I know that the government is supposed to protect its citizens, but surely it doesn't deserve the blame for these terrorist attacks. The blame ought to fall on the organizations who carried these out.
no, it shouldn't, or at least not solely. if you plan to do something which anyone with half a brain could have told you (and, in fact, did tell you) would provoke a terrorist response, and then you do it anyway despite overwhelming opposition, you are responsible for the consequences. sow the wind, reap the whirlwind, and such.
The difference is that terrorism is carried out by individuals (people) with a will. They chose to attack Madrid.
you're focused to inappropriate and unrealistic degrees on individual choice and free will. simply put, while you could try to argue that in some highly abstract theoretical sense individual people "chose" to attack Madrid, in actual practice, those choices were predictable. it's like any other kind of crime: put in (set of social and economic conditions) X you will get crime rate roughly in the vicinity of Y. it's statistically predictable, and given that X produces Y, who really honestly cares who the individuals are who "chose" to commit the crimes and what their decision making process was? you knew that under certain conditions, a certain percentage of the population is going to commit a crime. if conditions were different, different percentages of people would choose to commit or not commit a crime.
let's say you have an ice cream store. each customer, theoretically, can choose any flavor they want. however, over time, you can reasonably say that out of 100 ice cream store patrons, roughly (and i'm pulling a number out of my ass here) 20 are going to order vanilla. yes, theoretically, they could all choose to order something other than vanilla, but we know that that's not actually going to happen, so we make sure we stock enough vanilla to accomodate those people. could any one of those 20 order something else? maybe, but they probably won't in practice. does this mean that their choice was predestined? is free will an illusion? does it even matter? just stock enough vanilla, or you don't get to bitch when you run out.
people in general have to ditch all this 18th century baggage about the sovereign individual making rational decisions, take a step back and start looking at human interactions as teh results of systems rather than the results of individual decisions. are statistical models and predictions off sometimes? sure. but really, most of the time, given enough data, they're the most useful tools we have. humans are meat blobs with binary computers in their heads, a series of on and off switches, and under certain circumstances certain decisions are going to be made regardless of who specifically ends up making those decisions just as surely as a coin flip is going to come up heads roughly half the time.
basically, foreign policy makers and world leaders and diplomats and governments and such, collectively make social systems that will produce terrorists as a by-product. if you create a niche for a terrorist, some angry young person will move into it. if the particular people who bombed Madrid didn't "choose" to become terrorists, someone else would have.
thus, if you want to stop terrorism, stop producing niches for terrorists. if you could do so, and you don't, then you bear a higher degree of responsibility than people who have little or no input in the political process (which, incidentally, causes a certain number of them to choose terrorism).
And people respond to incentives in predictable ways.
people respond to everything in predictable ways. that's my point.
Changing to a policy that accomodates them acts as a reward to them in ways that, say, changing policy to prevent climate change does not. If we were to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the air, the earth would not recognize that it is able to dictate policy. People, terrorist or otherwise, can recognize this.
it doesn't matter. it's not about punishing the guilty or rewarding the innocent. it's not about negotiation or justice or what-have-you. every political system you set up, every diplomatic position taken, every economic policy, should be expected to produce a certain amount of terrorism as a by-product. if you want less terrorism, change the rules the system is operating by so that it produces different results. terrorism is one variable in a complex equation. change the others, and it will change with it.
It is because they are people, and not simply mindless forces of nature,
i don't accept the distinction you're making. people, when looked at one a large scale (the scale of societies, nations, etc) behave no differently than any other system. the mindless/not-mindless distinction you're making doesn't hold up with actual behavior. |
