Our dangerous refusal to understand Moslems’ motivations

A reader writes:

As a psychologist I find your critique of Condoleezza Rice’s assumptions to be extremely insightful. These assumptions show a dangerous lack of understanding of the threat we are facing.

First, the motivational force of beliefs is extremely powerful and people indoctrinated to hate and to see the other as an infidel will have an unlimited motivation for destructiveness. To this is added the powerful motivation of social reinforcement, that is, being considered a hero for murdering people, not to mention the perceived reward of paradise. The problem is not what they don’t have but what they do have which is a deep seated malignant ideology that is pervasively reinforced by their societies. [Emphasis added.] It is also a faulty assumption to assume that everyone really wants democracy. Erich Fromm in his classic book Escape from Freedom showed how there is actually a very strong motivation in many people for an authoritarian system, because it provides a sense of security, whereas democracy requires one to have more self-direction and take more responsibility.

The most basic problem I see here is a complete lack of understanding of malignant authoritarian psychology, which is a dynamic of unlimited evil and destructiveness as we saw with both Nazism and Communism and which we are now again confronted with. To see people driven by a malignant ideology as if they were ordinary non-ideological people is a mistake of monumental proportions. An example of this is the absurd idea that suicide terrorists are non-ideological people motivated by hopelessness. People who feel hopeless are apathetic and lose their motivation, whereas suicide terrorists are incredibly motivated by their malignant belief systems. The idea that democracy is a positive force makes sense but only after those who promote a malignant authoritarian ideology of hate are first defeated. The problem is not that their positive dreams have been frustrated. It’s that their most fervent dream is our destruction.

Again I found your analysis to be most insightful.

My reply:

Thank you very much.

You wrote: “The problem is not that their positive dreams have been frustrated. It’s that their most fervent dream is our destruction.”

That is very well stated. We are witnessing (I imagine there’s a clinical psychological term for this) the ballooning, the hyper-growth, of a liberal illusion about human nature. It’s bad enough to deny man’s destructive impulses in general, but to do it in relation to Moslems, the followers of a religion that commands them to kill non-believers, represents an unprecedented height of liberal madness. And what is most discouraging is that it is “conservatives,” led by their adored president, who are promoting and subscribing to this delusion.

In a further e-mail the correspondent expands on Westerners’ denial of the reality of Islamofascism, their rejection of any critical thinking when the subject is a third-world “religion”:

This is not something difficult to see. To paraphrase a slogan, “It’s the ideology, stupid.” The ideology is Islamofascism, which is the exact same dynamic as Nazism, and at its motivational core is boundless destructiveness and an unlimited desire for power over others. The confusion comes because it has become embedded in a religion, and you’re supposed to be tolerant of another religion even though they may be completely intolerant of you and want to kill you. Then there’s the fact that these are third world peoples …

People in most of these Moslem Middle Eastern countries are indoctrinated practically twenty-four hours a day to hate Americans, Jews, Christians, infidels, and sometimes even other Moslems both in their government media and their mosques. They inevitably develop a cognitive model which naturally creates hatred and the motivation to destroy and dominate their perceived enemies which includes us. This indoctrination is the proximal root cause, yet despite the fact that this is so obvious it seems to be largely ignored in favor of superficial universalist banal causes.

Again what we have here is the dynamic of malignant authoritarianism. What is its surest identifying feature which differentiates it from a less malignant authoritarianism? The same thing that differentiated relatively benign fascist Italy from Nazi Germany, virulent anti-Semitism. Virulent anti-Semitism always turns out to be in fact virulently antihuman as can be seen by the millions of Christians also deliberately murdered by the Nazis or the hundreds of thousands of Moslem victims of Islamofascism in Algeria and the Sudan as well as the innocent Buddhists of whom you just wrote, and the millions of victims of Joseph Stalin.

Another very important point is that once such an ideology takes hold it becomes functionally autonomous, that is, it becomes its own motivation. It’s too late for root causes; it can only be defeated. What has to be realized is that the problem is a deep seated highly malignant ideology whose aim is our destruction, and that we had nothing to do with creating this ideology. The damage in not understanding this will be incalculable to all of us. Unfortunately, as Daniel Pipes puts it, it will inevitably be education by murder. The only people who do seem to have some understanding of this are conservatives, particularly the Christian right, which is the only group that consistently seems to understand the nature of and threat posed by Islamofascism. People on the left by and large don’t even have a clue and are blind, because they see everything through their schema of anti-Americanism.

My reply:

The only qualification I would add to your latter remarks is that I wouldn’t describe the problem as “Islamofascism.” I think the problem is Islam itself. Yes, Islamofascism is a particularly virulent form of Islam, but it is also true and consistent Islam. In recent months, I’ve done an experiment. From time to time I open the Koran at random and start reading whatever part of the text my eye falls on, or I start reading at the beginning of the chapter that I have opened to at random. In the last ten or so times I’ve done this, virtually without exception, the text I begin reading is a brief statement about how if we obey Allah and his Prophet, we will go to paradise or whatever, immediately followed by a lengthy passage in which the most horrible punishments are promised to anyone who rejects Allah and his Prophet. The impression is overwhelming. Vindictiveness and hate and threats of murder are not mere incidentals of Islam; they are its primary emotions and motivations.

Meanwhile, Andy Bostom writes:

Larry,

Your psychologist interlocutor understands the psychology of Islam, but not its theory and practice. The problem is Islam not the foolish but soothing construct of Islamism. I can think of no better single quote than this one by the great 20th century French scholar of Islamic law, G.H. Bousquet, which closes my long introductory essay on jihad in my forthcoming book:

Islam first came before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed Muhammadan law, by the principles of fiqh, to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer…. Viewed from this angle, the study of Muhammadan Law (dry and forbidding though it may appear to be to those who confine themselves to the indispensable study of the fiqh), is of great importance to the world of today. It is something which is alive, a social phenomenon in the full tide of evolution …

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 21, 2005 09:37 AM | Send