At 03:35 PM 01/05/05 -0500, Dan Minette wrote:
snip
I thought about this a while, and can't see the link. For example, how is a battered women who thinks the battering is her own fault, and that it would stop if she were just a decent wife self-righteous? This type of behavior is often associated with very low self esteem, which is not associated with self-righteousness. It's closer to buying into the abuser's world.
Battered wife syndrome is closely related to Stockholm syndrome, more descriptively capture-bonding. Capture-bonding lies behind a frat hazing and military basic training among other things. It accounts for events like Patty Hearst and Elizabeth Smart.
http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.pdf
During an awful lot of human history you died if you didn't have the ability to bond to the people who had captured you and were abusing you. That why it is so hard for women to leave abusive situations, there capture bonding psychological mechanism has been activated.
Bush's attack on Iraq may be faulted, but not as co-dependant. Those who's immediate response to 9-11 was asking "how did the US provoke this" exhibited behavior that could be labeled co-dependant.
This is going to sound weird but 9/11 was gene based, rooted in human evolution during the stone age.
Hunter gatherer bands and tribes would build up in population until they were facing starvation. At that point even a small weak band or tribe was better off attacking a larger one than doing nothing because if they lost (likely) and the men were killed, the larger tribe usually absorbed the smaller tribes women as wives or extra wives.
This resulted in more of the warriors genes surviving than the whole of the little tribe dying of starvation. On the other hand, the personal downside for this path was extreme (very likely death).
So genes built brains that in circumstances of facing a bleak future were insanely optimistic about their chances of wining a war against a larger tribe and taking *their* women. This is the source of the irrational thinking you see so often in people involved in wars (both sides).
Of course most of the overpopulated Islamic world is facing a bleak future, much more so than a generation or two ago.
So the US "provoked" 9/11 by simply existing.
Keith Henson
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