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Respecting each others realities

Paul Watzlawick, an Austrian researcher, has edited a book on the subject of Invented Reality (W.W. Norton & Co., New-York, 1984). Since 1960, he worked at Stanford University Medical Center as a professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and edited this volume. This project examined how individual, social, scientific, and ideological realities are constructed and profoundly differ with factual realities. It is widely naively assumed, that one's own ‘dreams’ must be globally valid. However, human beings everywhere continue to operate on the basis of archaic programming. Centuries old traditions and beliefs are automatically accepted as factual reality by us and by them.

‘How do we know what we believe we know?’ asked Watzlawick in his book. Most people assume, that what they know, or what they think they know, indeed is true. Mistakenly it is taken for granted, that knowledge is the result of careful exploration of all options or is covered by basic research. Even the pre-Socratics were weighing questions, whether what was believed to be true had any connection with actual reality, or whether it was a figment of man's imagination. We still fail to examine our beliefs and inherited traditions, testing them against new and scientifically established realities.

After centuries of being brainwashed by utter nonsense, masquerading as the ultimate truth, it is hardly not surprising, that we still witness at the dawn of the 21st century a clash of civilizations. The first major test in our days of this confusion and lack of understanding factual realities, is this crazy Washington led War on Terrorism. The White House does not understand, nor is it aware of the manifold shades of gold that color the world's horizons. For the ruling Texans, there is but one way forward and that is the American way. The sooner King Fahd, Gadaffi and Arafat learn to chew gum, the better.

In 1973, Stanford professor of Law and Psychology, David Rosenhan, published an article titled On Being Sane in Insane Places. ‘If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them? The question is neither capricious nor itself insane,’ he wrote (pp

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117). What is being viewed as normal in one culture may be seen as quite aberrant in another. This goes also for us living in modern emancipated western nations. If the President of France, Jaques Chirac, would drive up the Champs Elysees in a golden carriage drawn by eight horses, an ambulance would be ordered to have his head examined in a psychiatric ward. In the uk or in Holland, on the contrary, respective queens drive once a year in state coaches to their parliaments to open the yearly parliamentary debate. What is being taken serious in London is called loony in Paris and visa versa.

Somalia, Iran Saudi-Arabia, Nigeria, Sudan and other nations, are practicing Sharia law. Maiming and physical abuse are legal. The hands of thieves are lopped off, women convicted of adultery may be stoned to death. In China prisoners are beaten with clubs and shocked with cattle prods. In India police stick nails through the fingers and fingernails of prisoners. One reason for Bush to invade Afghanistan was to overthrow the Taliban regime which enforced women to observe the tradition of hiding their faces from strangers. Bush introduced female jeans and Levi's stores.

He and Blair felt a war was justified in bringing their set of invented realities to Afghanistan and Iraq. Rosenhan asked in 1984, whether salient characteristics reside in patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which observers find them. Why do Bush and Blair (and Sharon) assume that assault helicopters and precision bombs are the answer to introduce their own invented realities in an effort to replace structures of mind of a billion Muslims? The trio assumes that their frames of mind are far superior. Why do they even think, that they can bomb thousands of years of Sharia law out of people's minds, because they feel, their invented realities are the sole correct ones? Military force is no effective replacement for the promotion of western human rights. Nor will brute superior force ever create a change of heart. If Osama bin Laden had B-52's, precision bombs and aircraft carriers, and we had to use suicide bombers against him, we would not be prepared to capitulate for Sharia law either.

5-11-2003