuals—generosity, compassion, foresight,
rationality, memory, creativity, love, etc.—are lost when people get mixed up
in groups, and the larger the group the greater the loss. A basketball team
seems to be about the largest group that’s capable of actually working together
to solve a problem. When such a team loses, sometimes the reason is lack of
ability, but surprisingly often is their inability to function as an
individual. The group has lost its memory, creativity, and ability to learn.
Sometimes the loss of individual
traits is desirable, for example in a military operation where compassion and
love must be abandoned if the goal is to destroy property and kill other
humans. But history is littered with excellent examples in which loss of those
noble individual traits results in disaster. Nazi Germany is only the most obvious
example of many, and the first that comes to mind, but in the opening years of
the Third Millennium, Kansas is closer to Americans than mid-century Germany, and
is just as instructive as a European horror rapidly fading from our memory.
Indeed, Kansas is a superb illustration of collective stupidity, one that’s
worthy of some detailed analysis.
In an action that could have been
predicted by Thomas Frank (What’s the
Matter with Kansas), the state elected a simple-minded ultraconservative
Republican who greatly reduced taxes, assuming that with all that free money,
Kansans would choose to open businesses, hire people, and generally use their
personal resources to create a thriving and prosperous state. All this economic
activity was supposed to generate state revenue in excess of that lost by
Brownback’s tax reduction plan. Exactly the opposite happened. An April 20,
2016 editorial in the Kansas City Star
concludes: “It’s clear the governor is incapable of realizing the damage he’s
causing to state’s future.” The state is closing public schools early and two
fine universities, traditional sources of agricultural expertise and highly
skilled workers appropriate for the technological age, are looking at major
budget cuts.
During the summer of 2016, the
Kansas legislature responded to the state Supreme Court’s ruling that the
school funding system was so inequitable as to be unconstitutional by passing a
$38 million aid bill. The court had threatened to close the state’s schools without
an effort to establish equitable funding. Four school districts had sued the
state over funding. A New York Times online story from June, 2016, contains a
quote from Mike Hayden, a former governor:
“Being a Kansas conservative used
to mean paying off debt, balancing the budget and not running up bills our
grandchildren would be expected to pay . . . I’m eager to see Kansas restored
to those principles and the upcoming election is our first opportunity.”
In the spring of 2016, the
current fiscal year Kansas budget shortfall was estimated at $228 million. To
quote the Topeka Capital-Journal web
site, the Brownback administration sought to solve the problem with a plan to
“strike at revenue dedicated to pensions, higher education, highways and
children.”
I have a sneaking suspicion that
if some Islamic fundamentalist got on Twitter and declared his intent to “hurt
the heart of America by taking away money for pensions, education, and highway
repair in Kansas,” the reaction in Wichita would be swift, patriotic, jingoist,
and disdainful. In other words, Brownback gets by with his destructive behavior
because it’s his mob supporting him,
not the other guy’s mob. Thomas Frank was right; Kansas has a problem; acting
against self-interest is the problem; and, Kansas is not unique, it’s just a
handy example. In the heart, the very geographic center, of America. If I were
a terrorist, I’d be pumping whatever money I could scrape up into the political
campaigns of Brownback clones, and I’d be digging deep into my creative
resources to convince Americans to act, collectively, against their own
self-interest, especially in the area of education. Remember what that African
gentleman told me, in chapter 1:
“But in your country,” my African
acquaintance continued, “the politicians want you to be concerned with what
they are doing to make you happy and safe and rich, and with local problems
that seem very dramatic.” By “local problems” he could easily have been talking
about everything from the O. J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson, and
Casey Anthony trials to the disappearance of a teenage girl in Aruba, the
murder of children by their mother, the Christmas murder of a child beauty
queen, or a lawsuit over display of The Ten Commandments—that is, the
substance, the heart and soul, of American public discourse, cable news, and,
arguably, Americans’ vision of our legal and social systems.
“So you grow up ignorant of the
rest of the world.” He took a sip of his vodka. “You are happy because your
leaders tell that they are not going to raise your taxes,” he continued, “but
your indebtedness grows daily.” He smiled. “And you are losing your economic
competitiveness because you are afraid of science.” He shook his head, looked
over at his wife, then turned back to me. “Why does this happen?” I couldn’t
answer; I was still stuck on his “ignorant of the rest of the world.”
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