The truth is better than the lie

I find myself thinking a lot about terrorism lately as if I’m going to solve the problem. The way we’re going about it isn’t working, and it doesn’t even make sense. It’s like the 58-year old calling the teenager sick for getting whacked out over their affair. He takes no responsibility for her state and will further destroy her in his “defense.”

I think there most definitely is a problem. As we near doubling our population, our world grows increasingly smaller and I for one don’t want the human race to go out in a hail of gunfire. It’s romantic in the movies but in real life, it’s just sad if we can’t find a way to get along. But real change requires understanding, work and sacrifice; it’s not just a matter of pushing someone back in line and telling them to shut up. If we wanted to make an impact on those who finance Al-Qaeda, we should have stopped the flow of money. Immediately. Stop driving cars if we have to and spend the billions of dollars being spent on the war to float the economy.

My family went overseas for the first time in 1984. I was just about to start high school when I met my English family. My cousins, a couple of years younger than me, wanted nothing more than to go to America. They thought it was the coolest place on earth. Twenty something years later, the Brits no longer love America and after decades of being our biggest fans outside of ourselves, they don’t even like Americans anymore. They think we’re ignorant, selfish, stupid and lazy and our President is all the proof they need.

When my friend was visiting from London, we were talking about something and I said, “people always think they’re doing the right thing.” I said that even George Bush thinks he’s doing the right thing. “Really,” he asked, “because I think he’s just taking a piss.” He referenced the comments he makes and how flippant and arrogant they are, how it seems he just doesn’t even care. I was too embarrassed to admit that I don’t listen to him anymore and because, frankly, it's difficult to imagine the magnitude of lying and deceit if he knows what he's doing.

I read an article in the New York Times a while back about plastic surgery in Iran. It’s so prevalent, apparently, that even men now are getting multiple surgeries done: nose jobs, chin implants, and cheek implants. A Persian friend of mine commented on it during her last trip there. She said every woman had a nose job and no one was the least bit bothered by a girl with bandages and bruises. There was a photo in the article of a woman, a beautiful woman, whose whole family has had a nose job. She didn’t even look Persian, she looked like a generic white woman. It was sad.

If I were Iranian, I think I would be livid. I would be outraged by the idea of a whole culture changing what makes them unique, succumbing to the idea that there is an ideal beauty, and that it is Western. I don’t want to live in an American world. Droves of people move here from other countries, looking for a better life, but they are all loyal to their homeland, their culture, their language, their food, their music, and their country. What would America be without that diversity?

Even Canada, our neighbors to the north, and the country that is probably most like ours in language, culture and history, is sensitive to not becoming Americanized and losing their identity. It’s easy then to imagine how massively offensive and threatening the export of our culture is to countries that share none of those things with us. Our culture isn’t just television and clothes. It’s language, policy, business, and yes, even our ideals. Just because we say something is important, doesn’t make it so. It has to appeal in a way that’s relevant and it has to be translated.

I remember reading in college about the family planning movement in Bangladesh. It was a critical program designed to reduce the poverty by decreasing the birthrate but it would require female empowerment, something just as new and delicate. While Western organizations could provide support, education and resources, it was essential that the actual outreach be done by local Bangladeshi women. Women who understood the culture and what they were up against but also, why it would work. And it did. Between 1975 and 1994, the fertility rate dropped from 6.3 to 3.3 and is now at 3 (children per family).

My mom told me a disturbing story that she read in the paper. The government of the Dominican Republic, in an effort to make their country more appealing to tourists, is cutting down hundred-year old shade trees that line their streets and replacing them with palm trees. The idea is that the tourists expect palm trees in a tropical country and they're trying to justify this massacre by saying the trees they're chopping are non-native. Meanwhile, the poor residents lose shade, cooler temperatures, fresh air and oxygen that these trees create, in addition to their history and the beauty of their town. Once again, a whole country suffers in the pursuit of a false ideal.

Europe, perhaps because of its smaller size, has always been much more concerned about keeping things clean, quiet and efficient, than the United States. In Sweden, apartment buildings have grass on the roof to contribute oxygen to the air and help insulate. In Britain, gas lawn mowers have been made illegal because of the noise and everyone uses nearly-silent electric mowers. In Paris, an electric train and public bicycles provide everyone with clean, quiet and efficient transportation. The cars are smaller, the houses are smaller, appliances are compact, and it’s always been like that.

Yet they have managed to mind their own business when it comes to America’s disgusting obsession with size and waste. Our compact cars of the same make and model are larger than their European counterparts and use more gas. But most of us aren’t even trying to be fuel-efficient. Our toilets use too much water, our water heaters heat water all day so it’s hot for the half hour that we need it, our food is too big and we throw most of it away. And yet, you don’t hear them telling us how we should live, though I wish they would. It's only a matter of time before the rest of the world starts imposing their views on us.

In the real world, we can’t force an employer to want to hire us, we can’t force a person to fall in love with us, we can’t force our children to be what we want them to be, and we can’t force people to buy our products. So why do we think we can force people to share our beliefs? The only thing we can do is make ourselves the best we can be and hope to be liked for who we really are. In marketing, we focus on making sure the product is something that people want and then making it relevant. If we want to sell democracy and freedom, we first have to practice what we preach and then find a way to make it something the rest of the world wants to buy.

I liken the "War on Terror" to the "War on Drugs," a similarly misguided attempt that failed spectacularly, increasing drug use, increasing drug profits and otherwise making the unwanted behavior more attractive and rewarding. The U.S. government allowed or otherwise participated in drug smuggling in order to fund other covert operations, no doubt justified by saying the actions were "good for the American people." Meanwhile, this country waged war on its own citizens. The land of "freedom lovers" has more people in prison than any country in the world, and nearly a quarter are there on drug charges.

Three motivating factors that drive everything

I believe there are only three motivating factors that drive every human action.
1) The need/desire to be accepted by other people.
2) The need/desire to be significant to society.
3) The need/desire to avoid death and/or be immortal.

Despite the trend reports, talk about what matters and changing public opinion, these motivations don’t change and haven’t change for thousands of years. What DOES change significantly, however, are the actions taken in response to those motivations. It’s actually quite complicated because while some things seem to be universal like marriage and children, the motivation for those things varies from person to person.

There are those that believe children will give them unconditional love and acceptance, a tiny creature that depends on you for life will have no choice. It’s not long, however, before that child realizes their own motivations and takes action to fulfill them. Intentionally or unintentionally, they will likely come into conflict with the parent’s motivations.

Same with anyone who has children to be immortal or to gain significance by raising the child better than they were raised. Children can be full of disappointment because they are following their own needs. In their drive to be accepted, they may do drugs or otherwise harm themselves. To be significant, they may make life choices that are unacceptable to their parents.

Islamic extremists probably demonstrate the clearest example of two people’s motivations at conflict with each other. To gain immortality and significance, a suicide bomber kills himself and his enemy, a clear violation of the victim’s need to avoid death. Towards the same goal of spreading their religion, the Mormons take a quite different tactic. Instead of recruiting their youth to die, they enlist them to travel the world as missionaries, helping the poor and converting as they go. They are then obligated to get married and have many children.

We’ve all heard the phrase “You get more bees with honey than vinegar” or some variation. It basically means if your approach is sweet, not sour, you’ll find more people on your side. It is probably universally true that no one likes to be yelled at or strong-armed but it’s still a limited approach. Many tactics have been used, successfully, to gain support for one’s cause including intimidation. Likewise, asked as nicely as possible, there are still many things people have no interest in doing or being a part of.

Those three motivations are still the only thing that drives people to take action.

Simply replacing negative behavior with something positive doesn’t immediately solve the problem. Gangs, for example, give the member a sense of belonging and acceptance. They may also provide a feeling of significance. People might argue that their behavior is a product of not having enough opportunity, jobs, etc. But simply offering a gang member a job at McDonald’s is not going to be enough. Rap music, on the other hand, has provided a powerful substitute for many youths. The substitution has to be something that just as effectively meets the need for acceptance and significance but it will likely be different for each individual. Finding the right solution to such problems is the stuff of revolutions. These are powerful needs and they must be addressed.

The Internet is a clear demonstration of those three needs being met. MySpace and other social networks fulfill a need for community and acceptance. Other sites have tried to slap on a networking feature thinking it will instantly propel their membership base but unless they are truly fulfilling the community/acceptance need, it doesn’t make a difference.

Blogs, You Tube and other forms of self-expression satisfy a need to be significant and therefore accepted by others. The strange permanence of anything ever on the Web also provides immortality. But again, it has to be the right context. You can’t just slap on forums and feedback fields and expect users to feel significant.

This is where the studies can be useful. What kind of communities are people searching for? What kinds of activities make people feel significant? In what ways are people seeking immortality? Of course, I’ll argue that the most powerful solutions are those that haven’t been done before because they are genuine. We are ever evolving and seeking new ways to fulfill our needs. Once parents ensured their children’s success by pushing them towards careers that they wanted for them, now parents push their children to discover and follow their own path. Maybe neither is right or better but they are satisfying the same needs, just in a different way.

There’s a quote in Applebee’s America by a man in his seventies, a lifelong Democrat and a veteran. He voted Republican for the first time, for George W. Bush in 2000. He says while he doesn’t agree with what Bush stands for, he at least he knows stands for something. The book claims that people are no longer issue voters. I’m not sure that we ever were, I think politicians just thought we were. Instead, we vote for gut values, we vote for a candidate that we think we can trust.

I’ll venture a guess that "values voting" is in essence trusting that the candidate will pursue the same kinds of actions to satisfy their basic needs that we would.