It seems to me that nobody appears to have yet really appreciated the
profundity of the changes that this tragedy will bring about. It will
permanently alter our views of how we make sense of our world and that has
enormous implications for therapists and counsellors as it has destroyed the
basic assumptions underlying our work. Modern liberal thinkers, together
with most therapists, take the view that everybody is unique with enormous
developmental potentials. If individuals somehow become estranged from
society, that is to say the society envisaged by the liberal sociologists,
then that is due to some form of personal maladaptation that is probably
reparable. Because these same thinkers see society is interactive, they also
believe that any estrangement must have at least part of its cause in the
actions of the evildoer's victims. This leads the liberals to require us all
to treat everybody with equal respect and without discrimination.
That's fine if everybody agrees. However, it probably never was true and it
has only seemed so in recent years because of the way that political
correctness has viciously censored rational debate. The people that attacked
us all last Tuesday simply aren't part of the liberals' Just World
Hypothesis. They don't hate us because of what we might or might not have
done to them. They hate us because we are not them! They always will! When
it's just a minority of haters such as ETA or the IRA, then we usually say
that the cost to our liberal society of eliminating them would be too great,
and so we tolerate them. This is different because at last we have realised
that those who hate us are actually many and implacable. In the case of the
WTC attack, they are distinct group of nations who can be broadly
differentiated by their religion. If you really think that Ben Laden
represents an evil minority in a generally loving religion, then just listen
to what the opinion makers, the activists, and the religious leaders of the
general populations of those countries are actually saying. Pakistan's
leaders may be giving lip-service to a pretence of supporting the USA, but
already broad-based movements in the ordinary population are saying that
they will defend Afghanistan. This is true throughout most of the Muslim
world.
Discrimination against some people groups is now not a bigoted act, it's
self-defence! For example, suppose that you are seeing your family off at
the airport next week. You see a group of young, Arabic males go onboard the
plan. Are you really going to go away without a care in the world? If you
can't answer this question with an unqualified "yes!" then your Just World
Hypothesis has just crashed. Then what do you base your therapeutic
modelling on?
Norman
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