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Emotional agendas

In this 21st century, the overriding road block to peace remains the dilemma, how to coordinate emotional agendas on all five continents. While summits and global forums consistently deal with political, economic and social programs to enable the coming into existence of universally acceptable management of the global village, the 64.000 dollar question remains, how to find a common dominator for emotional peace between minds everywhere. How to orchestrate this tutti-frutti of minds that constitute the conscience of humanity?

Clinical psychologist, Richard Bentall, reminds us that the English language has 2.000 emotion words. Some languages have less than 200. As an extreme example, the aboriginal Gidjingali in Australia do not distinguish between fear and shame. Studies comparing emotions in the Japanese language - Japan running the second largest economy in the world - reveal substantial differences compared to African, Islamic or Latino nations. Prototypical emotions, that have a central place in western concepts of psychopathology appear to be entirely absent. Cultures even appear to differ in where they draw the line between emotional and non-emotional states. (Madness Explained, Richard Bentall, Allan Lane, London, 2003, pp 212-215).

How do individuals everywhere come to possess a vocabulary of feelings and internal states? Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner concluded in 1945 that since we learn to label stimuli according to rules and conventions from the parents and people around us, coined by him as ‘the wider verbal community’, we all work with wholly different interpretations for the same emotions. This state of affairs occurs between allied nations (the United States and France), let alone between Palestinians and Israeli's, or for that matter between Bush, Saddam, Osama bin Laden, you and me.

Perhaps, even when we discuss multi-cultural communities, and certainly in the case of that much maligned word of globalization, we must continuously take into account the cold fact, that cultures describe internal states, including words expressing

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emotions, differently, and at times even fundamentally inconsistently. This emotional road block to the road map between Israel and Palestina should be clearly identified and thoroughly examined. While their peoples bleed to death, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators can not even agree on the substance of what makes a freedom fighter. One party continues to see them as terrorists while they should know better by now. As long as emotional, or even linguistical agendas do not jive, thoroughly confused political agendas only guarantee more war and bloodshed.