A Wise Perspective on Radical Islam Comes from Two Chris Hedges Paragraphs — both of which May Be Prophetic regarding America’s Own Accelerating Socioeconomic Inequality

15 August 2013

What Mr. Hedges wrote is obvious — yet far too few people think about it

From yesterday’s TruthDig — extracts reordered for easier online comprehension:

Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers.

The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral code that prohibits alcohol, along with the understanding that life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims from despair.

The fundamentalist ideology that rises from oppression is rigid and unforgiving. It radically splits the world into black and white, good and evil, apostates and believers. It is bigoted and cruel to women, Jews, Christians and secularists along with gays and lesbians.

But at the same time it offers to those on the very bottom of society a final refuge and hope.

If you live in the sprawling slums of Cairo or the refugee camps in Gaza or the concrete hovels in New Delhi, every avenue of escape is closed. You cannot get an education. You cannot get a job. You cannot get married. You cannot challenge the domination of the economy by the oligarchs and the generals.

The only way left for you to affirm yourself is to become a martyr or shahid.

The only way to break the hold of radical Islam is to give followers of the movement a stake in the wider economy, the possibility of a life where the future is not dominated by grinding poverty, repression and hopelessness.

Lack of empathy leads to unnecessary conflict

That is why socially active sages, like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Junior, have so much difficulty changing society for the better. When greed or despair is all one knows, linking hands across disparate income levels becomes an empty gesture.

Fear and avarice lead to oppression

Which accounts for the Egyptian military’s excesses in attempting to smother the Muslim Brotherhood.

The probable result is predictable:

The massacres of hundreds of believers in the streets of Cairo signal not only an assault against a religious ideology . . . but the start of a holy war that will turn Egypt and other poor regions of the globe into a cauldron of blood and suffering.

With a remotely possible overflow to America — if we keep lollygagging our way into an increasingly inequitable socioeconomic situation

Mr. Hedges forecasts that a global conflict between rich and poor will result, due to the capitalistic excesses that we see around us. Those, of course, are the gross inequities that I founded this website to argue against.

That said, I am less hyperbolically inclined than Hedges is. The poor have always taken it on the nose from the wealthy. Why a global “war” should result now, rather than in the past, is questionable.

Where Mr. Hedges is correct is that — the larger the mass of impoverished “masses” becomes — the more difficult it will be for the economic elite to eke out tolerable day to day personal situations, even while fenced off in their gated communities.

At some series of geographically twinkling tipping points, it will become difficult to exact work and interpersonal tolerance from a world population that is mostly comprised of enraged people. Louis the XVI, by way of minor example, found that out the hard way, toward the conclusion of the French revolutionary period.

I do not mean to imply that loose economic equality results from these interludes of payback.

But I do point out that survival-oriented elites need to pay more attention to their rage-inducing excesses, if they want to avoid being occasionally (and sometimes massively) gobbled in the tumult that results.

The moral? — Paying attention is always wise in the survival sense, even if one is not spiritually that way inclined

To that degree, Mr. Hedges’ paragraphs sum the medium term future.

The blind imbecility of Egypt’s military and (often) our own American economic and political elite is psychologically interesting in a depressing way. Human beings are violent, greedy, and dumb — and appear inclined to stay that way.

Meaningfully displayed compassion is not a popular trait. Fear, avarice, and self-centeredness overwhelm it. Even to the point that many of the world’s current elites invent pseudo-religious philosophies to justify their tiny-souled baseness. We see elements of that trend in wealth-based perversions of American Christianity.

It is interesting in a psychiatric sense. And saddening in social one.

PeteFree.com

A Wise Perspective on Radical Islam Comes from Two Chris Hedges Paragraphs — both of which May Be Prophetic regarding America’s Own Accelerating Socioeconomic Inequality