What would you say separates the men from the boys; the
women from the girls? It is the level of maturity, of course. And how do you
determine the level of maturity someone has attained? If you want an answer to
this question, stick around for a long discussion.
As toddlers, we learn by observation, by trial and error and
by being taught what is good and what is bad. While this is happening, a
mysterious mechanism wired into us, separates us from the other organisms
constituting life on Earth. No one has yet identified that mechanism, but its
manifestation is detected early in toddlers when they repeatedly ask the
question: Why?
When the brain receives an answer to that question, it does
not treat it like an end in itself. It uses it as a brick in the philosophical
monument it will build over time as the child grows older and accumulates more
answers to more whys. Later, as a teenager or a young adult, that person will
decide it has built a monument that is large enough and sturdy enough to stand
on its own. It will resist taking-in unsolicited advice but will seek to
further develop the monument by relying on its own experience and its own
research.
One important thing happens at this stage of human
development. It is that the maturing adult realizes the more he knows, the more
there is of what he doesn't know. This is the start of wisdom and the opening
of the mind. But it is also a dangerous time because it can be the start of
confusion and the loss of confidence in the ability of the self to make it
alone in the minefield of everyday living.
Ideally, this is what happens in a normal society. And it is
at this stage that some individuals go on to become leaders while others go on
to become followers. But while this is the natural order of things, you'll find
that in some big city cultures, the situation has evolved in ways which are
anything but ideal. You'll find that groups have formed to pursue their own
agendas. To this end, they work to dismantle the existing philosophical
monument by spreading confusion and doubt into the culture underlying it. Their
immediate goal is to take down that which developed normally one brick at a
time. Their ultimate aim is to supplant the existing leaders, thus exploit the
society to better serve their agenda.
The way they achieve all that, is by infiltrating the
society while acting sweet, suave and sociable. Once they gain the trust of
their hosts, they seize on events that might have escaped the notice of
ordinary people, and spin them in such a way as to make them appear more
ominous than they are. The groups repeat that performance till they get the
society scared to almost paralysis. At this point, the groups spread confusion
by turning upside down all the pillars of the existing monument.
You can see an example of how this method works by going
over the article that came under the title: “Trump in the Middle East” and the
subtitle “Note Who Curses America, and Who Blesses It,” written by Yoram Hazony
and published on January 23, 2018 in National Review Online. It is a long
article that goes on for almost 1,500 words, but the essence of what's said is
the same throughout the article. It is encapsulated in the subtitle: “Note who
curses America ,
and who blesses it”.
What the reader should note instead is that the writer of
the article regards the American society as standing at the adolescent level
where being cursed by someone or blessed by another is all that matters in
life. In fact, teenagers can sink into a depressive mode, even take drugs and
risk dying to relieve the pain of being cursed instead of being blessed by
others. But who is the writer of that article, anyway? He is Yoram Hazony, an
Israeli that didn't think it necessary to physically infiltrate America to confuse
it and turn its pillars upside down. He is doing it by remote from his base in Israel .
But is the scheme working? Has America lost the full breadth of
its philosophical monument? Has it been reduced to relying on flattery or the
absence of it; using it as guide to make it through the minefield of everyday
living? The truth – the sad truth – is that the evidence is overwhelmingly
pointing in that direction.
Even if we cannot see a direct relationship between Hazony's
article, and a Wall Street Journal editorial that was published 2 days later,
we cannot help but marvel at the level to which America's foreign policy is now
determined by adjectives used in the decoration of sentences rather than by
concepts of strategy which are fully analyzed in articles and in serious books.
The Journal's article in question came under the title:
“Testing Trump in Syria ” and
the subtitle: “Turkey , Russia and Iran
want to push the U.S.
and its allies out.” Its main feature is this sentence: “The Kurdish People's
Protection Units in Syria
fought valiantly and deserve training and protection”.
The clue that tells America 's policy makers what to do
is contained in the adjective “valiantly.” It tells the captains of the
American ship of state not to worry about the strategic implications of getting
involved deeply in the Middle East because the
only thing that counts is that the Kurdish forces fought valiantly.