This is about the recent killings and terrorism, which we think is directly linked to our need for oil and gas, our arms industry. By adopting more renewables and increasing wealth and water security we may reduce these threats.
We are trying to understand the rise of shootings and killings in Europe and the US. The reasons are more complex than indoctrination of Islamic State. Depressed and innately agressive persons can at times decide to choose a course of action that ultimately destroys them. This is not always an accident. Today it is pretty easy to track down people with hurt feelings, in emotional stress, hatefull. Especially if social media are used to express these feelings.
We can group killers in different groups :
- Young people that get sucked into or raised in islamic ideology which turns extreme. Factors are
- Peer pressure
- Desire for freedom and adventure
- Continued indoctrination by a small social group
- Possibly sexually frustrated
- Antagonized against the world
- May have lost family members
- Violent people that see an opportunity
- These can be tracked and approached to use them for ideological goals
- Depressed people that turn violence on themselves
- These can be tracked and approached to use them for ideological goals
- Highly abstract thinking persons that can be easily influenced given the right approach
- People who want to act against a wrong they correctly percieve.
It is clear that in the islamic world there exist recruiters, who look for sensitive targets, which are then groomed following a recipy which usually yields succes. This shows there is an external system of people that will use an individual as a tool to turn extreme. It depends on the quality of this system, and the sensitivity of the individual whether this works. Examples of this go back to the times of Napoleon, who’s second in command in Egypt got knifed by a scribe who got indoctrinated by a arab warlord. He would fall in category 4.
“The suicide bomber in Ansbach had had contact with an unknown person that significantly influenced him” (source)
Today tracking people that are ‘vulnerable’ is easier than ever. Social media, phone locations, financial data can show what people live like and what they are interested in. I believe we underestimate the ease with which people can be influenced by the large army of coaches and motivators looking for work. These peopl I come across a lot at (government funded) renewables events, there to waste your time, to find out about you. We have the NSA, CIA spying, Google, Microsoft, Apple spying, and sometimes we have people just crossing your path to waste your time. This is no secret by the way, it can be readily confirmed that coaches are hired to organize and run citizen participation events, really to give the citizen the feeling of being heard so the government plan (run by some industrial lobby group) can be executed with expedience. What else are people with these skills used for?
Intelligence and secret services both monitor and can create threats
I think we underestimate the role of manipulations of political opponents in the current situation. People can be changed, impeded, by many factors, including pathogens (viruses that alter personality), financial unfortunate events etc. The question should be why? To what end? Most people are not in any secretive organization (like the CIA or other secret service) engaged in any activity that drives towards violence or some impulsive act. Who are these people that are?
This violent background of our society exists because of our dependence on fossil fuels, for which all nations compete.
One of the reasons in my opinion is that we don’t see our reality clearly, and one of the main topics in that respect is our assumption that money is something we can trust, that we can build upon and that the only thing we need to watch in life is how much money we make or have. Because we don’t pay attention to the volume of oil, gas and coal traded around the world, because we don’t pay attention who owns it first and how that state or company agrees to allow us access to it, we don’t see why people would be angry or fight. For example, Iran, delivers massive amounts of fossil fuels to the world. It doesn’t have to, it could be wealthy in its own right (expecially given its solar wealth). We don’t thank it, but we can not produce the oil, gas in the West. We get it out of some relationship we never analyse, perhaps of an imminent nuclear threat to Iran from the US?
If we don’t live in Gaza we don’t see our brothers and sisters die. No matter how wrong terrorism is, we may fear it, others live it on a daily basis. If such a person arrives in the free west, and realizes the free west is selling weapons, gaining oil and gas (Gaza has gas reserves), and playing fearfull of ‘terrorism’, this might agitate this person, and with reason. Simply said : If a US drone kills a syrian civilian then this means the relatives of this civilian want to destroy the drone, destroy the person controlling it. No individual has the innate desire to give up and die when attacked. A sane person wants to fight. Correct that : A sane person with no other options that give it a future wants to fight. Our best protection at the moment against sane people wanting to hurt western citizens is distance, opportunity and their overwhelmingly peacefull nature.
Because groups are well monitored, only individuals can start their own revolution, these micro revolutions are very hard to prevent. The individuals don’t even need to be crazy.
Ubiquitous surveillance can stop organizations that commit crimes, even though going full analog makes a group of individuals very hard to track. Lone individuals that decide to act are next to impossible to detect, even though you can scope out those sensitive to such diseastrous changes of heart. The killer in Munich was depressed, on antidepressants. Two big risk factors. The killer in Nice was known to be violent. He could have been monitored more closely. But even completely normal individuals that have emotional attachement to victims of US drone strikes, or that feel Islamic values are superior than christian values, can decide to commit a crime, just like completely sane military commanders can decide to kill an enemy combattant.
The book Crime and Punishment of Dostojevsky is about a man who wonders why the state has the right to kill, but the individual does not. He goes through all kinds of weakminded torments, commits a crime, then gets tracked by a detective that doesn’t really know how to catch him. He wants to be caught, he doesn’t want to live in his guilty state. In the end he chooses to be punished. The book is about the weakness of normal people, who are supposed to be working in normal jobs, and should not develop the skill that is only necessary in extreme circumstances. The crime in the book is quite nonsensical really, very much a random result of the desire of the main character to commit it. The problem today is that we have a rational reason for some individual to retalliate against innocent people in the West. We also have people with the skills to commit crimes coming from the battlefields armed and funded by the West. It is a miracle (and the work of our police forces) that we don’t see more attacks.
The people that do commit crimes in our names, the military, needs to be driven only by the desire to bring peace, not by commercial motives or a need to secure fossil fuel resources.
I think the best way to combat individuals going on killing sprees, when we have identified all groups that may turn violent, is to undermine all aspects that drive these people to these crimes. They are:
- Poverty
- Alienation, indoctrination
- Sexual frustration (not an insignificant factor)
- Access to weapons
- Random killing of family and friends
- Oil dependent countries committing crimes against them
The world needs to calm down and move towards a peacefull mindset, in order for all people emotionally involved in what happens in the Middle East building up motivation to commit a crime. We need to drive renewables, solar and wind, cheap water technology to help those communities, instead of subjecting them to suffering because we need the oil and gas. We need to make sure the reasonings toward hate are not injected into young minds by clerics, that the violent lifestyle are not advertised online or elsewhere. Only then we can prevent these microrevolutions which seem inevitable to occur on almost mathematically predictable intervals otherwise.