"We will send against you people who love death more than you love life."
And, now the second, It was made by a young man shortly after he was saved from drowning by lifeguards.
"The voice compelled me right to my bones. It commanded me to die. To go into the surf and drown. I had to obey."
To the Geek these two statements, seemingly so unconnected suggest a power at work in the minds of Islamist jihadists, particularly those who willingly become "the poor man's smart bomb." The two statements, both highly redolent of epitomization, suggest a strong linkage between behavior which is incompletely explained by quotes from the Koran or the writings of assorted Islamists over the generations and a classic example of the auditory hallucinations experienced by individuals diagnosed as schizophrenic.
The linkage between the absolutist view of Islamists and their armed twins, the jihadists, including their love of death, and the plight of the schizophrenic is found in the highly controversial but increasingly validated hypothesis of the late American psychologist, Julian Jaynes, called bicamerialism.
Jaynes held that for a period during the evolution of human society and culture, a period encompassing the early use of agriculture and the rise of urban society, the human mind was for many a place of two distinct spheres. One, resident in the right hemisphere was executive in nature and expressed itself in auditory hallucinations perceived as the Voice of Authority by the "follower" side of the mind located in the left hemisphere. This Voice of Authority was inherently compelling. It was, for many, the Voice of God. For others, it was the perceived voice of dead ancestors or a distant king.
Along with the presence of the two domain brain and the concomitant auditory hallucinations, people living in the bicameral society to some, perhaps large, extent lacked an internal, introspective sense of self. The inner "I" which is at the very core of the unicameral mind with its subjective sense of self and capacity for inner dialogue with the self was absent.
Also absent were such deep and compelling mental structures as a conscience. The capacity for deception was missing. So to were the onboard sense of guilt and shame which do so much in the unicameral society to regulate behaviour and force conformity with social norms and values.
The bicameral mind with its ever-present Voice of Authority created social conditions which provided for a degree of harmony, conformity, obedience, submission to those in command, and an inherent selflessness which is difficult, even impossible to image today after nearly three thousand years of unicameral consciousness. The bicameral mind was intensely liberating in a very real sense.
"Huh?" You ask. "How in hell can being a robot run by a freakin' hallucination be liberating? You are out of your tree, Geek!"
"Not so fast, bucko," the Geek replies. "Walk this through with me, OK?"
The bicameral mind was a mind without fear. Particularly, it was free of the fear produced by the necessity of making a decision and taking responsibility for it. As many social thinkers have posited over the last fifty or sixty years, the intrinsic appeal of authoritarian regimes is the absence of any need to make individual decisions beyond that of following the regime's dictates.
As the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard observed, humans must make decisions and take actions in "fear and trembling." This condition exists because we can never be sure that our decisions and actions will be correct or even effective. We must always be prepared to acknowledge this and take proper remedial actions including apologies. This, Kierkegaard and others have contended for centuries, means that we don't want to choose, or make a decision, or act without instructions or orders.
The person with a bicameral mind doesn't have to worry about this. The Great Ju-Ju in the right hemisphere will tell him what he must do. It will order him into action. All the left hemisphere need do is, "hear and obey."
The bicameral mind lacks a conscience. The bicameral person can do anything, anything whatsoever, and never be bothered by the slightest qualm. In so far as there is a sense of self, it is satisfied completely by following the Voice. No doubts, no qualms, no regrets, no guilt, no shame cloud the bicameral mind's horizon. To hear is to obey. Nothing more is needed--or possible.
The bicameral mind has one severe flaw. It's capacity to react to new or stressful conditions is highly limited. The Great Ju-Ju of the right hemisphere knows nothing outside the experiential context of the person and his society. When something happens which is totally outside the experiential frame of reference, the Great Ju-Ju of the right hemisphere is silent.
The Gods stop speaking.
This great silence happened at different times to the several cultures which were, at least in Jaynes's estimate, bicameral in nature. The process could be slow and painful as in Greece and ancient Israel. Or it could happen literally overnight as with the Incas.
In any event, all bicameral societies ran into a mix of the new and traumatic which fell outside of past experience, so the Voices fell silent. Never to speak again.
The mere fact that the Voices of the right hemisphere are silent today as they have been for thousands of years for most people most of the time does not mean that we humans do not yearn for their return. In a real and ongoing sense we all want to go back to the easy years where fear and risk were reduced by the commands of the Voice within.
Ideologies, both sacred and secular, have promised the social and cultural certainty of the long-gone Voice. Humans beyond counting have followed the seductive message of prophets and philosophers, who have promised that by following, by truly believing in, and by acting upon the dictates and norms of one religion or ideology or another, the old certainty, the ancient absence of fear, the long lost but always hoped for Golden Age of harmony, justice, and freedom from pain will return.
All that is necessary say the prophets and philosophers is that people hear, believe, and obey. No thought, no reflection, no painful introspection, no fear of being wrong are required. Just, "hear, believe, and obey."
Hear and obey even onto death as with the young man marching determinedly into the surf. Hear and obey even onto death as with those who claim to "love death more than you love life."
The proponents of Islamism and, even more, the advocates of jihadism are questing after the bicameral mind. Their followers, those who, "hear, believe and obey," are freed from the fear of doing something wrong, immoral, evil. There is no conscience involved--and very little, if any, introspective consciousness either.
This is not to say--or even imply--that the Islamists and the monstrous regiment of jihadists are mentally ill in the sense of meeting the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia. They are not. Rather they represent the cultural and social expectations which emphasize hearing, believing, and submitting to those in clerical authority--those who attest to having what is in effect the Voice of Allah in their heads.
Whether or not any of the assorted clerics and their killer followers actually have auditory hallucinations, really do hear the Voice of Allah or the Prophet is both immaterial and irrelevant. What is desired, what is occurring, what will continue is the functional recreation of the bicameral mind and a society based upon the social and cultural analogue of one of the ancient bicameral societies which Janyes and others have adduced as proof of their hypothesis.
The young man on the beach who heard the commands of the right hemisphere had no choice except to obey. The young man with the suicide vest or the clicker for the truck bomb behind him may not have heard the same Voice, but he has heard, he does believe in and must obey the voice of some cleric who claims to know the will of Allah.
The young man on the beach was mentally ill. He was schizophrenic according to all the criteria established on behalf of a unicameral society. The young man with the clicker or the AK is not mentally ill. He is normal by the criteria of a society and culture which seeks desperately for the long gone, never to return, and purportedly halcyon days of bicameralism.
In many ways, the proponents of Islamism seek to return to the Arabian desert of over a thousand years ago. Their minds are inherently every bit as inflexible as those which could not fathom or handle creatively changes in Greece, or the ancient lands of the Hebrews, or the long buried empires and city states of the Nile and the Land Between the Rivers, or the Incas on the day after the Spanish arrived.
The young man on the beach could be and (hopefully) was cured of his illness. The young man with the clicker or the AK as well as the clerics behind him cannot be cured. They can only be killed. Or they will kill us.
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