You picked a hell of a topic to bring to this forum. Books could be written about this. I’m sure many have been. This topic needs a 10,000 word essay to give a proper response but that is too cumbersome. I will try to keep my reply brief and still worth reading. I think the term anti-people is too simplistic and misleading and this thread touches on more than just the root cause of extremist terrorist acts.
I think a major cause of extremist terrorism is people’s adherence to absolutist ideologies in the face of a much larger society that cannot accommodate those particular absolutist ideologies. These ideologues are effectively marginalized by society. When peaceful means for petitioning for acceptance of ideologies fails, people sometimes turn to violence. The reasons for this are many and some, but not all, of those reason include: people feel it is the only way to make society hear their message, or they feel they must (or simply want to) punish society for marginalizing their ideology, or they feel that a prolonged campaign of terror can effect a cultural change in favor of their ideology. I cannot remember the source but I read that, at one point, many suicide bombers in Al Qaeda were well-educated. These were not poor people with no other options open to them. They were using themselves as weapons to hurt a society that they viewed as evil.
I personally view religion as an abomination. It precludes reason and logic when they don’t support religious beliefs. It promotes the idea that some answers are irrefutably known, contrary to all evidence. There was an article about Science and Islam in the June 2007 edition of Discover Magazine. In the article, a Muslim “scientist” claimed that there is proof that Adam was the first man. His proof was that it was written in the Koran. You can find that article here.
discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/science-and-islamChristians (and other religions) commit these same egregious acts of denying evidence that implies or outright exposes falsehoods in their ideologies. In spite of my distaste for religion, I recognize that people cannot be forced to believe something. They must be allowed to arrive at their beliefs through personal experience and learning (again, which religion inhibits). While I don’t care for religion, I think it’s a shame when human cultural heritage is destroyed. Such acts deny us the ability to learn from it.
Why can’t people accept when they are wrong? Even in minor matters, it can be difficult to admit to being wrong. When it comes to ideology, you are dealing with a major component of many people’s mental model—the internal model that is built through personal experience, deduction, induction, etc. This model guides our interpretation of the sensory input and ideas we receive and helps us define our relationship to the universe. When an idea challenges an aspect of this model, it challenges the very thing people use to cope with their existence. The more you attempt to force them to change their model, the more tightly they will cling to it. The idea that the self ceases to exist beyond death, or that there is no omnipotent, omniscient being looking out for people’s well-being, is too scary for many people to even contemplate.
Ultimately, there is a limit to what you can do to persuade someone to change their internal model. If a person or relatively small group of people clings to a falsehood in the face of all evidence to the contrary, they condemn themselves to being marginalized. The whole of society cannot be expected to alter the way it functions just to allow a few thousand people to continue to believe that the earth is flat. This situation changes when a majority of a society clings to delusion. Then, other processes (physical laws, natural selection, etc.) can mitigate how much a society clings to delusion.
As far as news reporting in the Western media is concerned, financial considerations, time considerations, political factors (You’re safe. There are no monsters under the bed. Go back to sleep. And don’t forget to vote for me.) and other ideological factors determine what information is disseminated to the public, the amount of information disseminated, and how the information is presented. The frequency of events can also decrease their “newsworthiness”. The news is delivered in digestible chunks because that is the most profitable method for delivering it to the markets that consume it. Many people want small doses of news and that is not conducive to fuller comprehension of news events.
Also, many people have so many things to deal with just to survive, that it is difficult to spend time considering things that have no apparent direct connection to them. Wealthy citizens can lead lives of leisure and, thus, are less likely to challenge the framework that provides them with a life of luxury. The following story (from
http://www.chinesefortunecalendar.com/Zen/) is meant to illustrate difficulties in perceiving one’s Buddha nature, but I think it just as aptly serves as a metaphor for why it is difficult to perceive how culture affects our ability to perceive things.
"I heard others talk about ocean all the time. What's the ocean?" A baby fish in the ocean asked grandpa fish.
"Your surrounding is the ocean," grandpa said.
"How come I cannot see the ocean?" baby fish questioned.
"Ocean is inside you and outside you as well. You were born in the ocean and will die back in the ocean eventually. Ocean surrounds you is just like your body surrounds yourself," grandpa continued.
"... ? ? ?" baby fish.
We can appreciate that something exists in the abstract, but until it affects us in a very real way, it is very difficult to understand how other people (both inside and outside our society) are affected by our society, especially when the effects are difficult to measure or observe. Most white people cannot understand how racism affects “minorities” because they do not see it. Most men cannot understand how sexism affects women. These things are not always easily and directly observable. But a great number of African Americans and women have a very immediate and strong understanding of how a persistent, subtle environment of racism and sexism affects people.
Other things to consider: our education system is influenced by political and ideological forces. Two brothers: John Dulles, the secretary of state, and Allen Dulles, director of the CIA are credited with a campaign of American imperialism in the 20th century that resulted in the rise of much of the global anti-American sentiment and persuaded many South American governments to convert to Communism to avoid the Dulles’ interference with national sovereignty. Yet I never heard about them until a few years ago. I was never taught about anti-American sentiment unless it originated from the USSR during the Cold War. Also, people routinely try to get “intelligent design” included in science textbooks.
News media is not above manipulating the public with lies and misinformation for the purpose of increasing profits. Newspaper tycoon William Hurst is commonly credited with using his newspapers to influence Americans to support the idea that America should join the Spanish American War for the sole reason that more newspapers are sold during war time.
It looks like I’m veering off topic. I’m almost certainly skating along the edge. And it’s late; time to wrap this up. Ultimately, my point is that things aren’t likely to change unless we improve our efforts to understand other cultures (especially ones whose ideas don’t align with our own) and recognize that cultural differences, political forces, ideological forces, and many other factors can interfere with our ability to productively engage in conversation with other cultures. Or not. Like I said, you cannot force people to believe something (or, conversely, stop believing something). Some people simply refuse to change or compromise (including us), even when doing so can prove beneficial. But trying to improve is better than doing nothing.
tl;dr Fire, BAD!
