A Mutual Solution To The Problem Of Being Mortal

[RobertLevin]

Why Everything's All Right in the Middle East

Can we, just for a minute, dispense with the hand-wringing and acknowledge that the problem Israel and the Palestinians have with one another is actually their mutual solution to the problem of being mortal?

Of course to understand what I'm talking about it is first necessary to recognize that it's not love or sex or money that makes the world go around but the fact of death; that what drives virtually everything we believe and do is the need to reduce, to at least a manageable degree of fear, the terror and panic the anticipation of death causes us. (If you can't quite grasp this notion, if you have to be reminded that terror and panic constitute the human default condition, then whatever you're believing and doing is working for you.)

Of the myriad subtle and blatant ways we've come up with to make living with an impossible given tolerable, one example would be the symbolic immortality we assure ourselves of by leaving behind a scientific discovery, or a work of art, that will continue to have an influence on the world. Another is the accumulation of inordinate wealth. The god-like trappings great sums of money buy enable us to feel not just superior to the common man, but less vulnerable to the common fate. Still another is getting high, which is about getting ABOVE the body that we know will one day be our undoing.

And then there's our invention of an afterlife. Presenting us with a chance to survive death—if we honor the pronouncements and follow the dictates we've assigned to deities of our own fashioning—it's this immortality illusion that's at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Arabs are qualifying for eternity by doing what they've determined to be God's work, which is to make war on those who, ignoring or questioning His authority, are undermining His plan for the planet. And Israel, dropped in the Arab's midst, its diverse culture implicitly challenging the validity of Arab beliefs, provides the Arabs with the infidel they need to carry out their mission. For Arabs, it's not about killing Jews, per se. Jews are simply a fortuitously placed means to a purchase on heaven. (You could say that—their culture being, by all appearances, limited in its repertoire of immortality illusions to the resources of Islam--suicide is the only instrument of self-perpetuation available to the Palestinian terrorists.)

On the other hand, the Arabs afford Israelis an opportunity to continually certify their biblically bestowed "chosen" status—AND TO ASSURE THEMSELVES OF THE POST-CORPOREAL REWARDS IMPLICIT IN THE ANOINTMENT—by constantly threatening, but never accomplishing, Israel's destruction. Persistently testing Israel's exalted designation, but never disproving it, enabling Israel to be embattled AND remain intact, the Arabs are every bit the blessing to Israel that Israel is to the Arabs.

It follows that the violence each side visits on the other must be measured; balances and proportions need to be kept. For one side to win, after all would be for both sides to lose; would, that is, end the game and return BOTH sides to a contemplation of the void. We might call this aiding and abetting of one another's immortality illusions—the cooperation and the accommodations it requires--the deeper definition of the "social contract."

So we can engage ad infinitum in the most earnest discussions about anti-Semitism, about Arafat, about Sharon, about territory and occupation, and forever miss the real dynamic of the situation. The Arab-Israeli problem is, again, a solution to a more pressing problem, to what is, literally as well as figuratively, the mother of all problems. And what accounts for the tenaciousness of the
conflict is the ongoing success it's enjoying in the service of its underlying agenda. As long as this holds true, Arabs and Israelis will, on one level or another, be enemies. Because for all of the horrors hostilities between them cause, they cause a more acceptable, a more BEARABLE species of horror than the fact of oblivion does.

The pain we are witnessing is a palliative. These are not the worst of times in the Middle East.

[Impenitent]

kill 'em all...

hidden agenda? nope... being mortal is not a problem, once we die worry and any problem goes as well...

they are doing just fine killing themselves, thus they end the problem...

[darwinist]

Intresting concept. Although it holds some intresting insights. I have to disagree.

I do not believe it is Death that drives us.

The human condition is a complex one. But the basic premisis is surival. Way back when there where cavemen. People got along find. They did not think about god or stuff like that. Ok maybe they did. But it was not important. The most important factor to the group.Was to survive.

When the first groups of cavemen meet. They may have form a terriotly bounder. But in gerenal they helped each other. Because survival was hard.

As these people progressed through the ages. Survuval became easier. Which meant they could spend more time on thinking new concepts. Better survival, technology and burial rites.

Even further along in the time line. Survuval has become. A non issue. All gruops are a raging sucess. So much so, that resources become limited. Then you have your first conflict.

Now if you continue building this logic up. To mordern day. Then you can see the first conflicts where over resources, then technology/ideas, then ego/technology/ideas/Religon.

Greed and so on.

[G. Adams]

I think thats a little idealistic. Although this is largely all guesswork, I'm more of the opinion that when one group met the other they assessed each other "do they have anything I want? Are we strong enough to take it?"

Survival is a lot easier when there is only you and your family/tribe/clan...sharing the resources, rather than multiple groups.

[Scribbler1]

I don't think it's a fear of death so much as a fear of what comes after it. Aside from the authoritarian angle of religion, I think that's why we created God, Heaven and Hell, 40 virgins or whatever else. It's the nothingness that terrifies us. After all, even if you are convinced you're going to Hell, at least you're going SOMEWHERE!

[PeterAngelo]

The Arabs built a thriving empire long before there were Jews - or the evil British Empire..

The Middle East situation is caused by neither Arab or Jew.

It is caused by the deliberate acts of the stinking British Empire and its military arm - the United States military-industrial complex.

The current situation is only the current incarnation of policies that have been in play for at least 1600 years.

The Vatican Bank has been financing war machines, laundering money from tyrants, warlords, drug lords, and anyone but the LORD since its founding.

St. Peter took the franchise from Jesus and went straight to ROME - the center of evil - and established the most demonic bank in history - where it still sits.

The deliberate policy of divide and conquer is at the root of all our current problems.

We have - despite the warning from President Eisenhour - developed a monster war machine that has only one end product - mass graves.

We flourish at the expense of every screaming, burning baby on the planet.

Death - it would be welcome compared to the living nightmare I witness around me every day.

I spoke to a self rightous sales rep driving a stinking Lexus who thinks that poor people are just jealous of successful people and want to tax them because they are lazy, stupid and JEALOUS.

What a pig.

I explained to him that the playing field was rigged so that he could flourish at the expense of all those "losers" who are cheated out of a chance at life by deliberate policies that block them, enslave them, exploit them, and then throw them away like trash.

He became very distubed and thinks I am an Al-Quida cell.

The real problem is not that we fear death - we long for it.

Reality doesn't just bite - it is a living nightmare.

We are all nothing but space dust - a vibrating escent string that takes matter that has existed since time began - and "exists" for a very brief time shharing this nightmare with "others" who appear and disappear like whisps of smoke throughout our brief lives.

Every atom of our body has existed since time began and will forever. Our only afterlife is the genetic code we pass on to our children and the food we provide to the worms and bacteria that eventually eat us.

The ability to understand this is what makes us all insane.

The purpose of this suffering is irrelevant. It is what it is.

The Middle East is a hotbed of anger, death and destruction because Britain and America profit materially from all the carnage. Period.

Kill them all?

What an insipid ass "impentent" is to even suggest it.

We and Britain are the only ones sick enough to attack Iraq and try to justify it as their fault.

Why do you think France and Germany said go to hell.

It is because they understand our game and understand we have gone too far in an effort to achieve an unachievable goal before the Internet exposes them - too late.

Study history and you will find that the Arabs lived very well in their own indiginous way until Britain and the West decided to plunder them.

What the hell do you expect them to do in the face of a bunch of pasty-faced coward WASPS constantly attacking them with their superior technology.

We are serial killers who deny our responsibility to the human race -even our own best and brighest are being sacrificed to keep this travesty going.

Fear death - bull - I am sixty and I long for an end to this crap.

My only wish is that I get to kill some of my enemies first - literally.

We are no different than talking worms.

Our ability to reason is nothing more than one more weapon in our arsenal that gets us what our emotions demand.

If reason was the controlling force we sould live together in peace.

Reason is nothing but a weapon.

Emotion - love, hate, fear, greed, envy - all that good stuff - is what drives us.

The British Empire has been assaulting the East for plunder for so long the current crop of uneducated, mostly stupid humans that occupy this planet not only don't know the true history -they don't want to.

That a-hole sales rep I berated today knows nothing about the true history of the Middle East and doesn't care.

He understands that business policies in America are duplicitous and unfair but he cares only for his personal wealth - it makes him feel superior - he is not.

We deserve to be destroyed and I hope we are.

The Ottoman Empire was defeated because the Mongol Hordes attacked from the East and the West was able to defeat them by loaning them money and then screwing them.

That is still how the Western banks (Vatican, Bank of England, Swiss Banks, Bank of America, Federal Reserve) work to finanmce war machines and terrorize the world.

I have had it with them and the war machine that eats people and we laugh.

The life span of the Earth is finite. In abour 4.5 billion years the Sun will burn out and take us with it.

GOOD.

Then we will be free floating energy wandering through space looking for a place to land.

Meanwhile the victims in Israel, Iraq, and everywhere else on Earth can only pray for our demise. I do.

My only hope is that the 5,570,000,000 wretched poor on this planet (half under 20 years old) will swarm over the castles and mansions of the rich and eat them - literally - soon.

Ah - sweet death - come soon to Bush, Chaney, Blair, Kissinger, Bush Sr., Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft.

Long live my hero - BIN LADEN!!!!!

[darwinist]

PeterAngelo

What a vomit RANT...!!!

You claim to know about history, but don't mention one of the major early effects in the middle east.

I agree, with some of your historcial references. But that is all. You have choosen to live within that. To not fight back. I choose not to do so.

[Impenitent]

PA

"Kill them all?

What an insipid ass "impentent" is to even suggest it."

thanks for your insult, your argumentative skills shine brightly...

death and war make the world go round...

wake up