IS executes people. That’s like Pavlov’s bell being rung before a conditioned dog. Who is the dog? Who salivates for war? “An overwhelming majority of Americans think Congress should vote to authorize the use of military force against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), according to a new CNN/ORC poll.”
“Seventy-eight percent said that Congress should vote for an authorization, while 21 percent said they should not.”
IS provides the catalyst or the bell, but who and what have conditioned Americans beforehand? Who and what have made them ready such that when the bell rings, they automatically approve of going to war and are willing to write the president a blank check?
Why have past failures to win not acted like the absence of rewards (food) such that the behavior (going to war) extinguishes? The reward schedule has been one that’s variable in time and amount, like winning at gambling. This is known scientifically in behavioral psychology to lengthen the time it takes for the stimulus to extinguish and stop working. There have been enough supposed rewards, such as killing Saddam, bin Laden and Gaddafi, to keep Americans conditioned. The belief in American victory dies hard. Americans remember two World Wars also.
There is more at work than this. For Americans, the reward of suppressing anything thought to be evil is thought to be large. This plays a role in inducing the response. Why is the suppression of evil so important to Americans? This is because of a strong strain of faulty religious training, filled with contradictions and misconceptions of God, that has been fused with patriotic nationalism in the American psyche. The faulty religious training produces millions of people who think they are Christian and followers of Christ but who actually are anything but. The fusion with the state results in their support for the state’s wars against evils that its leaders identify and that they too see as being evil.
6:57 pm on February 16, 2015
