The expression “think outside the box” was coined because
someone noticed that whenever a line of thinking had gained traction in the
world of political punditry, everyone seemed to jump on the same bandwagon
whereby they all echoed the same refrain without thinking about its content,
let alone attempting to modify it so as to suit the changing circumstances.
Thus, the imperative “think outside the box” was given to an
interlocutor as a friendly advice to let them know that he or she was adding
nothing new to a debate that was growing stale. Those that had the intellectual
wherewithal to do what was necessary, responded by going outside the old box;
and they started thinking along new lines. They often enlarged the discussion,
and thus gave the other participants the chance to contribute fresh thoughts to
the debate.
The box, therefore, can be viewed as an abstract construct
inside of which a collection of thoughts, ideas and concepts incubate, grow and
mature to reach what has come to be called a logical conclusion. In the world
of the arts, they can become a movement that will last a long time. In the
world of logic and aesthetics, they can acquire the chance to become a
philosophy that will last for a while. But the chances of this happening in the
arts or the world of thoughts are small because most such boxes grow stale and
wither away before their content comes out the incubation period.
The problem with being inside such a box and having a
difficult time getting out of it, is manifested by the tendency to look at all
matters through the same colored glasses – whatever the color of the glass –
and interpreting everything from the same angle. This would be a handicap, and
you can see how it works and does not work in the editorial written by the New
York Times, published under the title: “A New Focus on Foreign Fighters,” on
September 25, 2014.
At first blush, this looks like an editorial about an
initiative launched by President Obama to rally the world against the phenomenon
of foreign fighters joining ISIS, al Qaeda and other foreign terrorist
fighters. This is where the editors of the NY Times see difficulty given that
the world has not settled on a definition of terrorism, and how to
differentiate it from fighting for freedom. But this is not how the editors of
the Times framed the difficulty. Instead, they stayed within the confines of
the box where the Jewish Propaganda machine put them. They specifically named
Hamas which is considered as a group of terrorists by a handful, and a group of
freedom fighters by most of the world.
Also, the initiative itself as taken by Mr. Obama had
nothing to do with his analysis of the situation. Instead, it was an
on-the-cuff political impulse that hit Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain who saw an opportunity to get America to do
the job that his Parliament forbade him from doing. Thanks to the likes of Fox
News, the Wall Street Journal and other right wing fanatic publications, he
reckoned that the world of punditry in America was ready to deify him if
he came up with words that will tickle their fancy without committing his
country to anything that his Parliament would not approve of. Thus, the
apparent Obama initiative.
With the editors of the Times unable to see their way outside
the box, with Obama jumping into it simply because it was there, and with every
pundit and his cousin having clamored for it, the die was cast for creating the
useless instrument that now stands in the way of creating a useful one – an
instrument that can solve many problems of our times.
To get there, Cameron, the pundits, Obama and the NY Times
could have pointed out that foreign fighters have always joined wars that were
not theirs. Some as young as their mid-teens lied about their age to join a
war. Also, “volunteer” fighters from Canada joined South American
groups. When caught, our government interceded to have them released. Worse
than all of that from the aesthetics and logical points of view, Jews who
joined the Israeli military of biblical savagery to go butcher civilian men,
women and children in their bedrooms in the middle of the night were portrayed
in the American media as saints doing God's work.