Agonal Autism in the Syrian Conflict: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

During the Cold War, there was much talk about that. It went something like this: If one could reveal the blind spots of both sides' views of East-West conflict during the Cold War, one might help governments to overcome those perceptual limitations and prejudices, and conflicts could be resolved in almost no time at all. The hottest candidate was Carl Rogers' person-centered talking therapy. Did not Rogers himself propagate that? And even if this might be a false memory, it is a proven fact that Watzlawick himself did apply the concept of discrepant punctuation to the case of the East-West arms race (Watzlawick et al. 1967), implying that - given a third party to help them climb the meta-level of communication - things could be easily resolved. And it is not implausible at all that such a thought was behind more recent attempts to apply the concept of discrepant punctuation to the interaction sequences between the United States and Al Qaida in the War on Terror. Thanks to Malick's (2011) analysis, it can be treated as an established fact that there are indeed mutually irreconcilable narratives in the Al Qaida conflict - and it would come as a great surprise if the same were not true in the case of Syria that we are dealing with today.

The question does not seem to be "If" there is a cognitive distortion in the Western narrative, but "Why". How is it possible that the world's only remaining superpower comes up with such a distored narrative? How can it be so blind to its own mistakes? How can a government follow an evidently self-defeating policy even though it knows that there is an alternative path of action? Such questions have been asked before with regard to other similarly compelling politica paradoxes. Why is it that governments pursue policies contrary to their own interests - from Vietnam over the counterproductive War on Terror all the way to Syria?

The lesson from this kind of thinking leads to a simple conclusion even if that may be hard to realize in practice: let us elect more intellectually capable leaders, or, if that does not work, let us at least try to educate those in power to the highest degree possible with the best adivsors imaginable. And maybe, one or the other of our leaders could see a talking therapist.

An alternative approach would suggest that what seems self-defeating, dumb, and ineffective might look irrational at first sight only, but reveal a certain sense and rationality if seen in a larger context. Seemingly irrational phenomena in politics might turn out to be rational as part of a larger scheme. That is the idea of George Tsebelis in his book on ''Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics'' (1990).