[ExI] Religions are not the ultimate cause of war

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 1:37 PM,  John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

snip

>> If the driving force behind terrorism is poor economic prospects
>
> I don't believe it is. Saudi Arabia is not a poor country and yet almost
> all the 911 hijackers came from there, and all were middle class.

Before 9/11, the was a 75% drop in the per capita income for Saudi
Arabia.  It was due to a rise in the population of factor of two and a
fall in the price of oil by half.  That seem to be enough to trip the
population wide "bleak future" detector.  And in the stone age, the
relatively well off warriors were infected by the same "kill the
neighbors" memetic mechanism as the rest of the tribe.

> Whenever
> you dig into terrorism you will usually find religion festering there
> someplace.

Right.  But "war mode" is not on all the time.  What happens is bleak
future turns up the gain in xenophobic memes (religions typically) and
that synchs the warriors up.  So religion is almost always an element
on the route to war, not causal, but a step.  We often make this kind
of association error.

> From: Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se>

> There is a depressing regularity in the riots in the Muslim world.
> Somebody expresses something rude somewhere, poor people riot and get
> killed (ambassadors are unusual victims). If one were anti-Muslim one
> could easily kill people remotely and safely simply by producing a
> suitable stream of controversial viral media - but it doesn't work the
> other way around.

Not yet.  But especially in the US there are increasing numbers of
people who rightly consider the future bleak.  That's part of why it
was possible to get the US population to support Bush's war against
Iraq.

> The reason is largely to be found in the human development indices. When
> people have political freedom, they tend to respond to provocations by
> shouting back or arguing that Somebody Ought to Do Something. When
> people perceive themselves as having a fairly good economic situation
> they have things to lose, so they are unlikely to riot. Conversely, when
> your political freedom is circumscribed any protest against the system
> is going to be illegal - yet you can express your anger by protesting
> against an outside enemy. And if the situation is fairly unbearable,
> then the step to rioting is small. The provocation is irrelevant (and
> often played by various memetic players), what really drives things is
> that these societies for various reasons are not working well and are
> under a lot of pressure.

Yes.

> Plentiful energy and food might lower some pressures, but actually
> worsen others. I shudder at the thought of the Arabian states if oil
> revenues come crashing down.

It's going to happen sooner or later.  For example, at some point the
internal use of oil will exceed what they can pump.

Keith