[ExI] Religions and violence. and EP

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Mon Jul 26 14:48:41 UTC 2010


On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 5:00 AM,  John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> On Jul 25, 2010, at 11:39 AM, Keith Henson wrote:
>>
>> If you wanted to see Islam become a peaceful religion, figure out how
>> to raise the average income per capita over a long term for those
>> peoples.
>
> That might help but I don't think it tells the entire story.

No, but it is fundamental, like plugging a hole in a dike will stop
the rising water.

> None of the 19 hijackers from 911 came from the poorest of the poor, they were middle or upper middle class and many, including their leader,  had a college education.

War and terrorism are *social* phenomena.  They emerge from a society
under stress that has been entrained by a meme that has built up over
a period of months to years.  The stress turns up the propagation
"gain" in xenophobic memes being passed from one person to another
within the group.  You need to map events like 9/11 back to the stone
age environmental situations of conflict, where it was often to the
extinction of one of the tribes.

In the stone age, it was not just the bottom social strata who went to
war when the tribe was under stress (or attack).  All the warriors
went out in a group, especially the leaders.  Anything less was
lethal.

> And it's a little hard to use poverty as an excuse for barbarism from a people living directly over most of the world's oil.

This is where Dr Cialdini's 3 buckets comes in.  It the character of
biological systems to respond to relative changes rather than
absolutes.  The gross income per person in Saudia Arabia had fallen in
the years prior to 9/11 from about $28k to $7k.  Half if this was
falling oil prices and the other half was the population doubling.

A projected 75% fall in the standard of living seems to be enough to
trip the "bleak times a-coming" detector.

I agree with you that Islam is a nasty meme set, at least in its
current state.  It's just not exceptional coming out of a stressed
society.  Nazism and communism were associated with huge numbers of
deaths in the last century, and I am not sure the memes associated
with the spasm in Rwanda even had a name.

Incidentally, your response of vilifying the memes of an attacking
tribe are themselves the expected way (from an EP viewpoint) to work
up to the mental state needed for war.  It may be more sensible than
my analytic approach.  If the planet isn't big enough for holders of
the Islamic meme set and the rest of us, I know how I want the war to
end.

Keith



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