KORZYBSKI TO THE RESCUE! Dealing with the Ideology behind Terrorism

If you’ve been watching television, the cable stations, internet, etc. for the past two days of the death and destruction in Orlando Florida, then you’ve been hearing the same questions that we hear every single time there’s a terrorist attack, the why questions: “Why did this happen?” “What is he (or they) so angry, hateful, intolerant, etc.?” We also hear the what questions: “What can we do to stop this?” “What can we do to catch the people before they start the murdering?”

Actually we already know the answer to the why questions. Indeed those who engage in the massacre of innocents and glory in murder have made it clear. It comes from their ideology—they believe that they have the right to impose their religious views on those who disagree with them. And behind that is an even more insidious belief: “My belief (as my mental map) is the reality (the territory). So first they believe in something most of us consider stupid and medieval: “We can impose our beliefs on others!” This violates the modern spirit of democracy and the human right that people can believe whatever they want to believe no matter how ridiculous or assisine. But believing is not the same as having the right to act out your beliefs.

Now those who believe in Radical Islam engage in terrorism because of its ideology and because they confuse their map with the territory. I’m not speaking about the religion itself, Islam. Instead, I’m speaking about people taking that religion and adding to it this radical attitude. “If I believe something, I have the right to impose that belief on others. I’m right, they are wrong. They are infidels, I must kill them.”

Confusing map and territory, your thinking and reality—that’s the problem. This is the medieval thinking which preceded today’s more modern and scientific thinking that distinguishes a person’s understanding from reality. Medieval thinking is the either-or thinking that puts a person into a dogmatic and fundamentalistic state. These symptoms make the persons closed-minded, intolerant, hateful, angry, etc. It distorts their religion so they actually think they are serving God by murdering people! This kind of thinking is the problem.

The young man (29) in Orlando Florida did not engage in mass murder because of poverty or mistreatment. He had a good job, had plenty of money, had a wife and child, and even had a loving family (parents). [Although he may have learned some of it from his dad who supported the Taliban, a terrorist group in Afghanistan.] While some people may join ISIS or Al-Qaeda or other Radical Islamic groups for these reasons, not this guy. The same could be said of the husband and wife murderers in San Bernardino California who slaughtered 14 fellow employees. The problem is their ideology and their confusion of map and territory. That’s what makes them fanatics!

It is similar to the problem with Nazism in the 1930s. The source of the anger, hatred, intolerance, murderous rage, etc. started with the ideology. It then went into the pathology of feeling proud of murdering as they thought that their mental map is the territory.

In Florida the problem was not his anger at gays. The problem was not his hatred of those who do not accept the Islam religion. The problem was not even his scornful attitude toward western culture. These were but symptoms. The problem is his ideology— his meanings! The meanings that he gave to these things became the experiences that he then lived.

As long as there are people who think and believe that they have “a divine right” to impose their values and beliefs on others, and as long as there are people who will do whatever it takes (e.g., murder, destruction, bomb civilians, etc.) to reach their goal of a Caliphate government on earth, then these problems will continue.

At the heart of these political problems are the psychological or ideological problems of their thinking. That’s why Alfred Korzybski’s formulation, “The map is not the territory” can rescue us from this non- sense. So I call upon all of our Muslims in Neuro-Semantics to spread the word wide and fear— “The map is not the territory.” Tell people, “Whatever you believe is a belief— not the territory.” Help people understand that this means that none of us can be so cockeyed sure that what we believe is the truth. We are all fallible and always will be. We are all wrong about many things. We now have hundreds, and perhaps we are close to thousands of beautiful Muslim people in Neuro-Semantics and many, many more in NLP, that’s a great start on a groundswell movement around the world. Of course, this by itself will not stop or defeat ISIS, but it will significantly help to change the kind of thinking that’s feeding the radical attitude that creates the radical Islamists who support terrorism.