Daisetz Suzuki who wrote about Zen wrote a book about Swedenborg called “Buddha of the North”, which presumably played a role in the transmission of S’s ideas to the terrorists.

A comparative study would be good. Perhaps some governments are better than others?

Finns are so taciturn that Swedes talk about how taciturn they are. They’re about 100% wired, and I think that shyness is one reason.

Stereotyping Scandinavians is permissible, because they’re so nice. Pillaging and raping are a thing of the past.

No there isn’t. And why stop at religions; why not include governments, corps, societies. Anything where an individual will associate his ego with the organisation. (Thus, an attack on the organisation is felt as an attack on the individual that has subordinated his ego to that organisation).

Rather than gettting into an argument with the nice bigots that are attracted to Crookedtimber; instead, may I recommend “Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by Kathleen Taylor”

I’d be interested to read a review of the book on CT. Although her background is scientific (she appears to be an expert on platelet activating factors); the book contains a lot of philosophical discussion (free will; Wittengestien’s impossibility of a secret language etc), so the humanities types around here may be able to cope with it.

This is to the side of the discussion here, but the most indelible image of this for me is Gregor Samsa, trying to shout through the door that he’ll be at work as soon as he can, as his little legs wave in the air.

Agreed, Theora, but I thought your next sentence might be along the lines of ‘they need to internalise the idea that, at this moment, we are the government’. I’m thinking back to the CPR and fire marshall training I went through for some of my jobs, where it was clear that the safety of individuals and groups depended on the timely contributions of people who’d had a bit of training, people who, in the case of fires, were essentially coordinating the movement of people out of a building. I can see that this may be exactly what happened at the WTC, in which case the lightly-trained collection of individuals were an effective ‘government’ for the purposes of getting people to safety.

The key is to make people understand their mission and give them the tools to achieve it.

Agreed, again. So it’s really pertinent to ask whether the tools are given. We also need to ask, in particular instances, what those tools might be. What would they have been in ‘lower’ New Orleans, as distinct from what they were in lower Manhattan? It may be that training people as fire marshalls was a good ‘tool’ for WTC firms, even when considering the great loss of life. It’s likely that employers – probably at State request – provided that training, and ensured that an emergency management team was in place. But maybe some other kind of tool is needed in a place like New Orleans. The difference being that a corporate environment is not the same as a street, and that streets have become regressively less well managed over the past few decades.
There’s more to this, of course, but much of it has been said above.

My impression is that this book, rather than Aum, is the more characteristic symbol of the Japanese national psyche, which is above all interested in distinguishing, analyzing and explaining the Japanese national psyche. In Canada, there’s an old joke that goes,

Q: What is a Canadian?
A: Someone who asks, “what is a Canadian?”

Japan appears to be something like that, except that it’s not a joke there.

This “really made me feel that I was reading about a culture very different from my own.”

For me, this brings back the morning of September 11, 2001, and the shock of non-recognition and realization. My actual memories of that morning are very different from what the day later came to signify. Obviously, it was different for those of us on the West Coast who heard the news early; I did not go to the office that day, and maybe that has something to do with why I recall calm instead of general panic. There is such a gulf, though, between what I remember and what I know think of when someone says “9/11” or “terrorist attack.”

Posted in a different form on my blog.

Thanks for making me think about Underground again.

Yeah, Yeah, I’m going to screamed at by the Christians for this, but I’m going to go out on a limb here amd say, no, there is not.
Specifically, consider millenial Christianity, this strange thing that has taken over America. It’s mainstream, as mainstream as you get, plenty of people were born into it not recruited, and it’s freaking nuts.
More to the point considering modern times, it is the proximate cause of Al Qaeda. The apocalyptic vision is not something native to Islam, it was something concocted in the very recent past by putting together various weird crap from insane American Christianity, things like Hal Lindsey’s stuff with whatever flimsy supporting traditions and phrases could be found in Islam. Think back to the political Islam, such as it was, of the 70’s and early 80’s—- Munich, Lebanon, Khomeini—- it wasn’t this apocalyptic nonsense. We have to thank US Protestants for having a large part in creating this lunatic “philosophy”.

For months afterwards commentators analyzed the motives of the attackers. The comment that always made me laugh was, ‘how could such elite people fall for a crazy cult?’ ‘Elite’ in modern Japan seems to mean a person who is given the chance to work himself (always him, never her) to death for a prestigious company, sacrificing all personal time and fulfillment. No wonder they turn to cults.

Aum also launched an experimental attack some years before in Matsumoto city. The police literally hounded a poor man living close by for years, just because he had a connection with a chemical company. Despite unrelenting intimation and harassment he protested his innocence, and investigation into the Tokyo attacks connected Aum Shinrikyo with the Matsumoto attacks and finally cleared his name. I’m amazed the guy didn’t simply commit suicide to escape the pressure.

In most crises, even non-catastrophic crises, the biggest determinant of mass death is the behavior not of trained professionals, but the behavior of the masses. On 9/11, evacuation was able to happen because 40,000 people were able to move themselves in a productive way to get out of these buildings (although this is obviously not to diminish in any way the heroic and critical efforts of police and fire people in directing them away from danger areas, shooting out windows to let people escape, etc.) My point is that if people had panicked and run when the planes hit, instead of proceeding for the exits and going down the stairs in an orderly fashion, the actions of police and firefighters would not have mattered, because people would have been undirectable—death tolls would have been in the tens of thousands.

OTOH, the only effective military response to 9/11 was mounted by the passengers on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. So clearly, there is much to be said for the “well, nobody’s gonna bail us out, so we have to deal with this” realization. Furthermore, in 9/11 people were not passive sheep, but active agents able to react effectively to the unanticipated problems—they got parapelegics down 60 flights of stairs, they knocked down walls, they cleared debris to allow people through, etc.

The point I’m making is that there is a profound and dangerous downside to setting an expectation of governmental incompetence. People are no longer interested in solving the problems that are solvable on an individual/small group level, and they are much quicker to take antisocial and violent actions that create MORE problems for everyone. Becuase they’re thinking short-term and totally selfishly. Which makes perfect sense if you don’t think anyone is coming for you.

What needs to happen isn’t that people need to internalize the idea that “government sucks.” Internalizing this message won’t inspire people to prepare and plan better for crises—it’ll just make them panic and start screaming “every man for himself” faster in crises. The military knows this better than anyone, which is why they drill in such discipline and unit cohesion, and tell soldiers that survival depsnds on focusing on the problems they can solve and working as a cohesive unit to achieve their objective.

What needs to happen is that realistic expectations of government competence need to be set (for instance, in a blackout: we will get the power back on within 4 days, we will patrol the streets, but we can’t get you home), and people need to be given proper training so that they have a feeling of agency in a crisis, and so they feel like their actions are part of a collective plan. People evacuated the towers effectively because they’d been drilled in it. They knew that when the shit hit the fan, they were supposed to get out in an orderly way, and so they did it.

Easier said than done, but training the people is the most important part of disaster planning, because it’s their response that a)keeps non-disasters from becoming disasters through panic and b)mitigates the impact of actual disasters and allows the higher levels of government to take the actions that only they can take (like fixing the levees or finding temporary homes for 100,000 people).

This is why I get so upset with people who say “you just have to realize the government won’t bail you out.” That’s as dangerous as it is simplistic and untrue. The key is to make people understand their mission and give them the tools to achieve it.

As unreasonable as lumping terrorism, of which the most freakish examples ever have killed a couple of thousand, with war, which is considered freakishly bloodless if only a couple of thousand die.

The median “deadly terrorist attack” kills little more than a freeway pile-up.