On Terrorism

How to Talk to Terrorists
By Jonathan Powell on 7/10/14, The Guardian

Extracts:

“(…) As is so often the case, the terrorists had a better memory for what had gone before than the government. (I use the word “terrorist” here for the sake of simplicity, but it isn’t a particularly useful term to define a group – terror is a tactic employed by governments, groups, and individuals. I mean it to refer to non-state armed groups that use terror and enjoy significant political support.)

When it comes to terrorism, governments seem to suffer from a collective amnesia. All of our historical experience tells us that there can be no purely military solution to a political problem, and yet every time we confront a new terrorist group, we begin by insisting we will never talk to them. As Dick Cheney put it, “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it”. In fact, history suggests we don’t usually defeat them and we nearly always end up talking to them. Hugh Gaitskell, the former Labour leader, captured it best when he said: “All terrorists, at the invitation of the government, end up with drinks in the Dorchester.”

Certainly that was true throughout the history of the British empire. Menachem Begin’s Irgun was responsible for blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 and injuring 46. The British authorities called him a terrorist and tried to hunt him down. But when he became prime minister of Israel and made peace with Egypt, we lauded him as a statesman. We accused Jomo Kenyatta of being a terrorist and locked him up, but later negotiated Kenyan independence with him. We exiled Archbishop Makarios to the Seychelles for supporting terrorism but made peace with him and he became the first leader of an independent Cyprus.

It is hard not to respond emotionally to a terrorist act in the heat of the moment. When we see videos of western journalists being beheaded or TV footage of small children being blown up by IRA bombs it seems obvious that the only answer is force. It is easy to regard any suggestion that we should ever talk to people capable of such savagery as immoral. George W Bush, in a speech to the Knesset in 2008, even suggested that talking to terrorists in this way amounted to appeasement. That is, however, to misunderstand appeasement. Chamberlain’s mistake in 1938 was not talking to Hitler – it was entirely sensible to take every possible step to avert another catastrophic world war – but to think Hitler could be bought off with a slice of Czechoslovakia. Talking to terrorists and agreeing with them are not the same thing. The British government negotiated with Sinn Féin, but we did not concede to their demand of a united Ireland at the barrel of a gun.

I have not always been convinced of the need to talk to terrorists. The first time I met a terrorist, I did so reluctantly. My father had been hit by an IRA bullet in an ambush in 1940, and my eldest brother was on an IRA death list for eight years while he worked for Margaret Thatcher. When I first met Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, in Belfast in October 1997, I declined to shake their hands – a petty gesture I now regret, but one that recurs again and again at encounters between governments and terrorists. (…) Terrorists are nearly always keen to talk. (…)

I am an unlikely peacenik. I grew up in a military family, and I was involved in the decisions on all of Tony Blair’s wars. I do not think that war is always wrong: sometimes it is necessary to stop a dictator, prevent massive human-rights abuses, or expel an invader. (…)

We usually delay talking to armed groups too long, and as a result, a large number of people die unnecessarily. General David Petraeus admitted that, in Iraq, the US left it far too late to talk to those “with American blood on their hands”. We delay because it is argued that talking is too risky – but experience suggests the real risk lies in not talking. (…)

It has been argued, by some revisionist historians, that talks delayed, rather than hastened, the end of the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Basque country. Had politicians allowed the army and police to go after the terrorists without “their hands tied behind their backs” by worries about human rights, the argument goes, they would have finished off the terrorists without any need for talking. As someone intimately involved in both negotiations, I can categorically declare this to be false. Although the IRA had been penetrated – and was suffering from the advances made by security forces, which frustrated an increasing number of their attacks – they were not about to be defeated.

(…) When every other option has been eliminated, and governments are prepared to contemplate talking to terrorists, they face a series of bad arguments against doing so.

First, that talking will give the terrorists legitimacy. It is true that armed groups crave legitimacy, and will go to great lengths to secure it. But it is equally true that such legitimacy is usually temporary, and disappears if they end the talks and return to violence. The Farc in Colombia attained some respectability in the Caguan negotiations in 1998-2002 but lost it as soon as they went back to war, being dismissed as narco-terrorists who had rejected a reasonable offer from the government.

Second, it is argued that agreeing to a ceasefire so that talks can begin allows insurgents to rest, regroup, and re-arm. In fact, experience suggests that it is the armed groups that suffer most from ceasefires, and find it harder to motivate their forces to return to killing if the ceasefire ends.

Third, critics suggest that talking can undermine moderate politicians by favouring the extremists. The Blair government was accused of having sidelined the moderate SDLP to talk to Sinn Féin, but this was another false charge: in fact, we tried at the beginning to build an agreement from the centre outward, but the SDLP made it clear they would not move forward without Sinn Féin.

These specious arguments only cause governments to leave opening up conversations with the terrorists far too late. We forget how such discussions were conducted on previous occasions, and try to reinvent the wheel each time. Opening a channel with a covert group is difficult and dangerous; building trust and turning the channel into a negotiation takes much more time than people think.

Terrorists are much better at learning the lessons of history, partly because leaders of armed groups tend to stay in place much longer than democratically elected prime ministers and presidents. Gerry Adams has seen eight British prime ministers come and go while he has been the leader of Irish Republicans. The terrorists deliberately study what has happened in the past. The Fenians looked at the Russian nihilists, and the original IRA were fascinated by the Boers. Menachem Begin studied both the campaigns of the IRA in 1919-21 and the Russian anarchists. His own memoir was in turn found in an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan.

To say that we need to learn the lessons from the past is not simply to suggest that we can adopt a model from Northern Ireland – or anywhere else – that can be plugged into any conflict and used as a template to solve it. Every conflict is different; its causes are different and its solution will be different. But I have now studied most of the negotiations between armed groups and governments in the last 30 years – including those that have succeeded in Mozambique, South Africa, El Salvador, the Philippines and Indonesia, as well as those that have failed in Sri Lanka, Colombia and the Middle East – and there is clearly a pattern to what works and what does not. Above all, what these experiences demonstrate is that there isn’t really an alternative to talking to the terrorists if you want the conflict to end. (…)

It is true that an autocratic regime can, by using unrestrained force and blacking out all publicity, finish off a terrorist movement in Chechnya or anywhere else. But as we found out after the Soviet Union collapsed, all this does is to put the problems in the deep freeze; sooner or later they will reappear. Hafez al-Assad thought he had resolved the problem of Sunni rebellion in 1982, when his forces killed tens of thousands of civilians in the city of Hama. But as his son Bashar found out 30 years later, he had not really resolved the problem at all. (…)

In February 2008, after I had left government, I argued in the Guardian that we should also talk to Hamas, to the Taliban and even to al-Qaida. My former colleagues in the British government predictably rubbished me. They insisted that while it was acceptable to talk to the IRA and the PLO it was out of the question with these new terrorists.

But are the so-called “fourth wave” terrorists (following on from the anarchists, the nationalists and the Marxists) really so different that there is nothing to be learned from the way we dealt with their predecessors? Or are the issues in the end political – however gruesome the methods they use – and therefore resolvable only by political means? It is true that the ambition of their violence is on a greater scale. Rather than the handful of people the IRA or ETA would kill in a car bombing or an assassination, they want to kill thousands of people. But the 19th-century anarchists had the same ambitions – and in any case, the number of people killed doesn’t make any difference to the moral nature of terrorism. It is just as wrong to kill one innocent person as it is to kill a thousand, and it can often be more shocking. It is true that the new terrorists use suicide bombers to maximise the terror they inflict, but so did the Russian nihilists – and the art of suicide bombing, including the use of female suicide bombers, was perfected by the Tamil Tigers in the 1980s.

It is argued that their violence is based on religion, and so it is impossible to negotiate with them – in the words of one former Israeli cabinet member: “When you get God into discussions, God never compromises.” But there is no evidence that religious armed groups are harder to engage than secular ones: peace has been made with Islamic armed groups, including the Free Aceh Movement in Indonesia and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines. It is also said that because the aims of these groups are apocalyptic and their demands unnegotiable, it is impossible to treat with them.

While it is true that it is unlikely that any government is going to agree to the creation of a global caliphate, the terrorist groups we encountered in the past also put forward demands that would never be acceptable. No British government was ever going to concede a united Ireland against the wishes of a majority of the people in Northern Ireland. Once discussions were begun with the Irish Republicans, we discovered that they were prepared to settle for something else.

Government officials may have criticised me six years ago, but in the intervening period they seem to have overcome the sense that it is absolutely impossible to talk to these groups. The Israeli and US governments have now both negotiated with Hamas on the release of Gilad Shalit, the kidnapped Israeli Defence Force corporal, and over the recent ceasefire in Gaza, albeit indirectly. In Afghanistan, after a long mating ritual, the US government finally negotiated with the Taliban for the release of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl a few months ago in return for freeing five prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay. (…) So it turns out that we are ready to talk to these fourth generation groups despite the assertion only a few years ago that we could never deal with them.

(…) We need to work out a longer term strategy for dealing with whatever threat they pose, rather than opting once again for a kneejerk response to satisfy opinion polls. That strategy will certainly include security measures – if the terrorists feel they have the prospect of winning, they will just carry on fighting. (…) We need to bear in mind that such negotiations do not usually succeed at first; they have to go through many iterations, and an agreement is usually reached only when a mutually hurting stalemate exists, in which both sides realise that they cannot prevail militarily.

Nor should we expect that we are going to defeat terrorism for good even if we succeed in dealing with al-Qaida and Isis; there will be new groups and terrorism will always be with us. It is the ugly twin of democracy and has grown up with it. If minorities cannot get their way by the ballot box they will sometimes resort to extreme violence to attract attention and find satisfaction for their demands.

Yet we continue to approach terrorism as if it is something that can be solved or cured. Some experts look for a solution in technology. Drones, jungle-penetrating radar and electronic counter-measures can help combat terrorists for a while but the terrorists soon work out a way round the counter-measures and technology helps them develop more deadly means of attack. The use of mobile phones and social media can make it easier to track terrorists but it also makes it easier for them to organise without being detected. There is not going to be a miracle cure for terrorism and we should stop hoping one will turn up. The solution lies in the tools we already have in our hands – fighting and talking. Success depends on combining military force with offering a political way out.

The one thing I have learned, above all else, from the last 17 years is that there is no such thing as an insoluble conflict with an armed group – however bloody, difficult or ancient. Even the Middle East peace process, which has stuttered on for decades, will in the end result in a lasting agreement. The fact that it has failed so many times before does not mean that it will always fail, and an eventual settlement will be built on the past failures and the lessons learned from these failures, as was the peace in Northern Ireland.

It is remarkable how quickly a conflict can shift from being regarded as “insoluble” to one whose solution was “inevitable” as soon as an agreement is signed. Beforehand, and even up to a very late stage in the process, conventional wisdom states that the conflict can never be resolved; but before the ink is dry on the agreement, people are ready to conclude that it was inevitable. They put it down to outside events like the end of the cold war, to the effect of 9/11 or to changing economic circumstances. But this conventional wisdom is wrong.

Just as no conflict is insoluble, nor is it inevitable that it will be resolved at any particular moment in history. Believing that a solution is inevitable is nearly as dangerous as believing a conflict cannot be solved. If people sit around waiting for a conflict to be “ripe” for talks to start, or for the forces of history to solve it for them, then it will never be resolved. If the negotiations are handled badly, they will fail, which is why it is worth trying to learn from the experience of others. Dealing effectively with a terrorist threat requires political leadership, patience and a refusal to take no for an answer. What we need are more political leaders who are capable of remembering what happened last time – and prepared to take the necessary risks.”

Why We Can’t Get Along

The Battle for your Brain

By Brian Resnick on the National Journal Magazine, 20/09/2014.

Extracts:

“I'm lying in the metal coffin of an MRI machine (…). Above me, faces flash on a screen. Some are human, others are dolls, and some are digitally blended to be something in between. It's my job to figure out which are which. And as I do, researchers at New York University's brain-imaging center are tracking what goes on in my head. I'm a subject for research on a bigger question: Is the human political brain broken?

The NYU team is trying to show that our brains are hardwired for partisanship and how that skews our perceptions in public life. (…) Once this partisanship mentality kicks in, the brain almost automatically pre-filters facts — even noncontroversial ones — that offend our political sensibilities. "Once you trip this wire, this trigger, this cue, that you are a part of 'us-versus-them,' it's almost like the whole brain becomes re-coordinated in how it views people," says Jay Van Bavel, the leader of NYU's Social Perception and Evaluation Lab.

Our tendency toward partisanship is likely the result of evolution — forming groups is how prehistoric humans survived. That's helpful when trying to master an unforgiving environment with Stone Age technology. It's less so when trying to foster a functional democracy. (…)

WHAT DOES ANY OF this have to do with photos of dolls? The researchers are testing one of partisanship's more frightening features: It allows us, even pushes us, to dehumanize those we categorize as "them".

I'm tasked with distinguishing humans from nonhumans, and it's not as easy as it sounds. While some of the faces appear to be normal photographs of men and women, others are warped into something that would have scared me as a child—faces that look like masks. They have no creases in their plasticky skin, and their big, anime-style eyes shine death stares. They are distinctly nonhuman. It's the ones in between that pose the problem, however. A face that's 90 percent human and 10 percent doll is plainly seen as human. But when the face is 50 percent doll and 50 percent human, that's where partisan perspective takes over.

For the first trial I am just shown a set of faces, but for the next run, Van Bavel introduces a twist: The faces are divided into two groups. Before I see the first group, the American flag flashes, and I'm told I'm looking at my countrymen. Before the second, a Russian flag appears. These are faces of Russians. As I try to assess which faces have a soul behind them, a dark facet of partisan psychology surfaces. If the face belongs to a team member — in my case, an American — I'm more likely to assign them humanity. I'm less inclined to do the same for Russians.

(…) When Van Bavel looks at the brain scans of people in his dollhouse experiment, he finds that the brain regions used to empathize with others aren't as active when a person is evaluating faces he or she has been told belong to the other team.

HUMANS' WILLINGNESS TO dehumanize is often mentioned alongside some of the darkest chapters of history — the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge — when regimes went to great lengths to build anger against "the other". In my case, the experiment relies on a national identity reinforced since birth.

But to create the base "us and them" structure, none of that is needed. The brain is so hardwired to build such groups that Van Bavel says he can turn anyone on the street into a partisan. (…) All it takes is a coin flip. "Somebody comes into your lab and you tell them, 'You're part of the blue team,' " he explains. "The next person who comes in, you flip a coin, let's say it comes up the other way. And you say, 'You're on the red team.' "That's it. The teammates never have to meet. Or interact. There doesn't need to be anything at stake. But within minutes, these insta-partisans like their teammates better than they like the other guys. And it shows when Van Bavel puts his subjects through his MRI dollhouse.

Red-team members are more likely to see humans when they're told they're looking at fellow red-team faces. Blue-team members respond the same way. Other tests reveal that red-team members remember red-team faces more accurately, and if Van Bavel asks subjects to allocate money, red-team members will pay out more to their own. Team members also have less sympathy for those on the other side, and even experience pleasure while reading about their pain.

I'm not just inside the MRI to be stumped by Russian dolls. The researchers are also checking to see if my brain has a conservative or liberal shape.

In 2011, a team of British scientists published a paper that found that brain structures correlated with political orientation. Specifically, conservatives tended to have larger amygdala areas — brain matter that plays a role in fear conditioning — than liberals. The results added to a body of research that finds conservatives and liberals have different physiological responses to the environment, and even perceive the world differently. (…)

With just a hint of partisan priming, an Arizona State University researcher was able to instantly blind Democrats to a noncontroversial fact, leading them immediately to fail to solve the easiest of math problems. In the 2010 experiment, political scientist Mark Ramirez asked subjects two similar questions. The control group saw this question: "Would you say that compared to 2008, the level of unemployment in this country has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse?" A separate group saw this one: "Would you say that the level of unemployment in this country has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse since Barack Obama was elected President?"

The key difference between the two: the first mentions the time period for assessing unemployment, while the second frames the issue around President Obama. When asked the first question, Democrats and Republicans responded similarly, with most saying unemployment had remained about the same. But among subjects who got the second question, opinions shifted along partisan lines: Around 60 percent of Democrats said unemployment had gotten better or somewhat better, and about 75 percent of Republicans said the opposite.

In fact, the unemployment rate increased between Obama's election and Ramirez's study. One can argue about whether this is a fair frame for evaluating this or any president's economic record, but from a raw-numbers perspective, the rise in the unemployment rate between 2008 and 2010 is indisputable.

But even giving Democrats that information did not increase the accuracy of their responses. Ramirez's study asked some participants the following question: "The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows unemployment has increased by 4.6 percent since 2008. Would you say that the level of unemployment in this country has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse since Barack Obama was elected President?"

Clearly, the answer is in the sentence that immediately precedes the question. But the mention of Obama launched a partisan mental process that led many astray: Nearly 60 percent of Democrats said unemployment had lessened since Obama's election.

Essentially, once Democrats focused on Obama, most of them largely ignored the facts. (About 80 percent of Republicans got the answer right when it was spoon-fed to them, but Republicans tempted to cry victory should be cautioned that researchers have found them to be similarly off base in assessing the economy when one of their own is in the Oval Office.)

Ramirez's experiment also reveals that our biases don't completely blind us to information, however. When he gave Democrats the correct unemployment statistics, it did not change their answers, but it did make them less confident in those responses, as reported in a post-test questionnaire. "It tells me that people might actually be processing the information in an unbiased way," Ramirez says. The question, then, is how to amplify that unbiased processing to overcome the partisan blindness.

BRENDAN NYHAN KNOWS just how hard it is to move that mental needle.

"I had the dream of, if we give people the right information, it'll make a difference," says Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth and contributor to The New York Times's The Upshot.

But after 15 years of throwing facts in people's faces, Nyhan has found the matter to be much more complicated. In the early 2000s, he co-founded the fact-checking website Spinsanity to combat the "he said, she said" coverage he saw in the media. "I'm very proud of the work we did, but it did illustrate how hard it was to change people's minds, even among the select group of people who were willing to take the time to read a nonpartisan fact-checking website," Nyhan said.

More recently, Nyhan attempted to debunk an argument that is growing in popularity but utterly lacking in scientific support: that parents shouldn't have their children vaccinated. Nyhan and his collaborators wanted to convince parents who were against vaccinations that their opposition was unfounded. Working with a large sample of 1,759 parents, the team sent them a variety of material, including pamphlets that explained the lack of evidence linking vaccinations with autism, explanations of the dangers of measles, photos of sick children whose diseases could have been prevented, and a story about an infant who almost died from infection. Some were appeals to pure reason; some were appeals to pure emotion.

Nothing worked. One of the interventions — the pamphlet explaining the lack of evidence — actually made anti-vaccination parents even less inclined to vaccinate. "Some of the conclusions of that research people find pretty depressing," Nyhan says. "Myself included." (…)

THERE'S AN EASIER WAY to help people look past their innate partisanship: Pay them to do it.

A 2013 study out of Princeton found that monetary incentives attenuate the partisan gap in answers to questions about the economy. The researchers designed an experiment similar to Ramirez's unemployment study but with a modification: Some participants were plainly informed, "We will pay you for answering correctly." All it took was $1 or $2 to dramatically improve the chances of a right answer, cutting the partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats in half — half!

Of course, a mass "pay Americans to pay more attention to facts" campaign isn't happening. So the question, then, is how do we get people to be more objective, without throwing money at them?

Jimmy Carter discovered one answer during the 1978 peace negotiations between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The talks were on the brink of collapsing in their final hours, and the prime minister was prepared to walk. That's when Carter directed his secretary to find out all the names of Begin's grandchildren. Carter autographed photos for them and personally gave them to the Israeli leader. "He had taken a blood oath that he would never dismantle an Israeli settlement," Carter later recalled in an interview. "He looked at those eight photographs and tears began to run down his cheeks — and mine — as he read the names."

A few minutes later, Begin was back at the negotiating table. By appealing to a nonpolitical idea Begin cared about — his family — Carter was able to bring him to a place where he could bend.

The technique works even when world peace isn't on the line. Kevin Binning, a University of Pittsburgh psychologist, used it to reshape the way partisans reacted to a 2008 presidential debate.

Just two days before the election, Binning assembled 110 self-identified Republicans and Democrats—60 Rs and 50 Ds—to watch a recording of a recent debate between Obama and Republican nominee John McCain. Before they viewed the debate, however, one group of participants was given a list of nonpolitical values such as "social skills" and "creativity," and then asked to write briefly about an instance when their own behavior had embodied one of those values. (The other group also wrote about nonpolitical values, but they were asked to write about how those might be important to other people, not about their personal experiences.)

By having one group write about nonpolitical experiences, Binning wanted to get participants thinking of themselves as individuals rather than partisans. The idea was that affirming the human identity would make people feel more receptive to ideas that didn't align with their worldview.

It worked. When Binning asked the participants to judge the candidates' performances, members of that group were more likely than those in the other to give a favorable rating to the opposition candidate. (…)

Yes, we wall ourselves off from unappealing truths. But when motivated — by money, by the right environment, by an affirmed sense of self, by institutions that value truth and civility — those walls come down.

Outside of the laboratory, people are putting that research into practice, developing civic forums with our mental shortcomings in mind.

After a dispute over a coal plant divided Tallahassee, Florida, into furiously partisan camps, Allan Katz, then a city commissioner, decided he had enough. "It was very nasty, it was very contentious, it was very personal," Katz recalls of the 2006 debates. "Facts didn't matter."

Katz, who is also a former U.S. ambassador to Portugal, joined with other community members to create the Village Square, which hosts events where the public is invited to discuss ongoing issues with experts and activists. Incivility and non-truths are not tolerated. During debates, the Village Square employs fact checkers to keep people in line. "So people couldn't make s--t up," Katz says. There's also a civility bell: If people start yelling, the bell is rung to remind them of their better nature.

For the first meeting, 175 people showed up. Now the Village Square is running 20 programs a year in Tallahassee, and it has expanded into St. Petersburg, Kansas City, and Sacramento. In Tallahassee, city officials ask the Village Square to host public forums on divisive issues.

"You're not trying to turn liberals into conservatives or vice versa," Katz says. "But the only way to get people to see the other point of view, even if they don't agree with it, is to do it in person."

Katz and his fellow organizers are relying on people finding a common humanity, and in so doing, he is playing to one of the brain's great strengths: The same tribal cognitive processes that make it easy to turn people against one another can also be harnessed to bring them together.

When people consider themselves to be part of the same team, be it as Village Square participants, as fellow Americans, or even — one might dream — as fellow members of Congress, they do a much better job of dropping their combative stance and processing the world through a less partisan lens.

And we make those identity jumps all the time, as our brains are wired to let us do.

Sometimes, in the middle of his red team/blue team exercise, Van Bavel will switch a participant from one group to the other. "We say, 'Listen, there's been a mistake, you're actually on the other team,' " he says. "And the moment we do, we completely reverse their empathy. Suddenly, they care about everybody who is in their new in-group. Suddenly, they see the other side.”

On Traveling Through Life

According to Theodore Zeldin, there are 6 ways a person can travel through life:

1) to OBEY, defer to the wisdom of others, accept life as it is. No need to take responsibility for one's acts. The majority of people fit in this category. Upside: reassurance of being in harmony with one's neighbour, peace of mind, no need to try to understand complicated things about the world, illusion of settling all problems by making one big decision (to follow), certainty and illusion as security. Downside: perception that things can't change, immobility;

2) to NEGOTIATE, bargain to get the best possible deal out of life. Upside: Anyone can get anywhere. Downside: there is no certainty or security, the competitive feeling that one could always achieve more, anxiety;

3) to concentrate on one's PRIVATE LIFE, to cultivate one's garden. Upside: no competition. Downside: live for the offspring (if applies) and not for the world; apolitical life;

4) to search KNOWLEDGE. Upside: fomenting new ideas. Downside: being an outsider, not fitting in.

5) to TALK, to pour out one's opinion in search of validation. Narcissism. Upside: getting confirmation from others. Downside: no learning occurs.

6) to BE CREATIVE, to invent ways of living, to innovate. Upside: freedom. Downside: uncertainty, possible exclusion. The geniuses of the past invariably suffered in their own lifetime.

"1984", by George Orwell

Extracts:

“An all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -indeed, in some sense was the destruction --of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."

“War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink.”

“War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word “war”, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.”

“Throughout recorded time, (...) there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibnum, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remainwhere they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives --is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims.”

“The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.”

“All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. (...)  From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.”

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

“If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes. (...) In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is.”

“ 'Let us get back to the question of ‘how’ and ‘why’. You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power?' (...)

He knew in advance what O’Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. (...)

'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. (...)

No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.' "

Quotes I

"Time spent hoping for happier days is time spent turning away from life."

"The true cost of something is what you give up to get it."

"Anguish emerges from craving for a life to be other than it is."

"People grow up in particular societies in particular periods, and their ideas cannot but reflect the constraints of the environment they have known."

"Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know." Heraclitus

"There’s nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"Most people would rather die than think; most people do." Bertrand Russell

"Habit is an effective tranquilizer but its side effects include blindness, deafness and atrophy of the brain." Michael Foley

"The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake." Bertrand Russell

"Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem." Woody Allen

"It started with a feeling of unease. I saw inconsistencies between what people said and did. I thought the way they lived was very foolish, that they didn't know  how to live. (...) There was no reason to do the done thing. You could do what wasn't done.  Gradually, without any rebellion, a sort of stupidity became evident. I wanted to get rid of it, so I worked to do so. Once I was a student and began to plan my life,  I tried to distance myself as much as possible from this ready made plan. I wanted to invent my life. I thought it would feel much better than repeating tested routines."

Simone de Beauvoir

"Do we own our own stories or do they own us?"

"We hear and apprehend only what we already half know." Henry David Thoreau

"No es saludable estar bien adaptado a una sociedad profundamente enferma." Jiddu krishnamurt

 

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." John Steinbeck

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw

"Outliers", by Malcolm Gladwell

“Guns, Germs, and Steel”, by Jared Diamond

What elements determine the adoption or not of a new invention by a specific society?

1) social value and prestige

2) relative economic advantage

3) vested interest

4) ease with which their advantage can be observed.

  
On Chiefdoms

"An Intimate History of Humanity”, by Theodore Zeldin

On Women and Power

On Slavery

On Dealing with Enemies

On Confrontation

On Family

On True Happiness

Love People, Not Pleasure

By Arthur C. Brooks

On the NY Times, 18/7/2014

Extracts:

“The Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues measured the “negative affect” (bad moods) that ordinary daily activities and interactions kick up. They found that the No. 1 unhappiness-provoking event in a typical day is spending time with one’s boss.

(…)

I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.

That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. (…) One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”

And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.

It makes sense. What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?

Some look for relief from unhappiness in money and material things. This scenario is a little more complicated than fame. The evidence does suggest that money relieves suffering in cases of true material need. (This is a strong argument, in my view, for many safety-net policies for the indigent.) But when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery, too. (…) As the Dalai Lama pithily suggests, it is better to want what you have than to have what you want.

SO fame and money are out. How about pleasures of the flesh? Take the canonical hedonistic pleasure: lust. From Hollywood to college campuses, many assume that sex is always great, and sexual variety is even better. (…) In 2004, two economists looked into whether more sexual variety led to greater well-being. They looked at data from about 16,000 adult Americans who were asked confidentially how many sex partners they had had in the preceding year, and about their happiness. Across men and women alike, the data show that the optimal number of partners is one.

This might seem totally counterintuitive. After all, we are unambiguously driven to accumulate material goods, to seek fame, to look for pleasure. How can it be that these very things can give us unhappiness instead of happiness? There are two explanations, one biological and the other philosophical.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.

But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”

But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.

More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers. We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. (…) No political ideology is immune to materialism.

Finally, it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license. But giving in to these impulses will bring unhappiness. You have a responsibility to yourself to stay in the battle. The day you declare a truce is the day you become unhappier. Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering.”

On Capitalism

The Great Philosophers 9: Max Weber

On the Philosophers’ Mail

Extracts:

“Max Weber is one of the three philosophers best able to explain to us the peculiar economic system we live within called Capitalism (Karl Marx and Adam Smith are the other two). (…)

1. Why does Capitalism exist?

Capitalism might feel normal or inevitable to us but, of course, it isn’t. It came into existence only relatively recently, in historical terms, and has successfully taken root in just a limited number of countries.

The standard view is that Capitalism is the result of developments in technology (particularly, the invention of steam power). But Weber proposed that what made Capitalism possible was a set of ideas, not scientific discoveries – and in particular religious ideas.

Religion made Capitalism happen. Not just any religion; a very particular, non-Catholic kind of the sort that flourished in Northern Europe where Capitalism was – and continues to be – particularly vigorous. Capitalism was created by Protestantism, specifically Calvinism, as developed by John Calvin in Geneva and by his followers in England, the Puritans.

In his great work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1905, Weber laid out some of the reasons why he believed Protestant Christianity had been so crucial to Capitalism:

i) Protestantism makes you feel guilty all the time:

Catholics have it – relatively – easy in Weber’s analysis. Believers who have strayed are able to confess their transgressions at regular intervals and can be ‘cleansed’ by priests and thereby recover a sense of their good name in the eyes of God. But no such purifications are available to Protestants, for only God is thought able to forgive and He won’t make his intentions known until the Day of Judgement. Until then, Weber alleged, Protestants are left with heightened feelings of anxiety as well as life-long guilty desires to prove their virtue before a severe, all-seeing but silent God.

ii) God likes hard work

In Weber’s eyes, Protestant guilt feelings were diverted into an obsession with hard work. The sins of Adam could only be expunged through constant toil. To rest, relax and go hunting – as the old Catholic aristocracy liked to do – was to ask for divine trouble. Not coincidentally, there were far fewer festivals and days of rest in Protestantism. God didn’t like time off. Money earnt wasn’t to be blown in feasts celebrating the here-and-now. It was always and only to be reinvested for tomorrow.

iii) All work is holy

Catholics had limited their conception of holy work to the activities of the clergy. But now Protestants declared that work of any kind could and should be done in the name of God, even jobs like being a baker or an accountant. This lent new moral energy and earnestness to all branches of professional life. Work was no longer just about earning a living, it was to be part of a religious vocation connected with proving one’s virtue to God. The clerk was meant to approach his work at the office with all the seriousness and piety of a monk.

iv) It’s the community, not the family, that counts

In Catholic countries, the family was (and often still is) everything. One would regularly give jobs to relatives, help out indolent uncles and lightly swindle the central authorities for family gain without too much compunction. But Protestants took a less benevolent view of family. The family could be a haven for selfish and egoistic motives, running counter to Jesus’s injunctions that a Christian should be concerned with the family of all believers, not his or her specific family. For early Protestants, one was meant to direct one’s selfless energies to the community as a whole, the public realm where everyone deserved fairness and dignity. To stick up for one’s family over and against the claims of the wider group was nothing less than a sin; it was time to do away with narrow vested interests and clan loyalties.

v) There aren’t miracles

Protestantism turned its back on miracles. God wasn’t thought to be lever-pulling behind the scenes day-to-day. One couldn’t get prayers directly answered. Heavenly power didn’t intervene in a fantastical, childish way. Weber called this ‘the disenchantment of the world.’ Instead, in the Protestant philosophy, the emphasis fell on human action: the day to day world was ruled by facts, by reason and by the discoverable laws of science. And therefore, prosperity was not mysteriously ordained by God and couldn’t be won through imploring prayers. It could only be the result of thinking methodically, acting honestly and working industriously and sensibly over many years.

Taken together, these five factors created, in Weber’s eyes, the crucial catalytic ingredients for Capitalism to take hold. In this analysis, Weber was in direct disagreement with Karl Marx, for Marx had proposed a materialist view of Capitalism (where technology was said to have created a new capitalist social system), whereas Weber now advanced an idealist one (suggesting that it was in fact a set of ideas that had created Capitalism and given the impetus for its newfound technological and financial arrangements).

The argument between Weber and Marx pivoted around the role of religion. Marx had argued that religion was ‘the opium of the masses’, a drug that induced passive acceptance of the horrors of Capitalism. But Weber turned this dictum on its head. It was religion that was in fact the cause and foremost supporter of Capitalism. People didn’t tolerate Capitalism because of religion, they only became capitalists as a result of their religion.

2. How do you develop Capitalism around the world?

There are about 35 countries where Capitalism is now well developed. It probably works best in Germany, where Weber first observed it. But in the remaining 161 nations, it arguably isn’t working well at all. This is a source of much puzzlement and distress. Billions of dollars in aid are transferred every year from the rich to the poor world, and are spent on malaria pills, solar panels and grants for irrigation projects and women’s education.

But a Weberian analysis tells us that these materialist interventions will never work, because the problem isn’t really a material one to begin with. One has to start at the level of ideas. What the World Bank and the IMF should be giving sub-Saharan Africa is not money and technology but ideas.

In the Weberian analysis, certain countries fail to succeed at Capitalism because they don’t feel anxious and guilty enough, they trust too much in miracles, they like to celebrate now rather than reinvest for tomorrow and their members feel it’s acceptable to steal from the community in order to enrich their families, favouring the clan over the nation.

Weber didn’t believe that the only way to be a successful Capitalist country was actually to convert to Protestantism. He argued that Protestantism had merely brought to their first fruition ideas which could now subsist outside of religious ideology.

Today Weber would counsel those who wish to spread Capitalism to concentrate on our equivalent of religion: culture. It is a nation’s attitudes, hopes and sense of what life is about that produces an economy that either flourishes or flounders. The path to reforming an economy shouldn’t hence wind through material aid, it should go through cultural assistance. The decisive question for an economy is not what the rate of inflation is, but what is on TV tonight.

3. Why is Capitalism not going so well in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the poorest country on earth)?

Because, Weber would tell us, this unfortunate nation has the wrong mentality, one far removed from that of Rhineland Germany. They believe in clans, they have magical thinking, they don’t believe that God would Himself command them to be an honest mechanic or hairdresser…

Weber’s point is that if Capitalism is going to take root in developing nations – and bring the advantages of higher productivity and greater wealth – then we will need to look to changing mentalities, instilling something akin to an updated version of the attitudes of Calvinism.

Weber’s views on global development emerged in two books he wrote on two religions that he felt were extremely unhelpful to Capitalism, The Religion of India and The Religion of China. For Weber, the caste system of the Hindus assigns everyone to a status they can’t escape and therefore makes any sustained commercial effort futile. The belief in samsara – the transmigration of souls – also inspires the view that nothing substantial can change until the next life. At the same time, a Hindu ideology of the clan takes pressure off individual responsibility and encourages nepotism rather than meritocracy. These ideas have economic consequences; they are why nowadays, Weberians would argue, there are many excellent public hospitals in Geneva and Erfurt and not too many in Chennai or Varanasi.

Weber noted similarly unhelpful factors in China. There Confucianism gives too much weight to tradition. No one feels able to rethink how things are done. The devotion to bureaucracy encourages a static society – whereas entrepreneurship arises from a fruitful mixture of anxiety and hope.

4. How can we change the world?

Weber was writing in an age of revolution. Lots of people around him were trying to change things: communists, socialists, anarchists, nationalists, separatists. He too wanted things to change, but he believed that one first had to work out how political power operated in the world.

He believed that humanity had gone through three distinct types of power across its history. The oldest societies operated according to what he called ‘traditional authority.’ This was where kings relied on appeals to folklore and divinity to justify their hold on power. Such societies were deeply inert and only rarely allowed for initiative

These societies had subsequently been replaced by an age of ‘charismatic authority’, where a heroic individual, most famously a Napoleon, could rise to power on the back of a magnetic personality – and change everything around him through passion and will.

But, Weber insisted, we were now long past this period of history, having entered a third age of ‘bureaucratic authority.’ This is where power is held by vast labyrinthine bureaucracies whose workings are entirely baffling to the average citizen. It’s not obvious what all the functionaries actually do in meetings and at their desks. Bureaucracy achieves its power via knowledge: only the bureaucrats know how stuff works, and it will take an outsider years to work it out (for example, how housing policy or the educational curriculum are actually structured). Most simply give up – usefully for the powers that be…

The dominance of bureaucracy has major implications for anyone trying to change a nation. There is often an understandable, but misguided, desire to think one just has to change the leader, who is imagined as a kind of super-parent personally determining how everything goes. But in fact, removing the leader almost never has the degree of impact that is hoped for. (The replacement of Bush by Obama did not lead, for example, to all the changes some people expected; Weber would not have been surprised).

Weber knew that today one can’t bring about significant social change just by charisma. It can feel as if political change should be driven by fiery rhetoric, marches, fury and grand, exciting gestures, like publishing a bestselling revolutionary book. But Weber is pessimistic about all such hopes, for they are misaligned with the reality of how the modern world works. The only way to overcome the power lodged within bureaucracy is through knowledge and systematic organisation.

Weber encourages us to see that change is not so much impossible as complicated and slow. If we are to get things to go better, much of it will have to come through outwardly very undramatic processes. It will be through the careful marshalling of statistical evidence, patient briefings to ministers, testimonies to committee hearings and minute studies of budgets.

Conclusion

Weber, though personally a cautious man, is an unexpected source of ideas on how to change things. He tells us how power works now and reminds us that ideas may be far more important than tools or money in changing nations. It is a hugely significant thesis. We learn that so much which we associate with vast impersonal external forces (and which hence feels entirely beyond our control) is, in fact, dependent upon something utterly intimate and perhaps more malleable: the thoughts in our own heads.”