Human beings think by logical association: one idea triggers a related idea and before you know it a simple idea mushrooms into a complex chain of ideas.

      At present, when folk talk of terrorism they probably have in mind Arab Muslim terrorism.  They are probably thinking about Muslim Arabs who strap bombs on their bodies and blow themselves to smithereens and, perhaps, take a few persons along with them.  That simple perception of terrorism has triggered my thinking about other possible dimensions of terrorism.

        Terrorism is any effort to use force and intimidation to get another human being, or many human beings, to do what otherwise they would not like to do. This definition is pretty much the definition of power; thus, power and terrorism are related! 

        Terrorism is any effort to intimidate other people into doing something out of fear, not out of free will.

        A terrorist assumes that human beings are prone to fear; he resolves to randomly kill some of them, hoping to arouse fear of harm and death in the rest of them. His belief is that if he randomly killed some people that the rest of the people would do what he asked them to do. 

         People are afraid of harm and death, therefore, if you randomly killed a few of them you demonstrate that you are willing to kill any of them and this arouses primordial fear of death in the rest of the people.  You have proven your credibility, your willingness to use actual force to kill and people wishing to live would be afraid of you and do as you asked them to do.  The terrorist aims at controlling people through fear and intimidation. 

       Terror is a means of implementing a policy that the terrorist wants in place that the rest of the people may not want as public policy.

       For example, Arab Muslim terrorists want the West to pressure Israel to disappear from the Middle East; to accomplish this goal, they randomly kill some Westerners and hope that the rest of the West would be scared and therefore do what they, Arab Muslims, desired, get the nation of Israel to fold up and disappear from existence.

       (As an aside, let it be observed that if the West were to kowtow to Arab Muslim terrorist demands and get the Jews to pack up and return to the West, the terrorists would have won. A behavior that yielded desired results is reinforced and is likely to be repeated. Therefore, Arab Muslims would use the same terror tactic to make other demands. Ultimately, they would demand that the Europeans and Americans jettison Christianity and embrace Islam. In fact, conversion of the world to Islam seems to be their ultimate goal. Apparently, in obedience to their religion’s founder’s wish for the entire world to be Muslim, Arabs want to convert the rest of the world to Islam and will not stop until that goal is attained. Thus giving in to their demands is a shortsighted and self defeating response. We must stick to what we know as the truth, and let terrorists satisfy their blood thirstiness by killing some people. Better still, we ought to hit them hard; kill the terrorists, for whoever kills ought to be killed. This is primitive justice, the only kind of justice the terrorist understands; no cuddling of sociopaths disguised as religionists.)

     To recapitulate, terrorism is the use of credible force to intimidate people into doing something out of fear of being harmed or killed it; terrorism takes away the human freedom to act according to the individual’s s choice.  Terrorism is a primitive mode of social control. This brings us to the subject of this essay.

         How much of what we, as individuals, do are done out of freewill, our choice to do so, and how much is because we were intimidated into doing so by other people, especially society? 

        The individual may say that he chose to do something out of free will but is that really true?  If it is true that he did what he did out of choice, if he did the opposite of what society approved would society not punish him?

        In as much as society punishes the individual if he does what society does not want him to do he was intimidated into doing what he did by society.

       The thesis of this essay is that society, which includes government, religion sometimes act as terrorists. The original terrorist in our midst may be society and its culture!

      Let us use some examples to make our point.

      If the individual engages in what society considers sexually inappropriate behavior he is arrested and punished by society.   

      Until recently in the West, and still so in the Muslim Arab world, if the individual said that there is no such thing as God, that Jesus Christ and Mohammed etc are not the messengers of God and that religion itself is a superstition through which society forces people to obey its views of reality, he is arrested and punished, even killed.  Most people in society avoid punishment and death by kowtowing to the dictates of their people’s religion.

     If the individual American (I say America because I am in America, you can replace it with whatever country you are in) says that the political system of America is designed to serve the interests of a small group and is not the democracy that it is said to be, the chances are that he would be harassed by the system’s gatekeepers and, eventually, arrested, tried and jailed. (America is not unique in doing what it does; we know what happened to individuals who challenged the overt terrorist state called the Soviet Union: they were sent to the Gulag and often killed. All political systems seek to preserve their selves and often persecute and, ultimately, destroy those who challenge their legitimacy. During the era of monarchies, those who challenged their kings and their minions were killed.)

     In traditional societies, such as Africa, individuals were expected to conform to their group’s norms and any deviation was severely punished. Dissidents were not tolerated and those who showed interest in independent thinking were, at first ostracized and if they persist in their ways, driven out of the group or even killed. In the present era one sees some Internet Igbo freedom fighters trying to use social pressure to force members of their group to go along with what they believe is in their self interest, break away from Nigeria. Any member of their group that dares to see things differently is bad mouthed and that is hoped would bring him back to the fold. As it were he is expected to seek his group’s acceptance and validation and fear its rejection hence conform to what the group’s vocal leaders desire. This lack of tolerance for divergent opinion probably accounts for the lack of creativity in traditional societies. The relevant point is that traditional societies used terrorism to get their members to conform to their stultifying views of phenomena.

       It seems that much of what people in any society do or claim to have done out of choice are really done under social duress, the duress of their society’s culture, government, religion etc. I submit that most societies and their governments, religions and cultures are like terrorist organizations.

           Consider Sex.  Sigmund Freud built his whole psychological system (which he called psychoanalysis) on sex.  As he saw it, we are polymorphously sexually perverse.  In his view, we are born with a desire for indiscriminate sexual behavior. The boy child wants to have sex with his mother and the girl child wants to have sex with her father. This desire to have sex with the parent of the opposite gender is socially forbidden and should the child persist in it he is punished, even killed. The child therefore feels that if he gave reign to his/her sexual desire that he would be punished, and or killed by the rival for his/her sexual favors, the parent of opposite gender.  The boy represses his desire for his mother and the girl represses her desire for her father. This is the famous oedipal complex. If a child fails to repress his/her desire for sex with the parent of the opposite gender he is hankering after forbidden fruit. 

       The neurotic, that is, a situation where there is over or under socialization in the individual, (read the Catholic Church’s sinner), is required to come to Reverend Father Freud and confess his sin, his secret desires and get out of his unconscious whatever is hidden therein. As Freud sees it, what is repressed into the unconscious is not eliminated and still exercises effects on the individual’s conscious behaviors: makes him behave irrationally.   The neurotic, Freud’s client, is to dreg out what is hidden in his unconscious and have the analyst, Freud and his disciples/priests,  analyze it and teach him the need to repress certain tabooed behaviors, for otherwise civilization would not survive.

        The healed neurotic is led to accept repression and become unhappy and be mildly depressed, as normal persons are supposed to be. The alternative would be to give reign to all the desires of the Id and be happy but live in an unorganized society.  (See Freud’s  Civilization and its Discontents.)

     Freud’s thesis is that we all have what he called Id, an instinct to have sex with all people in our world (at some point he entertained the notion that people are naturally bisexual) and aggression towards other people.  The Id is indiscriminate in its sexual desires, including desiring other people’s wives/husbands. Clearly, given human tendency to jealousy, if the individual had sex with his neighbor’s wife/husband he is likely to be clobbered. Therefore, to live, the individual’s ego (the referee) tells him to steer clear of certain sex objects. The Superego (internalized social norms) tells him what is socially accepted and not accepted sexual behavior.

       The Id desires, the superego suppresses, and the ego judges when it is safe to give in to Id desires. For example, the ego tells the individual that if he desired his neighbors smashingly beautiful wife that he risks harm and or death and tells him to go visit a prostitute, who may be equally beautiful, for he is not likely to lose his life from cavorting with Whores (although he may risk it through STDs, especially HIV-AIDS). 

        The analyst through proper transference relationship with the analyzed helps him to free associate, say whatever comes to his mind without blocking it with the strictures of socially accepted values, his idea of what society would approve, including confessing that he wished to have sex with his mother and his neighbor’s wife.  

        (Alas, if you told Freud that you had an eye on your neighbor’s wife, to garner his favors, Freud, promptly told the neighbor about it…psychoanalysis is like the Catholic Church, it uses people’s confessions to control them; so beware to whom you confess your secrets; I just finished reading a biography of Carl Jung and learnt to what extent Freud tried to use his knowledge of Jung’s sexual peccadilloes to control him, particularly to prevent him from breaking away from Freud’s psychoanalytic cult and go form his own sect, one that speculated on Hellenistic and Aryan gods  and saw them as in Jung and his Aryan people’s collective unconscious. I was not aware that Jung, whom I had respected, was a racist.  At any rate, Jung saw Freud as superimposing a Jewish world view on him and strove to invent his own Germanic world view for he and his people; apparently, he had no regard for black people, for when a cousin befriended a black person he was furious at her, in fact rejected her, for having sex with an “inferior black man”. Apparently, psychology is not a universal science but a tribal clubbing!)

        Any way, as Freud saw it, society forced the human child to repress his sexuality and in the process made him mentally sick.  In other words, society terrorized the child into suppressing his true desires.

       Does this mean that all behaviors should be permitted?  Of course, not. If punishment was not meted out to those who transgressed society’s sexual mores many men would probably gratify their desire for more sex by superimposing their will on unwilling women. Pure reason tells us that sex ought to be restricted to matrimonial situations. In my view, one man, one wife is a rational social construct. (Mohammed permitted his followers to have up to four wives; many rich Muslims marry more than four wives; they marry them and divorce them and keep four at any one time; I just read the biography of Osama Bin Laden and learnt that his father, Mohammed, had over twenty wives and fifty four children! This is obviously an irresponsible situation for no man can give emotional nurturance to twenty women and fifty four children. No wonder his child turned out a terrorist; he was probably emotionally abandoned by an absent father. In my view, one wife is all that a man ought to have and no couple ought to have more than two or three children.)

     For our present purposes, the point is that society/religion stipulates what is appropriate sexual behavior and punishes those who disobey it. Out of fear of punishment (including social rejection) folk conform to their religion’s demands on sex.  That is to say that it is intimidation that forces people to give in to what is called socially appropriate sexual behaviors.  It is not freedom of choice that makes folk behave in the manner society approves but fear of punishment. If it is fear of punishment that makes folk do something, it follows that a terrorist intimidated them; in my view, religions act like terrorist organizations and use force to get folks to do what they do not want to do.

         One is not a hedonist and knows that some behaviors, in society, are inappropriate. If you desire sex with your neighbor’s wife you are looking for trouble, big time; therefore, prudence tells you to repress that desire. If you desire to have sex with children, well, you ought to be punished for children are to be protected not abused. If you desire sex with persons of your own gender there probably is something the matter with you. At any rate, you risk harm, for if you make sexual advances on certain men they would feel humiliated by you and attack, even kill you. Pure reason can tell us what appropriate sexual behavior is.

     In America most people believe that their form of government and economy are the best things that have happened to man on his sojourn on planet earth.  Many Americans would be surprised to learn that some foreigners do not share their delusion.

       A democracy where only a handful rule the many is a misnomer; an economy where only a few have all the money is not exactly the best that human beings can produce. I believe that we can tweak the present political system to make most people participate in it, and make the economy serve all people. (This essay is not the place to share information on my political and economic philosophy.)

        The point is that if any one American were to vigorously oppose the American political and economic system, the chances are that he would be, at first harassed, such as denied jobs, and if he persists, punished. To obtain a high level job in America, folk’s backgrounds are vetted and if they have ever done anything considered anti American their chances for obtaining such jobs are zero. America, like many other countries, is a velvet dictatorship.

       Every political system rewards those who support and maintain it and punishes those who oppose it.  Therefore, all political systems, up to a point, are terrorist organizations and use force and intimidation to get people to go along with them. Those who insist on opposing the political system that they live in risk punishment and ultimately could be killed.

       (Talk is cheap, so are permitted to criticize your political system; but if you really oppose it in your action, you would be punished by its supporters.  This is political realism. Courage is an expensive commodity possessed only by few human beings. Most people are cowards and go along with their political systems, injustice and all.)

        This is not to say that governments have to let go of the use of force in controlling folk. If you disband the police force of any city, folk would loot their neighbors’ properties. Man, as both Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes tell us, is selfish. We need social force to control the ugly aspect of human beings.  Without a strong police, judiciary and military, society would not exist. If one engages in anti social behaves, one ought to be arrested, tried and punished by society. Law and order should be the number one priority of any society. 

      Nevertheless, intellectual integrity requires us to acknowledge that our much valued society and its gatekeepers are like terrorists, for they use force and intimidation to arouse fear in folk and from so doing get them to abide by the law. (They are, for lack of a better phrase, positive terrorists.)

CONCLUSION

     The choice is not whether to use force to suppress certain behaviors or not, but to balance force with pure reason. I think that pure reason can enable us to decide what behavior is socially appropriate or not, and those deemed inappropriate can then be punished by society. This social realism, however, does not obfuscate the fact that in as much as society uses force to get folk to do what they do want to do that it is acting like terrorists.

       Society and its agents sometimes act as terrorist do; it is up to citizens to make sure that where society is excessively terroristic, fight it. They should not delude themselves into thinking that society and its agents are always benign. As John Stuart Mill (On Liberty) and Thomas Paine (Common Sense) observed, Liberty is always a product of citizens’ vigilance for it; governments can become tyrannical and destroy citizens’ civil liberties; societies and their religions can become superstitious and enforce primitive mores that prevent people from living fully and actualizing their potential, ala Abraham Maslow.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

September 1, 2006

Robot  Villager

# 1 Human beings think by logical association: one idea triggers a related idea and before you ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 02.09.2006 22:49

Abraxas  Villager

# 2 Hi, Dr. Ozodi Thomas OSUJI! In summary, worldwide, government, whether democratic or not, controls the management of the constitutionally acceptable intimidation and coercion of its citizens. One shudders to think of the magnitude of damage being repeatedly inflicted unwittingly on Nigerians by themselves whenever they allow any and anybody to exercise the privilege of representing them in government, in other words, controlling them, or visiting them overtly with state-sponsored terrorism, under the pretext of governance, or law enforcement, by a rabidly corrupt and often belligerent cabal of politicians and state security operatives (i.e. policemen, army, navy SSS, customs officers), with the mindset of a colonial army of occupation on permanent punitive expeditions or ambush operations in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. In the final analysis, Nigerians need to liberate themselves from the cultural terrorism of the over a quarter of a century of military dictatorship that they went through between 1966 and 1999. That is why OBJ must be the last of that era of overt state-authorised terrorism that was presided over by soldiers: particularly Generals Mohammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha, and Abdulsalami Abubakar, or/and their proxies, for the next 30 years or more. Muchas gracias. Posted by Abraxas| 03.09.2006 00:26

Yesi Playrough  JJC

# 3 Another take Supremacy of unhindered free will?(my Theory on a lawless Society?) In Nigeria maybe one must start putting in the question mark I think you have made some nice points. But some believe true freedom can only occur when there are limitations( reason common good) or so to say some form of principles to guide the city/society towards common good. In NIgeria, one can say it is a free society in a different way mixed with undue restraints due to lack of opportunity and terrorism. By free I meant one has the advantage of engaging in different activities without due limitations if one can pay the necessary fee or bribe or gain access to power through selfishness as a result of unhindered free will. The traffic laws are not neccessary heeded, even more the laws of the land are not heeded by the protectors/executors of those laws just to prove the point of their unhindered freedom(abscence of limitations/reason?). This idea of a free society is alien to the west which prescribes principles and reason as the major foundation of freedom without principles then there is anarchy, injustice and thr reign of abscence of reason PArt of my issue is that if you believe in the Nigerian freedom, do you think it leads to abuse and undue restraint on individuals such as nepotism against merit, thievery against hard work or suicide and as a result of a terrorist state? Also this freedom give some individuals the ability to be corrupt(free will to do bad instead of good) and use the power gained from corruption(spoils of power ala Soyinka) to terrorise the people? Also coming back to your attack on Biafra, if you believe that Nigeria can terrorise its citizens then why not allow for free flow of knowledge on alternatives(which may arise over the next 50-100 yrs) part of the idea of free will is a collapse of a justice system(common good) or so to say an objective unbiased justice system(in simple form reap what you sow? harm not so you won't be harmed) Which again leads to the potential/supremacy of reason, law and principles as the guiding light of free will. I do disagree/agree with you that for a society like Biafra? Arewa and Ijaw to succeed they need to recognize the existence of alternative views in their midst and to embrace a culture of diversity this can be done with checked government interference under the guise of majority rule. Mainly/partly because like unhindered free will government interference in any activity can lead it to do good or to remain free from constraint to do what ever it wishes which in the end leads to authoritarianism(ironic because it is derived from an exercise of unhindered singular free will) as a result of its desire to be free from control ultimately ensuring its supremacy and creating a desire to control others as a result of its freedom. Posted by Yesi Playrough| 03.09.2006 20:58

Yesi Playrough  JJC

# 4 Another take Supremacy of unhindered free will?(my Theory on a lawless Society?) In Nigeria maybe one must start putting in the question mark I think you have made some nice points. But some believe true freedom can only occur when there are limitations( reason common good) or so to say some form of principles to guide the city/society towards common good. In NIgeria, one can say it is a free society in a different way mixed with undue restraints due to lack of opportunity and terrorism. By free I meant one has the advantage of engaging in different activities without due limitations if one can pay the necessary fee or bribe or gain access to power through selfishness as a result of unhindered free will. The traffic laws are not neccessary heeded, even more the laws of the land are not heeded by the protectors/executors of those laws just to prove the point of their freedom(abscence of limitations/reason?). This idea of a free society is alien to the west which prescribes principles and reason as the major foundation of freedom without principles then there is anarchy, injustice and the reign of abscence of reason? PArt of my issue is that if you believe in the Nigerian freedom, do you think it leads to abuse and undue restraint on individuals such as nepotism against merit, thievery against hard work or suicide and as a result of a terrorist state? Also this freedom give some individuals the ability to be corrupt(unhindered free will to do bad instead of good) and use the power gained from corruption(spoils of power ala Soyinka) to terrorise the people? Also coming back to your attack on Biafra, if you believe that Nigeria can terrorise its citizens then why not allow for free flow of knowledge on alternatives(which may arise over the next 50-100 yrs) part of the idea of free will is a collapse of a justice system(common good) or so to say an objective unbiased justice system(in simple form reap what you sow? harm not so you won't be harmed) Which again leads to the potential/supremacy of reason, law and principles as the guiding light of free will. I do disagree/agree with you that for a society like Biafra? Arewa and Ijaw to succeed they need to recognize the existence of alternative views in their midst and to embrace a culture of diversity this can be done with checked government interference under the guise of majority rule. Mainly/partly because like unhindered free will government interference in any activity can lead it to do good or to remain free from constraint to do what ever it wishes which in the end leads to authoritarianism(ironic because it is derived from a singular exercise of unhindered free will) as a result of its desire to be free from control ultimately ensuring its supremacy and creating a desire to control others as a result of its freedom. Posted by Yesi Playrough| 03.09.2006 20:59

BLF  Villager

# 5 Raving lunatic with a little education. Please just go away!The genuinely crazy have a certain aloofness, a dignity, a madnesse-oblige. Posted by BLF| 06.09.2006 20:08