Tuesday

How a Tolerant Country Can Avoid Being a Doormat for Intolerant Countries

Tolerance and mutual respect for different cultures and religions is great — as long as it is mutual. When it's not mutual, then tolerance becomes a self-destructive doctrine. When it is not mutual, one side gives and the other side takes. In normal parlance, it is called being a doormat.

Islamic supremacism is religiously-sanctioned intolerance, and many in the West tolerate the intolerance out of a blind multiculturalism. But multiculturalism (respect for other cultures) need not be blind. The addition of one simple distinction is all that is needed.

When I was younger, I lacked the same distinction in my own personal life. I had read the book, How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie, when I was very young, and it had a profound effect on the way I treated people. And for the most part, the effect was good.

The basic approach to Carnegie's book is to give to people, to trust them, to see the best in them, etc. When you do this, people will respond positively, and they'll give back to you and trust you and they'll want to fulfill your trust, etc. This approach has worked great for almost everybody I've ever met, because most people reciprocate. It becomes a mutual thing.

But several times in my life I ran into people who only took advantage of my kindness or generosity. They took, and sometimes not only did they not reciprocate, but sometimes they've even responded to my kindness by stabbing me in the back. They weren't interested in cooperating. They didn't care about good long-term relations.

With those people, I had to figure out a different way of dealing with them. I had to make an extra distinction. My tolerance and goodwill were blind. I did it with everyone indiscriminately, and that's just stupid.

A few years ago, a biography of Dale Carnegie came out, and I found out that Carnegie left out a chapter in his book. He didn't get the chapter to the publisher on time so the book was published without it.

The missing chapter was about what to do with uncooperative, selfish, self-serving people. A small percentage of the population doesn't have normal human empathy. The way you deal with these people must be different or you're just being foolish.

A very similar thing is happening with orthodox Islam and multiculturalism. There is nothing wrong with the multicultural doctrine. Nothing at all. It's wonderful, in fact. One of the reasons democracies are so much more enjoyable countries to live in than non-democratic countries is because we are so tolerant of each other.

But the multiculturalism doctrine is incomplete. It is a great strategy for most people and most cultures and most religions. But it is disastrous when you stick with it blindly.

All that's missing is the added distinction of mutuality. We can simply amend the doctrine to something like this: We respect all religions and cultures who do us the honor of respecting ours as well. All others will be treated with less generosity.

Another characteristic of both selfish people and Islamic supremacists is the use of deception. They pretend to be thoughtful and kind. They pretend to be peaceful, tolerant, and cooperative. They try to fool their victims into keeping their guard down. They pretend in order to gain an advantage.

Over time, most of us have learned to pay attention to what people do and see if it matches what they say. Most of us who have lived long enough to see our 30s do not automatically trust everyone. We give people a chance to earn our trust. That's a sensible way to live.

Orthodox Muslims often try to fool non-Muslims in the same way selfish people do. They mimic peaceful religious people. They try to act as if they believe what we believe (see the principle of religious deception), and this makes it more difficult to determine whether or not these are cooperators or back-stabbers. But we can apply the same principles we use in our personal lives. We can watch what they do and see if it matches what they say. We don't have to automatically trust. Let them earn our trust.

On the DVD, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, you can literally watch what they do. You can see Muslim leaders saying one thing to the western media, appearing to be moderate, peaceful, reasonable Muslims, and then you see the same person saying another thing entirely to their own people in Arabic.

If we didn't automatically trust, we could see they are intolerant, uncooperative, and even bloodthirsty, and not the cooperative people they pretend to be.

If we pay attention, we will see some Muslims are not mutually respectful. In fact, they actively exploit our well-ingrained respect for other cultures, and use it against us, considering it a weakness they can exploit.

For years, the Wahhabi Muslims in Saudi Arabia have been spending their oil-enriched billions building mosques all over the western democracies. They then preach hatred of the West in those mosques, and we have been allowing this.

Within Saudi Arabia, no churches or synagogues are allowed to be built.

The western democracies, in other words, are being doormats. We are giving and allowing, respecting and tolerating, and the Islamic supremacists are taking, expressing intolerance, and stabbing us in the back. Being a doormat is not a successful long-term strategy.


TIT FOR TAT
In the 1970's the political scientist Robert Axelrod created a computer "world" using the famous Prisoner's Dilemma as a game computer programs could play against each other. He wanted to find out which computer program would succeed the best.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a hypothetical situation used to test whether someone will cooperate or compete, and how well the strategies work in the long run.

The game is played by two people. If one cooperates and the other competes, the one who cooperated will lose and the competitive one (the selfish one) will win. If they both compete, they both lose, but not as badly.

If they both cooperate, they both win. That's how the game is set up.

If you were one of the prisoners, what would you do? That's the dilemma. How much can you count on the cooperative nature of the other person?

The game is often played repeatedly with the same two people, each of them choosing to cooperate or take advantage of the other through successive rounds of the game.

The Prisoner's Dilemma game is designed to parallel real life. If two people in real life cooperate with each other, it very often works to their mutual advantage. But if one person cooperates and the other takes advantage, it often works out very well for the selfish one and very poorly for the cooperative one.

On the other hand, if you go around preempting people — trying to take advantage of them before they take advantage of you — you will miss out on the advantages of cooperation, people will resent you, and you might get people working against you.

What is the best long-term strategy? This is the dilemma we are faced with every day, personally as well as culturally.

Robert Axelrod, the man who created the computer world, invited computer programmers to create a program to play the Prisoner's Dilemma with other programs. The question is, which program would succeed the best?

In a game that resembles the real dilemma we all face, what strategy is the most effective?

The program that proved the best was named TIT FOR TAT. It was designed by Anatol Rapoport and it was one of the simplest programs submitted. For the first interaction, it would cooperate. After that, it would repay in kind whatever the other did. That was the whole strategy.

If the other cooperated, TIT FOR TAT benefited. So did the other. If the other took advantage, TIT FOR TAT cut its losses immediately.

As the game went on, TIT FOR TAT gained more (and lost less) than any other program. In The Moral Animal, Robert Wright wrote, "More than the steadily mean, more than the steadily nice, and more than various 'clever' programs whose elaborate rules made them hard for other programs to read, the straightforwardly conditional TIT FOR TAT was, in the long run, self-serving."

And it's the most fair to everyone involved.

I suggest we in the West use the same program when dealing with other countries and other cultures. We should begin with tolerance and cooperation, and then be as tolerant and cooperative as the other is from that point on.

We would be fools to tolerate intolerance — even if that intolerance is hiding behind a cloak of religion. An intolerant culture should be the exception to the principle of universal multicultural tolerance.

For example, if orthodox Islam does not tolerate other religions, it should not be tolerated itself.

Tolerance and cooperation are definitely the best way to go, but only if the other side is tolerant and cooperative also. If they prove to be otherwise, intolerance and competitively cutting our losses is a sane response.

13 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:25 AM

    thought provoking article..i like the iterative PD analogy here.

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  2. india is the best example of tolerance shown by hindus to Muslims , India has been ruined and on brink of disintegeration

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  3. InfidelKaffir12:20 PM

    I agree entirely with the "Tit for Tat" program.

    The first Tat was 9/11.

    The resultant Tit for Tat must be a 4 x Cruise Missile strike on the Kaaba in Mecca.

    This is no joke, I am entirely serious and you might be amazed at the result such a strike would have.

    It would indicate to this intolerant gang of thugs that we have drawn a line in the sand and that enough is enough.

    Or else we can spread our ass-cheeks wide and pass them the jar of vaseline.

    Your choice.

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  4. freiwahreheiten3:42 AM

    I don't see why there should be different laws for radical islamists than for the rest of the population. It feels not right for me to apply different standards to an entire group of people. In a democracy everybody should be treated equally. If an imam does calls for murder while preaching in a mosque he can be accused on the basis of existing laws. However, we have the problem that many imams are not controlled by anyone. But we have to find a solution for that. A free society has to fight using their values, not giving them up.

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  5. Anonymous1:51 PM

    Congratulations. Please accept my compliments. Its a brilliant piece.I'm from India. I agree 100% with EVERY word written here. Hindus in India are exactly the way you describe yourself as a nation. Tolerant of all religions, multicultural to a fault. Totally trusting. Believing that all religions are the same....just another path to reach God.

    But all thru my reading, I couldnt help replacing the word Islam with Christianity the way its practiced in India. The Christian missionaries in India are practicing a perverted medieval version of Christianity that would put a radical Islamist to utter shame.

    Poor unsuspecting Hindus villagers are bribed to convert to Christianity. Not being satisfied with that, the flooring on the newly planted churches are pasted with photographs of Hindu Gods and Goddesses. The new converts are told to walk over them. They're given photographs of the Gods to burn every Sunday. The converts are told not to interact with their former friends who are Hindu, even family if they've not converted. Poor children are given admission to missionary schools only on the condition that they convert to Christianity.

    In pockets where the Christians gain majority, the converts are instructed to refuse to sell or buy anything from Hindu 'minority' residents of the village. Local Hindu leaders (Spiritual Gurus)of the village are killed (by people belonging to organisations like the Lutheran church or Seventh Day Adventists. The blame is put on some terrorist group of course) Incase such killings result in a communically charged situation where the authorities impose curfew (which generally last for weeks and results in shutting down of all shops); in such situations, missionaries arrange for food for the christians but not the Hindu poor who are equally suffering the result of the same curfew.


    There is cultural attacks on the Vedic texts (7000 years old Hindu religious texts). several religious texts are being appropriated by the missionaries and claimed to be christian in nature. Even the Pope had to refer to such missionaries as 'wolves' in one of his recent commnique.


    Unsuspecting Christians in the western world are donating $30 a month from their payroll (supposedly to sponsor a child) to these churches believing that they're helping the poor in a third world country. Whereas, these missionaries employ 'Conversion Agents'. They're given targets for conversion. There are fixed rates for conversion of an individual; or a family or a whole village. Incase a converted person becomes a local 'converter', there is an additional bonus for the Agents.
    These efforts have caused huge chasms in peaceful communities leading to distrust and disharmony. These seeds of 'hate' have been sown on large swathes of India in the North East and in the Southern parts of India.


    I have several great friends in US, UK and elsewhere who are Christians. They all express shock when they see such atrocities on a culture thats one of the oldest in the world.
    No self respecting Christian in any western country would allow this to happen anywhere in the world in the name of Christ.


    It was wonderful to read your piece on how you perceive Islam and the comparison sprung to mind immediately. This is exactly how the Hindus feel in India about this perverted version of Christianity being propogated in India.

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  6. Anonymous10:14 PM

    I read the book the 2 faces of islam. How do we tell radical islam from moderate islam for purposes of your proposal?

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  7. Anonymous9:21 AM

    We already have laws on the books to stop Islam, The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. abolished slavery in the United States and provides that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.".

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  8. Anonymous1:29 PM

    Excellent article ... as always!

    This Prisoner's Dilemma argument is so logical that it seems impossible that it should not bring about a sense of reality to the PCs!

    The big obstacle is the meme that is accepted by most in the West that we are somehow the cause of all the maladies in the world.

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  9. Anonymous12:48 AM

    There is a precedent for stopping migration of citizens from countries that do not respect human rights.

    The prevailing human rights code today is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

    Islamic countries are trying to get these amended to allow for Shariah Law.

    They call it the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI).

    However at this stage it is stil the UDHR that prevails.

    Back during Apartheid South Africa days the Eastern Bloc denied access to white South Africans on the basis that whether or not they individually mistreated blacks they were the privileged in a system of gross human right abuses.

    The irony is that this was the policy of the Left who would probably be the main opponents to invoking such a policy now.

    The same can apply to Islamic nations - treat the non-Muslims according to the UDHR or do not bother to apply for immigration to the West.

    This would favour any non-Muslim seeking to escape Islamist human right abuses ... especially the 4 million Pakistan Christians and the 8 million Copts.

    They would have immigration preference.

    It would also help to re-balance the Islamic population surge in Europe relative to that of the indigenous Europeans.

    Christ, Krishna and The Buddha can co-exist - they are all about love and compassion.

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  10. Anonymous1:56 AM

    The Stupidity of two of the Great Unbeliefs:

    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/23/us-china-iran-sanctions-idUSTRE7AM0IU20111123

    China and Russia opposing sanctions on Iran!

    Islamists know they lost the Iberian Peninsula through inner squabbling.

    They hope to have the Great Unbeliefs do the same and lose the Planet.

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  11. Anonymous9:44 PM

    I would love to get my hands on that missing chapter of Dale Carnegie's! Like you, I read his book "How to Win Friends and Influence People." I wonder what information that chapter contained.

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  12. Anonymous6:26 PM

    Stop for foreign funding for religious organizations in the US. Austria did it and so should we.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/austrian-bill-would-ban-foreign-funding-for-mosques-imams/2014/11/20/8ad73496-70d6-11e4-a2c2-478179fd0489_story.html

    Sebastian Kurz was brilliant!

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  13. Anonymous9:26 PM

    Excellent article..........as always.
    Your advice is priceless for countries as well as in personal life.
    Principle of mutuality should be the bedrock of concessions given to any individual in our life as well as any religion.
    Why should anyone tolerate the intolerant?
    I am from India where religious minorities are not just tolerated, they are treated better than the majority.
    Anyway, islam is not a minority in India anymore - it is the second largest majority.
    The percentage of non-muslims in pakistan and bangladesh has gone down to minuscule proportions but the percentage of muslims in India has soared.

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