Getting Into Their Minds II:  How Does Islam Do It?

 

In times gone by in China, some children were deformed for the amusement of the royals.  Some had their feet bound.  Others were raised in giant urns.  The latter were kept in the urns until bone growth stopped.  The, the urn was broken, and out came the subject of the amusement, a human deformed into the shape of the urn.  Throughout history, humans have deformed other humans for their own purposes.  Ayn Rand gives a brilliant exposition in her essay entitled "The Comprachicos," published in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and she shows that the comprachicos of old deformed children for court amusement while the comprachicos of now deform children in what passes for "educations" in America.  Regardless of purpose, the bottom line is that ostensibly normal people have been twisted, torqued, and deformed to serve evil  ends of others.

So it is with Islam.  Ostensibly normal kids are converted into life-long Muslims before they reach  puberty.  They have been turned into Muslim-bots awaiting focus and orders.  Some become activist jihadists.  Many do not, but of that many, still many passively support the jihadists.  Why?  Because they are Muslims, and they seldom can ever be anything else.  Their urns have been broken, but their deformity remains.

How does Islam do this?  We know well what these kids become, "out of the urn," so to speak.  And, we know children and the fact they start life in most cases as normals.  By puberty, they have changed forever for most of them.  Obviously Islam does this, and does it with great effectiveness.  But, how?

These essays attempt to provide a working hypothesis.

Part One:  Basic Ideas

 
          Why are Islamists the way they are?  After all, they have some individual personality, but as a group, the behave somewhat like the Star Trek villains, the Borg.  They act like "scripted" peoples, routinized and  predictable.  According to historical descriptions, they have been this way for some fourteen centuries. Why?

           To get to the “why,” we have to get to the “how.”  How did they get the way they are? 

           There is an old cliché’ that says humans are creatures of habit.  Intuitively, we can agree with that statement, even though it doesn’t clarify anything.  Still, we wonder, how much is learned and habituated, and how much is just biology?  Current estimates suggest that some 70% of our personalities comes from biology alone, leaving the 30% for learning.  However, that explains very little, as well.

          Each of us is born with a certain genetic sorting which results in each of us having a “temperament,” a characteristic (habitual) style of responding to a broad range of stimuli.  Some of this is evident at birth.  E.g., my oldest daughter, right from day one, was obviously extroverted.  Even as a neonate, she needed to react heavily with her environment, and particularly others in that external environment.  The second daughter was blatantly  introverted from the "get go."   Even in the early days of infancy, this second daughter needed significant daily periods of time to herself, unlike her older sister who was more like a circus all the time.  These are just two examples of some of the myriad, built-in reaction styles and patterns people have from their beginnings.

          Much less clear are groups of people who share behaviors so alike that they seem to be peas in a very large pod, even if they do not have distinguishing physical characteristics such as skin color.  For example, we have a real sense at some “gut level” how Japanese individuals differ from Chinese, and how each differs from the British.  Yet, if a child from Japan or China grows up from the earliest life in Great Britain, that child will seem very "British."  regardless of apparent origin.  Take another example, we have the experience of hearing someone speaking over the television set when we can not see the screen.  We can be surprised, even startled perhaps, to see that the person speaking, when seen, looks nothing like the ordinary inhabitant of a particular country or ethnic group.  These are characteristics of learned traits but they become deeply engrained.

          Let us do the "p.c." kabuki dance for a moment to disabuse us of the postmodernist notion of “stereotyping.”  We are not dealing with blatant or latent racism by categorizing people from certain areas with shared characteristics of behavior, and usually shared physiological characteristics as well.  Were we to say something like, "all blacks are shuffling, slow talking, English-mangling humans of obviously low intelligence," that would be erroneous stereotyping.  Facts do not support such statements.  That blacks might sound regional or even local in dialect might be true, or, as in very many cases, be totally false.  But, these are superficialities.

         Another example might help to clarify.  Japanese and Chinese indigenous to those countries have no problem picking out persons of Japanese and Chinese extraction born or raised in America.  The latter behave, speak, and interact totally differently from the indigenous, modal population.  Once I became aware of this perception, I could see it.  Americans have a demeanor, gait, and style that belies their heritage.

          Let us assume, then, that Arab children are born about as normal as any other children in any ethnic or social group anywhere.  We are on very safe ground assuming this, of course.  They are not born Muslim, even though Muslims say that they are.  As Aristotle said, these kids are born tabula rasa, i.e., with “blank slates” (i.e., no innate knowledge) for minds.  As humans, they have standard human characteristics, and standard human natures, with standard human needs.  Yet, before puberty, these same kids cease to be “normal,” as we in free societies view them.  They have become Muslims-for-life.  Few escape this fate before they can become “Muslim,” and fewer still ever escape it afterward, although, thankfully, some do (Cf:  Ibn Warraq).

          Whether these kids are born into some domain of the Middle East, i.e., Islamia, or even in America or Britain, they grow up conforming to a very rigid and totally predictable behavioral pattern.  What happens to them, happens to them before they are old enough to make a choice, with few exceptions.  They become as detectable as those who are Japanese, or any other ethnic group.  Most cannot be reversed.  They will live out their lives as Muslims, and they will make their little tabula rasa offspring into replicants of themselves.

          What happens to Muslim children in Islamia happens, in principle, to kids in every culture.  In Western cultures, kids grow up retaining the element of choice, even if they do not use it.  Why is this so?  Why do the Muslim children in Islamia grow up the way they do?

          To show that this is a set of phenomena much more basic than just growing up in whatever culture, look at Americans.  Many Americans are resolutely religious, and they cannot be dissuaded, regardless of how compelling the evidence otherwise.  How did they become so “set in their ways”?  When and how does someone become “set in his or her ways”?  Why is it that changing a person’s personal philosophy almost never happens after age 25?  Recall the old Jesuit maxim that said, in effect, give me your children until they are six, and they will be mine forever thereafter, no matter what you do as parents.  There is truth to that maxim.

          But, with humans, there is nothing preordained, i.e., carved in stone to be immutable throughout life.  It turns out, with most people, that they may as well be immutable, but, believe it or not, that is a function of choice.  Until death, the human mind remains open by nature because humans have the “volitional consciousness.”  For this defining type of consciousness to work, people must use theirs or suffer disuse atrophy of their own minds.

          Somehow in all humans, philosophical ideas from the culture, parents, others, schools, etc., get incorporated into children.  How?  That is what we will begin to look at.  Specifically, we will look at how Islam makes Muslims out of normal children and keeps them that way life long.  We must lay out relevant background information first.

The Islam Problem

          There is a huge problem in the thinking operations of Muslims, one which sets up absolutely all of their other problems, and all of the problems we have with them.  Sadly, their problem differs from most of the rest of us only in degree and content, but, since theirs is established with such ruthless efficiency and reinforcement, they come out as they do, quite different from us.

          Understanding this problem gives us the key to unlocking proper understanding of Muslims and Islam, and much, much more.

          The problem is not easy just to phrase as some glibly worded label and expect anyone to understand anything from that, so let’s build a description before locking in terms and definitions.

          The problem occurs specifically in the automated thinking functions in that shuttle between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. 

The Shuttle of the Human Mind

          While the conscious mind is the big operator, the subconscious mind is the big warehouse serving the needs of the conscious mind.  For example, the conscious mind can hold only approximately seven items in its attention at any given moment without losing focus on any one or more of the seven percepts.  Every human constantly exchanges items making up those seven.  There is a lively exchange going on all the time, as any act of introspection reveals.  Some things get cancelled.  Others get forgotten.  Others go out of conscious awareness for use some other time.  Exchanges, run from the subconscious, make those seven items seem like 7² or 7³, etc.

          Where do items for future use go, and how do they come back to awareness?

         While we know precious little detail, we start with the conscious mind, which we can perceive directly.  We have consciousness, and we are aware of it.  Consciousness is our faculty of awareness.

         We are also aware that there is some sort of repository for items not in consciousness at any given moment.  We call that repository our “subconscious” mind, meaning a place to put material one is not working with at any given moment.  Obviously some mechanisms exist to shuttle mental material to and from the conscious mind, and there are means for storing mental material in the subconscious itself, as well as means for retrieving mental materials for conscious mind use.  The system is the master of multitasking.

         We also know that humans try to automatize mental processes as much as possible.  We see this in action all of the time.  Take this example: we catch a movement with our peripheral vision and duck, thereby missing being hit by some flying object.  We did not think then and there about the matter.  However, through previous experiences, we have stored up all sorts of thoughts, including evaluations, about a lot of things, including many events like these.  A stimulus triggers our response.  That stimulus sets off a lightening fast cascade of thought, emotion, and action.  We duck, and the object misses us.  During this lightening-fast cascade of mental operations, we neither thought nor emoted consciously and deliberately about any of it until after the event was over.  Then we called on all sorts of recent and older material introspectively to think and feel about the incident, long after it had passed.

         The automatization of mental content and processes allowed us to act in haste to avoid the threat.  In this case, the prior thinking prepared us to protect ourselves with the speed we needed, without having to think it through first.  Had we taken the time needed to rethink it, we probably would have been hit and injured by the flying object.

         Automatization frees up mental resources which ideally allows us to move on to other matters of thought. Sometimes that is good.  Other times, that is bad.  I.e., this same automatization can result in deleterious automation of thought and behavior, as we will discuss.

         After the flying object passed us by, we feel before we think, but all of that changes in another instant.  We might have felt residual fright caused by how we evaluated the threat.  We might also have a number of pleasurable emotions, including relief, joy, and so on.  Whatever, we felt, all of these emotions come from the same source, namely the thinking we had done previously and stored that enabled us to evaluate the stimulus in terms of its importance to us.  Triggering this stored, prior thinking, results in that psycho-physiological reaction we call "feelings or emotions."  This may seem self-evident, but many theorists and many more lay-people get this cart and horse reversed quite commonly and make colossal errors that pollute normal thinking:  namely, regarding emotions as the means of thought.  What is important to stress here is that the emotions come solely from prior thinking interacting with some stimulus or stimuli.  Emotions are an automatized product, not a cause.  Muslim psychology is dominated by their considering emotions as tools of thought, as primaries, and as absolutes.

         Let us take another example.  We start from the fact that the conscious mind stores material in the subconscious and receives material from it on conscious demand and sometimes without conscious demand.  For example, we may be driving in traffic, aware of a number of cars going in the same direction, a number coming at us, the weather, some scenery, the instrument readings on the dash board, passenger conversation, radio output, and so on.  Our consciousness is fully occupied in that sense.  Suddenly, we realize how to rewrite an insufficiently clear paragraph in a technical article.  We feel exhilaration.  Where did this come from? 

          Without getting too abstract, we can say that all of it came from prior thinking and current integration, directed by standing orders that our consciousness had given to our subconscious to integrate certain thoughts.  When it happened, it fulfilled something important to us, a value, and we felt pleasure.  At the same time, we continued to drive safely, although we might have ignored passenger conversation and the radio to make room for the new integrations served up by our subconscious mind.  However, no road stimuli summoned any integration, and we did not have the matter in our consciousness at any level before it "popped up."

          We all have had many experiences like this.

          We have to have some place to put memories, incomplete thoughts, evaluations, and hosts of orders we give to our minds to perform all sorts of jobs for us.  If we had to stick to the seven items the conscious mind can juggle at any given moment, we would experience severe limitations to our learning, our knowledge, and to directing our lives.  We come close to this state when we fail to use our emotions properly and live as though these are items of thought instead of products of prior thinking and lightening-fast evaluations, which use that prior thinking—but more on this later.

          Our brains have the physical and chemical means to sustain consciousness and its subconscious.  How we program them depends on us, but much of our jumbled contents and programming occur early in life, before we are really able to think things through.  As a result, all of us have the unavoidable obligation to go back through and rethink the mental junkyard, to turn it into refuse or something useful, or live at the mercy of mental mess.  Many people choose the latter, unfortunately, which makes them "at the mercy of" whatever is out there stimulating or manipulating them.

         We are hard-wired not for knowledge but for certain biological reactions.  For example, infants cry because they are hard-wired to act in response to a small repertoire  of specific stimuli.  They startle in response to sudden noises, have righting reflexes, extremity withdrawal from noxious stimulation, and so on.  They are also born with a temperament, a cluster of habitual patterns of responses to happenings in the outer and inner worlds.  For example, some babies are placid.  Some are hyper-reactive.  Others are shy while some are fearlessly assertive.  Some take things in stride, and some take nothing in stride.

          Although infants are born knowing nothing whatsoever about reality, including themselves, they are born with mechanisms for gathering data about reality, and these instruments are their senses.  We extrospect and introspect, gathering data, which we turn into information.  This is a life-long process.  Our only contact with reality comes through our senses, and they operate each with a specific nature and only to certain stimuli.  Our brains, specifically our conscious and subconscious minds, put the data together to make information.  Our senses do the only job they can, namely provide data when stimulated.

          It is very important to pause briefly to be very clear about the senses because so many people for so many centuries have dreadfully mucked up understanding them.

          Senses are what they are, and they can do only what they can do because of what they are.  They report on reality.  They do not make up reality.  Many philosophers for hosts of reasons have claimed that the senses create reality.  That is worse than nonsense.  To repeat, senses can do only what they can do, and creating reality is not what they can do.

          Another bizarre claim by some philosophers and all religionists is that the senses distort reality.  You can’t rely on your senses, they say, because the senses can deceive you; when they go to offer explanations and examples, they irepeat the same colossal error every single time, and they do not seem to catch it.  For example, they will use something as simple as a pencil in a glass of water.  Look, they say, the pencil looks bent.  That, they say, is evidence that the senses lie to you.

          In fact, the senses only report the data that came to them.  Our minds INTERPRET these data.  Our senses do not.  Our minds turn these data into information.  Our senses cannot.  If we are primitives, we think some magic bends the pencil when it is placed in the glass of water.  Today, that is inexcusable.  We know about light, light traversing different densities of materials which affect its speed, and we know that what we see is an illusion, one caused by simple physics.  Furthermore, using simple physics, we can measure the pencil while it is in the glass of water and prove that it did not bend.

          From pencils in water to very, very complex matters, the senses are always valid.  Our brains and minds may come up with different interpretations for various reasons, but our senses interpret NOTHING—because they can’t.  For example, we might get very drunk with booze and believe that we are the next entertainment idol because we “knocked the Karaoke dead”.  A recording playback when we are sober disabuses us of that interpretation.  A sick brain may hallucinate, may even suggest that we are having an out-of-body experience, moving toward the white light down the tunnel, seeing the face of God, and so on.  Those are the interpretations of a sick brain, not bad senses.

          From early in life, we take in data.  Early in infancy, those data arrive "packaged" in clusters (percepts).  Thus, we see entities, not as a set of primary colors, motions, etc.  Later in our development, we learn that this entity has a name, and it is called, for example, “cat.”  The human mind puts data into clusters so that we can perceive entities, and these clusters are known as “percepts.”  Even if we do not know the name or purpose of some entity, such as a lamp, we see a cluster of sensory data that we later call “lamp,” and not all of the sensory components making up the lamp.  We stay on the perceptual level of awareness for many years, until we grow into the distinctive human mode of awareness, namely the “conceptual.”  The problem is in part, for example, for people like Muslims is that they stay locked onto the perceptual level.

          The conceptual level for humans is actually a voluntary function.  Its existence depends on someone developing language, but its operation requires anyone to want to operate on that level.  This has been quite properly known as humans having a “volitional consciousness,” or “free will.”  The latter term is much more imprecise but comes from the fact of the conceptual level of functioning being voluntary.  To activate this level, anyone must bring his mind into focus and take control of it, something we all know about introspectively.

          Everyone knows how children are mental “sponges.”  They pick up mores, language, mannerisms, speech patterns, cuss words, and jillions of other “cultural” aspects of life.  They do so much of this before they are language facile and certainly before they are conceptually competent.  They have a standing order in their minds to take in the culture around them and make it egosyntonic, or put another way, make all of that become a part of them.  That applies to knowledge and values.  To kids, the culture is important, and the standing orders incorporate what is important, even if they do not understand what they are absorbing.  They make big assumptions which have major consequences.  One of the biggest is that whatever the family does is supremely important.  In the Bedouin-derived, Arab-based, Islamic world, this is not an asset.

         As they grow, they expand the zone of importance.  Since they are always growing at this stage of their lives, their capacities are changing constantly, and they can evaluate what they take in more and more as they develop.  At some point, they develop a critical sense of independence which, with their expanding ability to think for themselves, allows them discrimination over new input from their surroundings and what they themselves engage in.  With that faculty, they can begin rethinking what they had previously absorbed uncritically.

          Islam makes certain that the independence either does not develop or dies on the vine, so to speak.

          If a child--Muslim or not--does not learn to take control of his mind, of his consciousness, volitionally, and know that he can do it, he lives in a state of jumbled percepts, emotions, and inadequate, if not erroneous, concepts cluttering his mind.  Because he is human, he has distinctly human needs and requirements to fulfill, if he is to use himself properly.  Here, if properly working, his emotional mechanisms can alert him to the fact that he is not functioning properly because of the dysphorias he experiences.  Like all feelings, he cannot know their source or their meaning without introspective thought.  If his mind is a mess, he becomes reliant  on others, whose minds are less jumbled, tell him what to do, what to think, what to feel, how to behave, and so on.  He always needs his own volitional consciousness to be independent, but he must be responsible for making it work right.  When it does not work right, he senses that something is wrong.  He feels it.  He may well experience some sense of guilt because he has a few clues that he plays a role in the cause of his feelings.  The human mind and body are very good at dishing out clues to the efficacy of one’s behavior.

          As the Muslim child enters what developmental psychologists call the “latency period,” before puberty, he will have absorbed so much from Islam that he would have to be a giant of a human, mentally speaking, to survive.  Most become cogs in Islamia.  Since Islam permeates the state and all aspects of their lives, Muslims become the servants of Islam.  Islam successfully turns children's minds against them, usually forever.

Islam versus the developing human mind

          How does this happen?

          Historically, it began serendipitously.  Islam and the Arabic language developed sufficiently close to each other create a highly successful partnership from the time of Muhammad until the present day.  A wonderful book, The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai, reviewed on this website, outlines the syncitium formed by Islam and the Arabic language to produce the Arab, as he was and as he is.

          Note how Islamists always claim that the official language of Allah is Arabic because Allah revealed the Qur’an in Arabic.  Early Arabic happened to be what Muhammad spoke but did not read or write.  He was illiterate.  The first writings of the Qur’an were done a couple of hundred years after Arabic had become the dominant language of Arabia.  From the first, Islam was the official religion of the Arabic language, and the Arabic language was the official language of Islam, and still is.  Muslim Arabs conquered one people after another.  Each conquered people acquired two obligations:  They had to adopt Islam, and they had to adopt Arabic.

          Arabic took Islam into the child acquiring language, and Islam reinforced everything learned through Arabic for the life of the child.  Children as adults lived the fusion of Islam and Arabic.  Acculturation entered children through this fusion, and still does.  For those older who had to learn Arabic and Islam, they had to adopt these ways, and then passed them on to subsequent generations.

          The power of language cannot be underestimated.

          Down that language and acculturation transmission belt come the principles by which Muslim children have grown up, for centuries.  These came originally from Bedouin tribes, which populated Arabia.  They lived certain customs, including chronic barbarity.  Bedouin traits became codified in the Arabic language and Islam, all of which fused together.  From tribal mothers and fathers and others, this is how "Islamic philosophy" got entrenched into their culture and all the cultures they conquered and made adopt the Arabic religion, language, and customs. 

          Islam directs Muslim kids to absorb cognitive directives designed to shut down, abort, and distort normal human thinking functions.  What happens is more malignant than any virus or worm ever devised for computers and electronic systems.  The power and importance of this phenomenon cannot be overstated.  It is why Islamia has been the way it is for more than 14 centuries.  It is why our only hope to turn around Islamia from Islam is to get to the smallest children FIRST.  Islamists know this—thus madrassas.

          What I have been describing is how philosophy goes from abstract principles to every aspect of the life and experience of a human being.  And, let’s be clear.  By philosophy, I do not mean sophistic courses called “philosophy” such as those taught in a university. 

          By “philosophy,” I mean the basic principles by which one lives one’s life.  We all have philosophies, each and every one of us, even if we cannot verbalize them or even detect any contradictions.  This is a huge failure and is a failure of introspection to use of one’s mind in the service of oneself, not a failure to have principles.  One cannot not have a philosophy.  Every human mind requires it.  In the absence of a rational philosophy, humans will construct "something" as a philosophical surrogate.  This, in my view, is how religions began and why they still exist today.  Your only choice as a human being is what kind of philosophy you will have:  implicit and foggy or explicit and non-contradictory; complete or incomplete; applied to all aspects of one’s life or hit-and-miss; etc.

Introducing “Psycho-Epistemology”

          What gets those principles into your life and how you use them for all of your life goes by the name of psycho-epistemology.  Two quotations should help to clarify the basic meaning of the term[1]:

"Psycho-epistemology is the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interactions between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious."  (“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” Romantic Manifesto, by Ayn Rand)

And,

“'Psycho-epistemology,'” a term coined by Ayn Rand, pertains not to the content of a man’s ideas, but to his method of awareness, i.e., the method by which his mind habitually deals with its content.”  (Leonard Peikoff, editor’s footnote to Ayn Rand’s article, “The Missing Link,” Philosophy Who Needs It, by Ayn Rand)

          Thus, all humans have and use psycho-epistemology even though different people from different cultures, different educational backgrounds, etc., have differing mental contents.  Psycho-epistemology concerns itself with the methodology, for example, how a child’s mind in Islamia becomes Islamized.  It also covers how such a mind can be un-Islamized, among other possibilities.  The term is good to know about and to know that Ayn Rand and others have written and presented considerable material about it, but it is not necessary to use to understand what happens to Muslim children.

          Islam instills a set of psycho-epistemological directives in the Muslim child.  These psycho-epistemological directives guide the entry of the philosophical principles of Islam into each child .  The result is a deformed mind.  Their minds have become purposefully deformed, just as the Chinese women who had their feet bound in childhood to produce tiny feet in adults, ones which could neither support the adult woman nor sustain her walking. and just as other children were encased in urns until grown, rather like spica plaster casts put around the bodies of those with severe, axial orthopedic injuries.  Once long bone growth has ceased in these children, the urns were broken.  Out came adults permanently shaped as urns.  For the women with bound feet, these were considered aspects of female beauty.  For the urn children, these were the future court fools, objects of ridicule.  However, these two processes show what happens when normal physiological processes become blocked.  Deformity results.  This, on a mental level, is what Islam does to Muslim children.

          We will explore this more subsequently.

 

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[1]   The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z, edited by Harry Binswanger; New American Library, New York; 1986; ISBN:  0-453-00528-4.  One of the best expositions of “psycho-epistemology” is given by Ayn Rand in a number of articles in her book on esthetics called The Romantic Manifesto, easily available as a paperback book.