My Own Side

This one is from the 4th of July Freedom Fair in Tacoma, Washington. She really needs to lighten up a touch on that makeup.

Understanding two basic tendencies in human nature is crucial to understanding the current struggle with Islamic terrorism, and what our response to it should be.

One is our natural tendency to project our beliefs and values onto others, expecting them to be shared. For the sake of this discussion I am going to call this projection. Simply put, we expect others to react the same way that we would react to the same situation. Probably it is our brains trying to keep themselves from being overloaded by reducing the wide open world of conflicting values and ideas to as simple a set as possible, namely ours.

Marriage counselors work with this all the time. They sit a couple down who seem to always be ‘missing’ each other, forcing each in turn to recognize the different way that a comment or an event is perceived by the other.

Unfortunately, the failure to recognize that they are projecting causes many today to completely misunderstand the threat and how to respond to it. It almost seems like a willful blindness has taken hold of many on the left, as they mobilize to ‘promote peace’ and ‘understanding’ with our enemy. At first it seems like they are doing what needs to be done as an antidote to projection, trying to understand the other’s point of view. But in reality they cannot, because a true understanding of a jihadists mindset is too foreign for them to understand.

They firmly believe that if only they could have ‘dialog’ and promote ‘mutual respect’ with the jihadists, they could persuade them to give up their violence and ‘wage peace’ instead. They firmly believe this, because they project onto the jihadists their own values. Persuading yourself of your own values is a snap. They believe that the jihadists would be persuaded, because they themselves would be.

The more pacifist a person is, the harder it seems to be for them to ‘get it’. Looking into the mind of a terrorist is not pleasant. They have dedicated their life to a consuming hatred of others. It sucks. We all desperately wish they were not there. But they are, and a rational person who wishes to survive has to recognize that and deal with it.

So how does someone get to the point where they can commit premeditated murder? They must first dehumanize the victim. Human beings naturally empathize with others. To get to the point where you can take someone’s life, you must first convert them into an object. One of the most chilling things I have ever read is the directions given to the 9/11 hijackers to prepare them for the attacks. One part talks about slitting the throats of the stewardesses, but they don’t call them that. Instead of talking about them as human beings, they are talked about as if they were animals being sacrificed for the sake of Allah.

Hostages can increase their chance of survival by doing what they can to resist being dehumanized by their captors. Talking about their childhood, their families, their future plans. When the captors suddenly go cold to them, the decision has probably been made to kill them instead of hold them any longer. They must be dehumanized in the captors eyes first.

As our civilization confronts the threat of those who have dehumanized us to the point where they can unhesitatingly kill us, it is important that those who are defending us not fall into the trap of believing that our enemies share our values. Simply because we would not do it, we must not believe that they would not. And if you doubt this, there is a hole in Manhattan that you should remember.