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Terrorism’s source is the ideology of middle class rebellion.

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PART I

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN TO TERRORISM

“Ideas, forms of thought, and psychic energies persist and are transformed in close conjunction with social forces. It is never by accident that they appear at given moments in the social process.”

– Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia –

Introduction to PART I: The Faun’s Challenge

Why hasn’t somebody…?
At the outset, it is easy to see why the road we are about to take is less traveled. The front gate is locked. If you look beyond it, you will see the road itself, grassy and covered in leaves. Quiet, deserted, the road goes to the source of terrorism.
This essay is about that source, middle class rebellion. It is not about terrorism.
I wish I could take you directly to the source, and skip not just this introduction but all of PART I. Hard experience, unfortunately, has taught me otherwise. To discuss meaningfully the source of terrorism requires a tectonic shift in certain perceptions before — not after — we arrive at our destination. That shift starts here, at the entrance.
There are several keys to the gate. One of them is the experiment performed in this introduction. To my knowledge, the experiment has never been performed before. It is intended for a particular type of reader I know is out there. I taught hundreds of them at the University of Florida. It concerns something I wish somebody had shown me when I was a student; they would have spared me a multitude of wrong assumptions and misplaced values, of false leads, of transplanted thinking about middle class rebellion, the source of terrorism
Not faraway, there is another road. I think it is the first road Robert Frost saw and considered taking, the road more traveled that bends in the distant undergrowth. The experiment about to be performed involves a small forest creature Robert Frost might have seen had he taken that road: a faun, a Roman deity that is half-man, half-goat. Or, perhaps, thought he had seen…
Will the experiment work? Undoubtedly, some readers already have other keys and are inside the gate. If you are one of them, you are most likely not from the middle class. In that case, you will probably conclude that The Faun’s Challenge is kicking a dead horse. If so, I apologize. However, I am not sorry for conducting the experiment. Why no regrets? Two reasons:
First, some things should not be left only to the mind to see. They must be shown openly, directly, immediately, to the heart. That is the only way I know to question meaningfully the usual way of seeing the source of terrorism — a way that prevails among you who are reading these words and which is part of the very problem you seek to correct. A way that makes you pretty much like them.
And second, to those who see themselves already inside the gate, a word of caution is in order. When you wake up tomorrow, you might want to have someone look you over. You may have hoof marks running up and down your back.

If you are like me, you find viscerally obscene the very idea of brainwashing. Your values and ideas — your families, schools, and churches all tell you — make up your unique, individual personality, viz., who you “really” are. Personal and private — unless you decide otherwise — your values and ideas are often associated with a divine soul, ageless, timeless, immortal. Why that association does, should, or must exist, is unclear. In the end, we are told, the ghost in the machine cannot be explained. It is an enigma wrapped in “the miracle of life.”
If your values and ideas are part of a transcendental soul connected to a transcendental entity — e.g., God, history, destiny — it stands to reason that if they were somehow secretly replaced by something fabricated in the outside, everyday world — if you were brainwashed — then you would not be yourself but a zombie, a slave. Somebody would have drained away your genuine self and poured into your brain box some sort of political slush. A monstrous hoax would have been perpetrated in which you would be thinking with somebody else’s brain. That hoax is the theme of numerous science fiction and horror books and movies, among them 1984, “Village of The Damned,” and “The Stepford Wives.”
For you, the situation is clear: either your values and ideas are your own or they are somebody else’s. The sacred individual versus society and its profane indoctrination: it is an either-or proposition. There is no other possible option.
If you think like that, then we disagree.
In fact, I will go further and say you have been misled — “brainwashed,” if you like. I will show you how your either-or thinking and extreme individualism are socially programmed — the very thing you deny and detest. By the way, they are also major parts of terrorism’s source. In fact, terrorism cannot exist without them.
For now, though, are you already a robot? You are not sure how the programming is taking place, but your intuition tells you that it is happening, and not just in North Korea. Perhaps, at times you wonder if you have already been brainwashed, “processed.” But if you wonder about it, you are not a robot — not yet. No robot wonders how deep is a lake, how old is starlight. The reason is simple: to program wondering would risk subverting the programming itself.
So, is there an eternal, transcendental, unique soul inside you? Thousands of years of debate have arrived at one, apparently final conclusion. The ghost in the machine can neither be proven nor disproved. All I can do is show that even if the ghost is real, there are other realities which are also real…
To start with, to those who are absolutely convinced that their ideas and values are individual and sacred, I ask you to ponder the following possibility: what if the very idea you hold so dearly, that your ideas and values are individual and sacred, was not your own idea at all, but instilled from outside? Puzzling? Moreover, what if that same outside source existed not only for your ideas and beliefs but also for many of what you consider your most intimate impressions and judgments, feelings and intuitions, perhaps even some sensations? Impossible? Finally, what if that outer source was neither God nor the semi-divine wheels of history or destiny, or any other transcendental force, but simply the greater society, the one you see and hear and smell everyday? Diabolical? Yes, you answer, because when all is said and done, the individual is sacred and unique, the ultimate kernel of value, of meaning, of Truth.
If you believe your ideas are truly individual and not social in origin, that they are independent in the fullest sense of the word, then — I will say it again — you have been programmed. On the most rudimentary level, ideas consist of words, and words are social in origin. You did not invent them; in fact, your idea that ideas are not social in origin consists of words, six of them to be precise; therefore, it cannot exist apart from society.
No society\no words\no ideas: I realize that pathway will strike a particular type of reader as cold, soulless. Hence, for those readers, I offer a way to experience directly a basic fact of existence. It concerns your identity.
I invite you to accept The Faun’s Challenge. It is the experiment I mentioned that unlocks the front gate.
The Faun’s Challenge concerns one of the most beloved artists in the world, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). I have often wondered if Robert Frost had Gauguin in mind when he wrote “The Road Not Taken.” Half-French, half-Peruvian, the son of a journalist, Gauguin quit his cozy bank job in 1881, separated from his well-off wife, and took off to pursue an artist’s life. As to why he did it, here is his celebrated answer: “I wanted to establish the right to dare to do anything.” The financial and personal sacrifices Gauguin made attempting to establish that right are as legendary and monumental as the South Sea Islanders he painted in their color-saturated paradise.
Paul Gauguin. The right to dare to do anything. Sacrifices. Take note of your thoughts and feelings about those subjects. Courage? Admiration? Foolishness? Remember them.
Fortunately for us, Gauguin did not limit his art to painting.
In 1997, Douglas Druick, the chief curator of the Art Institute of Chicago, saw “The Faun,” a ceramic sculpture based on a drawing in Gauguin’s sketchbook, in the home of a London art dealer. Druick bought “The Faun” for around $125,000. The seller had acquired it at a Sotheby’s auction in 1994, for £20,700. As for the authenticity of the work, Sotheby’s had a letter from the prestigious Wildenstein Institute in Paris confirming that “The Faun” was included in its forthcoming catalogue raisonné, the authoritative list of known works by Gauguin.
What does the sculpture mean? Druick wrote that the “potentially phallic tail, but parted legs reveal the absence of the often flaunted sign of a faun’s virility, resulting in an aura of impotence. Gauguin evidently linked this iconography to his failing relationship with [his Danish wife] Mette.” The Institute’s curator of sculptures, Ian Wardropper, wrote that the features of “The Faun” were “bound up with the artist’s self-image as a ‘savage.’” Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, the world’s leading expert on Gauguin ceramics, concluded that “The Faun” was “among Gauguin’s most satirical” works.
Sexual impotence. Savage. Satire. Once more, take note of your thoughts, feelings.
If you find the sculpture disturbing, intriguing, you are in good company. “The Faun” was included in one of the most highly praised and popular art exhibitions in the world, “Van Gogh and Gauguin,” 2000-2001. You may have been among the thousands of people from the general public, critics, and curators the world over who admired “The Faun” along with all the other artwork by two of the most revered artists of all times.
All the other artwork. What made “The Faun” so deserving of special attention was that it was not sculpted by Gauguin in 1886, but by Shaun Greenhalgh of northern England, in a garden shed in the 1990s. Greenhalgh was a member of a family of con artists. While on trial for forging another sculpture, he confessed to sculpting “The Faun.” He was convicted in December 2007, and sentenced to prison.
And so, whomever you are, along with all the art critics and curators worldwide, you were had.
As for the technical and artistic merits of “The Faun,” all the experts agreed that it was a creative, well-executed work. But perhaps the greatest tribute is to note a simple fact: if Greenhalgh had not been caught in another forgery case, “The Faun” would most likely still be on display as a Gauguin.
Fraud. Forgery. Counterfeit. Once again — and for the final time — take stock of your thoughts and feelings. If you are from the Western world, most likely your reactions are disappointment, anger, a sense of betrayal. You may also feel like rejoicing, applauding Shaun Greenhalgh for having fooled a bunch of feigning and distaining connoisseurs and collectors. Being in it only for the money, the “bastards got what was coming to them.” But whatever your reactions were, “The Faun” today is exactly the same sculpture that the Vincent van Gogh and Gauguin exhibition displayed to thousands of adoring eyes. Whether sorrow or joy, or both, your ideas and feelings about the sculpture changed the instant I revealed it to be a hoax, not because the sculpture changed, but because you have certain assumptions and values about art, about corruption, about authenticity, about sacrifice, about rebellion, about the road less traveled. We know that your assumptions and values are cultural givens — not eternal truths, not parts of some unchanging “human nature” — for one, very simple reason: not all cultures share them. Ancient Egypt, for example, valued copying in its art, which remained basically unchanged for two thousand years, 2600 to 600 B.C. Originality, art as the expression of the artist’s individual genius, art as an agent of change: such beliefs are relatively recent inventions still not found everywhere.
Your reactions come from a particular constellation of ideas, values, feelings, and attitudes, or ideology. It is an important part of the culture in which you grew up. Again, not all cultures are alike. Other cultures do not share your reactions to art forgery. I know how hard it is for Western readers even to imagine that people in other cultures could care less if an artwork is “genuine.” Two examples will illustrate my point:
(i) While working in the office of The Governor of New Mexico, I became involved in major amendments proposed to The Indian Arts and Crafts Act. The market for American Indian goods is enormous, and scammers circle around it like ravenous buzzards. The practical problems, however, in determining what is genuine Indian arts and crafts are as huge as the market itself. For example, if an Indian strung a necklace of beads imported from Formosa, you would cry “Hoax!” But if Indian arts and crafts must be 100% Indian-made from start to finish to be genuine, what is to be said of an 1800s squash blossom necklace containing silver not from some legendary Indian mine but from the good old U.S. Mint, in the form of melted nickels? What about Navajo rugs containing not only yarn from wool from Indian-bred sheep grazing bucolically in mountain meadows but also strings from uniforms of Federal Soldiers killed in combat? I have seen those cases, and plenty more. In trying to come up with a working definition of what is genuine in American Indian arts and crafts, you are wrestling with an 800-pound marshmallow.
I will let you in on a secret. In private, the Indians with whom I worked all expressed this opinion: why worry about it? If you truly like a necklace, even if it is not genuine, buy it. And if you do not like it, do not buy it even if it is genuine.
(ii) Two decades later, I heard the same viewpoint expressed a world away, in Moscow’s Vernisage flea market. We were wandering in a myriad of booths selling шкатулки, the highly prized, miniature lacquered boxes. An Irishman in our group wondered aloud if the boxes were really hand painted, as all the vendors claimed, or if some bore photographic reproductions. “What difference does it make,” a Russian friend responded, “as long as you find them beautiful?”
A cross-cultural experience will quickly show how your Western reactions differ from those of people from other cultures. That experience will show something else: your reactions are highly predictable precisely because they are not unique and individual but common and social.
Karl Mannheim’s observation quoted at the start of this chapter, then, that “ideas, forms of thought, and other psychic energies” do not occur in isolation from society, is compelling. Whom you are — and that includes your ideas and values — is to a large degree — although not entirely — created and shaped by society. You cannot escape it; in fact, the idea of escaping it was created by society. Among those socially created ideas and other energies are your ideas, feelings, and beliefs about terrorism and its source. Most likely, you acquired them on the road more traveled. If so, their source is The Official Explanation, a hallmark of Western ideology and the subject of Chapter One.
An understanding of ideology is crucial to our subject because terrorism is the outcome of an ideology. As Chapter Three will explore, every ideology has unconscious roots. That means it operates autonomously: it controls you; you do not control it. That is precisely what The Faun’s Challenge was intended to show. You experienced firsthand, only a moment ago, the astounding power of ideology in the way your thoughts and feelings about “The Faun” changed drastically in the course of a single sentence revealing it to be a hoax, and did so beyond your control and independently of the sculpture itself, which is the same as the day it left Shaun Greenhalgh’s garden shed. Could an ideology with similar – indeed, even greater — power be the source of terrorism? This essay explores that question.
We will return to Paul Gauguin in PART III. If you are like me, you will conclude that the man who worked to establish the right to dare to do anything created a treasure no museum can hang on its walls.
Having passed The Faun’s Challenge, you now have the key: most of your ideas and values — including those pertaining to terrorism — come from society.
With full recognition of that simple truth, you are past the front gate.

Read more about The Source of Terrorism: Middle Class Rebellion and Thomas Belvedere HERE.

Copyright 2008 Thomas Belvedere. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.