LESSONS WE LEARN FROM OUR SOCIAL PSYCH TEXTBOOK
Posted by the Bekka
(Incidentally, it annoys the Bekka it when people say stuff like, "Freud teaches us...," and "We learn about the miracle of birth from...")

I took this killer Social Psych class this past summer. In a chapter entitled "The Need to Justify Our Actions: Maintaining a Stable, Positive Self-Image," our texbook discussed an interesting passage from a book entitled Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World after 9/11. I've been meaning to post it for some time now. Please to enjoy:

"Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and one of our nation's most astute observers of the Middle East...suggests that there are thousands of young Muslim men all over the Middle east and Europe who are suffering from a loss of dignity. According to Friedman, these young men were:

taught from youth in the mosque that theirs is the most complete and advanced form of the three monotheistic faiths - superior to both Christianity and Judaism - yet who become aware that the Islamic world has fallen behind both the Christian West and the Jewish state in education, science, democracy, and development. This produces a cognitive dissonance in these young men - a cognitive dissonance that is the original spark for all their rage.... They reconcile this by concluding that the Islamic world has fallen behind the rest of the world either because the Europeans, Americans, and Israelis stole something from the Muslims, or because the Europeans, Americans, and Israelis are deliberately retarding the progress of Muslims, or because those who are leading the Muslim world have drifted away from the true faith and are behaving in un-Islamic ways, but are being kept in power by America.... They see America as the most powerful lethal weapon destroying their religious universe, or at least the universe they would like to build. And that is why they transform America into the ultimate evil, even more than Western Europe, an evil that needs to be weakened and, if possible, destroyed. Even by suicide? Why not? If America is destroying the source of meaning in their lives, then it needs to be destroyed back."

Chew on that tasty morsel for a while.