People give up power only to grasp greater power. They abandon a familiar game only to take up a better one. Model building is a better game than war. Compared to the dialogues of model builders, the slogans of demagogues sound like the braggadocio of adolescents. Compared to model building, war is not only clumsy; it is boring.
What About Bad Guys?
Over the last century, wars do appear to have been declining, both in frequency and intensity. But even if aggression is becoming less likely with the passage of time, it can never be completely ruled out. Any group can choose to destroy the peace and may well do so if it thinks it can get away with it. This means we must always be prepared to face such an opponent--whether it be an individual committing a crime, a group engaging in terrorism or genocide, or a nation declaring war--in a more elementary struggle wherein brute force determines the outcome.
The durability of any post-rankist framework is bought at the price of preparedness to meet "bad guys"--those who refuse to play by the new rules--on their own turf. To make and keep the brute force option unappealing, a credible superior force, willing and able to disqualify or dominate aggressors,must be kept in readiness and in sight. Just as referees and umpires prevent cheating and police deter crime, so a strong defense--national and/or supranational--is required to deter rogue organizations or states.
From the perspective of human social evolution,we can see ourselves as now emerging from a long history of predation, as suggested by statistics on war-related deaths. As we make this transition, it's all-important that we erect steep barriers to slipping back into our old ways. By doing so we should in time be able to make transgressive criminal lapses rare. The most important thing we can do to avoid having to resort to force, however, is to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to contribute to the whole.
Malrecognition and Counterterrorism
Trying to identify a single "root cause" of terrorism is a futile endeavor.
Indeed, it is clear that the psychological, political, cultural, and religious motivations of the individuals who actually plan and execute acts of terror are complex and varied. As the Russian novelist Dostoevsky put it: "While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him." Fortunately, we do not need to understand the precise motivations of terrorists to mount a defense against their activities.
Why? Because the reasons that bystanders sympathize with terrorists and ennoble them as "martyrs" are not so difficult to understand, and by addressing those reasons we can marginalize the activists. Sympathizers generally see the activists as protesting chronic indignities with which they, too, identify. Regardless of the individual psychology of the activists, a developing wisdom suggests that terrorism, as a strategy, is adopted in reaction to what is perceived by a larger group of sympathizers as organized dominance behavior that is to their detriment.
Although bystanders generally limit their own protests to passive resistance and noncooperation, they are not displeased when those they see as their oppressors are made to suffer at the hands of their activist compatriots.
In the aftermath of an act of terrorism it is often possible to catch a glimpse of the extent of the latent support for activist perpetrators. Following the attacks of 9/11, thousands of disenfranchised young Muslims, many with little concern for the precise political aims of the Al Qaeda leadership, celebrated in the streets of foreign capitals. This often happens in instances of domestic terrorism as well. In the weeks following
the shootings at Columbine High School, throngs of school outcasts all over the United States voiced complaints about intolerance, humiliation, and bullying. Similarly, when an employee goes "postal," browbeaten workers from near and far,while distancing themselves from the violence, begin urging their employers to appoint ombudspersons.
The extent to which active terrorists depend on passive sympathizers for material and psychological support varies from one situation to the next. But for there to be a renewable supply of purveyors of violence and suicide bombers, volunteers for such missions need to feel they are making a statement on behalf of a group whose members regard them as heroic martyrs. They want to believe that their sacrifice will not only bring recognition to themselves personally but will also draw attention to indignities suffered by the entire class of people with whom they identify.
Any cause that can draw significant numbers of passive adherents out of their latency poses a grave threat to the status quo. The Gandhi-led struggle for Indian independence, the American civil rights movement, and the people-power revolutions in Soviet satellites (including Poland, Hungary, and East Germany) and former republics (the Baltic nations, Georgia, Ukraine) showed the world what happens when those suffering in silence find a way to act out their resentment.
For centuries, African Americans stoically resigned themselves to slavery and, after their emancipation, to menial jobs in a segregated, racist society. Protest had to remain covert because open rebellion was summarily punished. In the 1960s, under the leadership of Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr., the Gandhian strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience gave millions of people who were passive sympathizers an acceptable way to cross over into activism. Huge numbers of them marched in the streets and subjected themselves to arrest and police brutality while the world watched with mounting apprehension.
As the ranks of nonviolent protestors swelled, Congress had no recourse but to begin dismantling deeply entrenched segregationist barriers to equal opportunity, and initiated a series of reforms to eliminate degrading societal practices. Faced with escalating disruption, Americans realized that evil lay not in the protestors but in the racism that fueled their outrage.
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