Great essay from "the guardian" blog
The Magical World of Terrorists and Liberals
There really are two ways of looking at the world. To most of us, the world works in rational, linear, fairly predictable ways. Drop a hammer, for instance, and it will always fall, accelerating at thirty-two feet per second, every second. Science works. Reason works. We're capable of understanding the world, and using our understanding of it in small ways to advance ourselves. The world around us makes sense.
Then there are people who see the world through emotionalism, symbolism and magic. The world makes sense to them, but in a completely different way. They believe in Grand Gestures and symbolic attacks. Their emotions drive their thoughts and fears. Those who believe in symbolic magic don't see the world as working along the same rational, linear lines as the rest of us. Liberals and terrorists both belong to this latter group of people.
Terrorists attack representative symbols of things they hate. Innocent people are symbolically representative of the larger group they want to hurt -- they're emotionally incapable of separating the individual from the group. To attack America or Israel, they kill random Americans or Israelis; to attack America's military, they attack the Pentagon or blow up a truck full of American soldiers; to attack America's economic might, they attack the World Trade Center and other financial buildings. Even the symbolic gesture of burning American flags is, by magic, supposed to be an attack on America itself. A rational people would strive to build a better economy or military to increase their position in the world. By making the Grand Gesture of killing themselves along with the symbol that represents their chosen enemy, terrorists ensure that their attack "means" something -- it's the magic that translates the attack on the symbol to the hated real thing. Because their world functions by magic instead of rationality, they believe that they can hurt America by hurting symbols or representatives OF America.
Most Liberals have the same magical, emotional worldview as terrorists. Liberals feel that magic, of a sort, actually works. Their speeches are full of metaphor and emotional overtones instead of fact and realism. Like terrorists, they are fond of the Grand Gesture and symbolic attacks. When you see them dancing wildly and chanting obscenities in the streets of New York City to protest the Republican convention all next week (ironically using their freedom of speech to protest other people's freedom of speech), understand that what they do makes sense in a magic-run emotion-driven universe. If they can out-shout the Republicans, they can "beat" them. If they can project their hate loudly enough, they can "win." That is why arguments with Liberals almost inevitably devolve into shouting matches. When they burn American flags, they're burning a symbol that represents America -- and in their minds, they are burning America itself. Their weird costumes, hate-spewing signs and slogans are all designed to symbolically attack the things they hate -- law, order, capitalism, common decency and morality, freedom (to disagree with them), American power, the rational world and George W. Bush. It doesn't matter that their arguments are irrational and not based on all the available facts -- they feel right, and, magically, they can become right by the power of emotion. As for the giant puppet heads... okay, no one can explain the giant puppet heads.
Knowing that they can't possibly hurt any of these things only makes protesters redouble their efforts. Watch them carefully through the week and ask yourself whether they represent your way of thinking. Where terrorists kill themselves to seal the magical deal, as it were, Liberals merely get more outrageous and outlandish in their symbolic street theater -- wearing hateful, scary costumes, staging "die-ins," painting their faces and bodies, making criminal accusations without proof (or even evidence), running around naked and so on. The shock value of their appearance and actions, they feel, is sufficient to translate their attacks from the symbols of the things they hate to the real thing. Having felt better for making the Grand Gesture, they return to their comfortable world, bought and paid for by the very things they profess to hate. Their main difference from the terrorists lies in this hypocrisy.
We survived the Cold War only because our enemy was generally as rational as we are. We could foresee the Soviet response to any action on our part because they thought the same way we do -- in rational, linear terms. Each move, like a chess game, led to a response from a set of rational responses. We're not so lucky this time. Terrorists are not really crazy, though they appear so to the rational thinker. Their belief in symbolic magic merely makes them seem insane to us. Liberals, likewise, view the world in an irrational way... they're only slightly less incomprehensible. |
