Thoughts Have Hands

This theme captures the meaning of identity politics; what is right and just conforms to my beliefs and interests. This provides a basis for decision making in the world. 

The problem is we have to search and find truth beyond our limited world views.  When all you trust is what confirms your beliefs, you risk isolation. Doesn’t this lead a person or group to a potential dead end? A parochial vision of unrealistic ideas that risks one’s ability to get along in the broader world. How does one transcend, see beyond, the structures that give you comfort and confirm your beliefs? How does one grow beyond what one knows?

My identity is equated with what I believe and this leads me to act in conformity with belief. Clearly one doesn’t usually choose to act against what you believe to be the case. So on what authority can I base decisions that don’t echo my identity? To learn to accept new information is critical to growth and survival. It requires a flexibility. To incorporate new ways of thinking and acting in one’s life, you must step beyond past tethers into new realities. 

To act in a way contrary to my world view is destructive of my identity. How could I risk doing that? Similarly my family, my neighborhood, my town, my religion, my nation act like the concentric circles rippling out from my center of being and are bound to me by this same familiarity, a sense of identity. The sense that each circle protects who I am, agrees with what I need.  This agreement forms a social network that makes each level of community mine, that is, not other, not strange or foreign. The agreement makes my world mine.

It is the process of growth and change that clashes with these identity structures and creates a dialogue and at times a cacophony of meaning that cracks the hard shell of identity and forces each of us to risk embracing some level of difference. 

How we negotiate this process speaks to our personal ego strength and tolerance for difference. Are we egg shells waiting to be cracked? Or are we chicks strong enough to peck our way into the world, huddle under our mothers warmth and eventually seek out the farm yard? 

Some choose to maintain a very rigid world and closely held personal beliefs. They seek the comfort of what has worked and seek to maintain it against all assaults. Others have boundaries they seek to expand, incorporating larger lives. They can be swept up in the powerful streams of belief from beyond the small world in which they began. If you think about an ideal setting for growth one might conceive it as the rippling circles radiating out from the the center where the pebble of our soul has sunk into the depths of life’s pond. Visualizing the result provides a model for healthy development. The initial splash awakes our consciousness. The waves of belief, norms and expectations surround you. You are cradled by a world of sensation that laps against your center of gravity. You begin to expect warmth, food, a sense of being held closely. You are guarded (unbeknown to you) from ripples outside your immediate circle that might drown your being until you can begin to sit up, walk, and see beyond the confines of the first circles of family and friend. Slowly your experience begins to encompass waves of information that buoy you up and out of the family circle. Thus begins your life adventure and you must learn to swim with the waves of experience. Sometimes being carried into the outer rings of experience and at others resting on the tidal waves that may lift you back toward your center and the arms of family.

How you learn to negotiate the ripples of conscious experience determines your grasp on reality. It provides a tool kit to analyze and decipher experience so you can construct a sense of self that is neither so rigid that you risk cracking up or so adventurous that all personal boundaries are erased and dissipated. 

What are the tools that allow you to discriminate truth from myth and lies? On what can you rely to make your way in the world? 

Some ideas include family values, religious dogma, scientific experiment and reason, tribal identity, national pride, cosmic myth of origin and purpose just to name a few.  The solitary individual treads water amongst the rippling waves of these social and ideological tides. Some are swamped by then. Others are buoyed by them. All must learn to swim there.  Life’s pond can be a pleasant community of ideal balance: nature and nurture, individual freedom and community responsibility. It can also be a riptide that pulls even the best swimmer under or a very rough sea that buffets the senses and drowns many in storms and cold waters.  

So how do terrorists form their identity

So how do republicans, evangelists, rationalists, democrats, and libertarians