We should take the outside view and look at other governments that had "crazy" ideologies and ask if the leaders of these governments really believed these ideologies. The Nazi leaders were mostly sincere in their beliefs, as were many but not all of the communist leaders (Lenin and Trotsky certainly were true believers in what they professed, while Mao and Stalin were probably cynical opportunists.) My guess is that most of the Christian European monarchs who claimed a divine right to rule really did believe that they were God's instruments.
let us assume, that the top leadership of ISIS is composed of completely rational and very intelligent individuals
Of the sort that casebash assures us cannot exist? The imaginary competence of fictional rational heroes? Top human genius level?
No. These all amount to assuming a falsehood.
- The premise of this article is wrong. The ISIS are really just a bunch of idiots, and their apparent successes are only caused by the powers in the region being much more incompetent than ISIS
Another straw falsehood to set beside the first one. All of this rules out from the start any consideration of ISIS as they actually are. They are real people with a mission, no more and no less intelligent than anyone else who succeeds in doing what they have done so far.
There is no mystery about what ISIS wants. They tell the world in their glossy magazine), available in many languages, including English (see the link at the foot of that page). They tell the world in every announcement and proclamation.
"Rationalist", however, seem incapable of believing that anyone ever means what they say. Nothing is what it is, but a signal of something else.
I have not seen any reason to suppose that the...
You don't win ideological Turing tests by speculated about possible theories which you can came up with in the ivory tower. You instead need to read about the actual reasoning of the other side.
With ISIS the best article is likely Graeme Wood's What ISIS Really Wants. If you generally want to understand radical Islam Sayyid Qutb's Milestones is an insightful book as it lays out the general doctrine of modern Salafi jihadism.
ISIS does have intelligent leaders but those leaders also happen to be very religious. If you don't understand that religious framework I don't think you will succeed at winning any ideological turing test.
Memes are subject to evolution. I would expect that fanatics are selected, to a certain extent, for fanaticism that happens to work in a way conducive to spreading the fanaticism. So it's not really inconsistent to point out that they have standard goals such as religious fanaticism and lust for power, yet to note that they do "rational things". After all, any group of fanatics who want power, but act in ways that are sufficiently irrational as to be ineffective, never would have become known except as a historical footnote.
(Note that this doesn't mean that every single thing they do is "rational", just a couple of the top ones. It is consistent that ISIS makes people skeptical of Islam and prevents Islam from spreading to Europe, because other groups are also ineffective at spreading Islam to Europe and not being very good at it either doesn't put ISIS at much of a competitive disadvantage.)
"left-leaning political elite in Europe encouraging the acceptance of and submission to Islamic culture in Europe "
I can't recall any politicians encouraging my submission to Islam.
You're right that this is hotly debated, because some people are very confident that there is a systematic process of kowtowing to Islamic immigrants (because of some sort of left-leaning ideology) and some other people are very confident that there isn't (and that the first lot are claiming there is because of some sort of right-leaning ideology).
It seems to me that the sensible thing to do, if you're aware of this hot debate and want to avoid a firefight, is not
but
It is easy to think of the ISIS as just a bunch of lunatics who kill people because they believe God told them to do it,
That is an odd use of the word 'lunatics'. The great majority of the people who ever lived did things, and often killed people, because they believed God(s) told them (through intermediaries) to do it. The particular acts of ISIS are not very unusual in the broader span of history. Different but comparable acts of mostly- or partially-religiously-motivated mass genocide and other evils have happened multiple times in the 20th century a...
Well, I expect you're failing, yes. It is going to be futile to try to understand the Islamic State without understanding the philosophy of Al-Ghazali, the most influential Muslim scholar since Mohamed, the man accorded the honorific Hujjat al-Islam (Proof of Islam), and his doctrine of occasionalism.
This is going to be particularly hard on this site because the local "rationality" is rooted in the Aristotle-Averroes-Aquinas tradition, where we believe in things like natural laws that can be deduced by observation. And Averroes (Ibn Rushd) was ...
I'm going to underline that what you're trying to do isn't an ideological Turing Test. An ideological Turing Test is expressing your opponents point of view in such a way that they agree you've done a good job of expressing it.
This isn't a matter of speculating on motives, or even getting the motives right. It's a matter of becoming able to set aside your own point of view to express another point of view, accurately and non-ironically, .It's at least plausible that being able to pass the Turing Test will help with being able to communicate with and understand people you don't agree with.
Or you could, you know, look at the evidence each side presents.
I am 100% in favour of looking at the evidence. But that isn't a thing Val could have done to avoid arguments breaking out in the comments, because how carefully Val has looked at the evidence has essentially no bearing on whether others choose to argue about the issue. And it certainly isn't a thing Val could have done to avoid arguments while also expressing an unwillingness to get involved in those arguments because the only way Val's expertise thus acquired could influence the arguments would be through Val getting involved.
The Great Leap Forward increased Mao's power in the sense that it gave him much more control over of the lives of Chinese citizens, although it did cause him to lose favor among the Chinese elites.
Why couldn't they be both rational and honest religious extremists?
I never said they couldn't be.
However, I still struggle to understand you. Do you feel this article shouldn't have been written? Or do you disagree with what you believe to be my ideological views? I was never meant to state, defend or attack any ideology at all. Just to listen to interesting ideas and theories which maybe didn't occur to me before.
No, it wasn't.
It seems however, that the main point of this article was misunderstood. Maybe I didn't express it cleanly enough, and some of the remarks in it contributed to it being misunderstood?
With the list and my comments about the list my intention was not to state that "this is what they really want" or that "this cannot be what they really want". All I wanted was to start a discussion thread about possibly weird or unconventional ideas about what the true long-term goals of their leadership could be, assuming them to be very in...
My point is that instead of just declaring what I believe their goals and objectives are, I also presented my own doubts about them. Maybe I only should have listed those 4 possibilities without commenting, or maybe even left them completely out? I'm not arguing for or against nr. 2 being their true goal, I just presented them as possible choices.
Please elaborate. Where did I write about anyone that they "secretly agree with me"?
Also stop equating "doesn't agree with your worldview" with "being just crazy".
Why do you feel I did this? Actually I wrote the opposite: that a lot of people dismiss the isis, for example, as just being crazy. This whole article is about them not being crazy.
If you have a good model about them, please describe it.
Or is his failure to foresee the outcome merely evidence he was a bad planner? Did his ideology say anything he tried would succeed as long as his goals were correct? After he achieved a bad outcome, did he therefore modify his ideology to account for it?
Every strategy has drawbacks. If you prioritize avoiding arguments then indeed you have to accept having less influence than people willing to have those arguments.
So it could be that, given Val's actual preferences, avoiding arguments wasn't a good priority to have. But given Val's stated goals (avoiding distraction from the main point of the discussion), leaving the topic alone would have met then better than bringing up an inflammatory and distracting topic and then declining to discuss it.
It seems to me as if "don't bring up the distractingly infl...
Perhaps there are a blend of motivations. There are some true diehard believers. Some relatively lukewarm Pascal's Wager types. Some purely opportunistic charlatans.
Care to cite the relevant verse?
I don't think that passing around verses of the Koran is the way to have a conversation like this. I hold my opinion based on the analysis of the Atlantic article.
In this case we are talking about the scenario where an ISIS leader would say: "In the past we thought the Koran prospribed free healthcare about know we don't think so anymore."
It seems to me that a pre-requisite of talking about ISIS' motivations would be actually visiting the region and being involved with them first-hand, or else basing your opinion on information gathered from direct, reputable sources.
Right now most of the discussion on the internet - especially including this post - fail to meet this criterion. They are simply opinions based on opinions repeated by other uninformed persons which also repeat opinions from other uninformed persons. If I am wrong, then provide links to your sources.
In fact you could argue that...
...
- Trying to make their ideology more dominant (aka spreading Islam in general)
I find this the least likely as the main goal. Also, if this was the case, they are counterproductive. So far Islam was very successful in the last few decades to gain a bigger and bigger foothold in the Western world, helped both by demographics and by the predominantly left-leaning political elite in Europe encouraging the acceptance of and submission to Islamic culture in Europe instead of encouraging the immigrants to abandon their culture for the culture of the host nation
Dude, you don't own this forum. So you don't get to decide what is or isn't abuse of moderating power. And threatening the moderators is certainly not going to help your case.
Even with the current dramatic events the German government is still refusing to take any action and doing its best to downplay the incident.
It is darkly amusing that the govt that stood idly by while the sexual assault mobs were running wild, and then did their best to cover up the attacks, got busy cracking down today, turning the water canons on the people opposing their immigration policy.
ISIS is led by a cabal of wizards. The destruction they caused feeds into a spell designed by smart, rational magicians to create the Philosopher's Stone.
It is easy to think of the ISIS as just a bunch of lunatics who kill people because they believe God told them to do it, but if we take a closer look at how they are organized and how successful they are, (and especially how successful they were at the beginning), this seems to be an oversimplification. Sure, most of their lowest level fighters are probably belonging to the "brainwashed and crazy" group, but I guess the leadership is almost certainly not. They know and use modern media very well, they are effective at recruitment, advertising, organization, and secrecy. Their successes are aided by the fact that they know how we think much better than how we know how they think.
Most of what they do seem to be very rational from a utilitarian point of view: they destroy pre-islamic historical monuments (which previous Islamic theocratic governments left intact) to show their supporters that they are in control and that they are serious, they try to trick NATO and the Russians to commit ground troops, so they can recruit the less radical Muslims to defend their homes against "foreign conquerors", and they cater for both the religious fanatics, and for the opportunists. They have many mercenaries on their side, simply because they can pay them better than others in the region. They also gain recruits by promising them wealth and power, so not all their rhetoric is strictly religiously motivated.
With the most repeated assumptions about their true goals and motivations being "they just want power", "they are just crazy", and "they just enjoy being evil", it seems that we are failing the ideological Turing test.
Therefore, I suggest a thread similar to the "Crazy Ideas Threads": let us assume, that the top leadership of ISIS is composed of completely rational and very intelligent individuals, and let's try to guess what their true goals and motivations are. I have a number of ideas, but I can find many arguments both for and against them. I encourage you to criticize the ideas I came up with, and suggest your own theories.
1. The premise of this article is wrong. The ISIS are really just a bunch of idiots, and their apparent successes are only caused by the powers in the region being much more incompetent than ISIS
2. They want to create a sovereign nation and become its ruling elite.
The problem with this is that their current economic model is unsustainable in the long term. When conquering and looting new territory makes up most of your income, once you exhausted an area, you need to find new places to conquer. When you can no longer do it, your economy collapses. Until now, looting the towns they conquered, selling artifacts and robbing the banks found in the town made up a large part of their income. They have no real industry to speak of, except for selling the oil extracted by already existing infrastructure. If you think this is the real answer, please indicate a realistic economic model for the geographical area which is mostly defined by the power vacuum they managed to exploit, and which as of today seems to be mostly filled by them, making them unlikely to continue to gain significant new territories.
3. They just want to amass as much wealth as possible, and then comfortably retire to some secluded place.
The problem with this is that they made some of the greatest powers on the planet their enemies, who will have a high probability of finding and hunting them down if they, for example, just retire to a sunny beach of a tropical island.
4. Trying to make their ideology more dominant (aka spreading Islam in general)
I find this the least likely as the main goal. Also, if this was the case, they are counterproductive. So far Islam was very successful in the last few decades to gain a bigger and bigger foothold in the Western world, helped both by demographics and by the predominantly left-leaning political elite in Europe encouraging the acceptance of and submission to Islamic culture in Europe instead of encouraging the immigrants to abandon their culture for the culture of the host nations. However, the recent terrorist attacks, and the many atrocities committed by the recently arrived asylum seekers, while hurting European economy, will probably lead to Europe being more skeptical regarding Islam, which might reduce the chances of Islam peacefully and silently spreading. So these events, if indeed orchestrated by ISIS, might have been successful in harming the economy of their enemies, but I don't know what an effect they had on the spreading of Islam. I'm tending on believing in a negative effect, but I just don't know enough factors to know it for sure. I believe the violent attacks in the Western world are done mostly to show their own followers at home how powerful they are and how weak their enemies are.
Other, not necessarily rational motivations:
- they just saw an opportunity and exploited it, they have no long term contingency plans.
- they really believe that what they do will, in the long therm, benefit the people in the region.
Note: by presenting the above theories, my goal was not to claim them to be true or false. My goal is to listen to interesting ideas and theories which maybe didn't occur to me before.