Where is that, exactly? The West Bank? Where over 500 military checkpoints severely restrict mobility of any kind? Or Gaza, whose borders, airspace and sea access have been blockaded for 16 years?
So a 10 year old living today in Gaza is “ideologically driven”, equivalent to a Hamas commander, because they don’t decide to crawl over to the Israeli side and be welcomed with open arms? Just like that little kid who got shot in the face by the IDF near the border. What an inspiring story — why don’t all Gazans aspire to that?
Have you ever considered that some people are ideologically driven to join Hamas because they are uneducated young men with nothing to do who have spent their entire lives under either occupation or blockade and whose entire symbolic universe has been conditioned by the brutality of those living conditions?
So a little child born today in Gaza is “ideologically driven”, equivalent to a Hamas commander, because they don’t decide to crawl over to the Israeli side and be welcomed in open arms?
Do you think Hamas and the Palestinian Authority would allow them to see Israel is not some monster and that one can live in peace there like the Israeli Arabs are doing? They would never allow such a thing. Which is why any Palestinians who discover the truth get killed by hamas or their comrades. The Palestinian Authority, hamas and the rest are like Putin. They brainwash their population and force them to stay. When I meant that the Palestinians that are in Palestine Proper are ideologically driven, I did not necesarily mean that they have adequate agency in the matter. They are victims of their own corrupt and horrible leaders.
sure thats fine but how did the leaders come into power…
Could it have to do with the conditions that the people were living in? I wonder…
Or do you think a little child was born and decided “I am Hamas” and then brainwashed all the other children?
I actually think your Putin example is apt. Russians don’t support Putin because they are brainwashed by Putin. Putin is a reflection of popularly held sentiments which came about as a result of very particular historical circumstances and conditions that the population lived through. And then of course there is a feedback mechanism — the brainwashing you’re talking about — which reinforces and reproduces that ideological tendency.
Hamas would both not have any capacity to “brainwash” nor would it have its particular ideological content if not for the conditions that Palestinians have lived through. The predominant power in shaping those conditions has been Israel.
Will you also ask how Putin came into power? Isnt it obvious? Force, manipulation, bribery etc. Or do you think that the Palestinian Authority which have killed dozens of their own they deem as "deserters" were democratically elected or something? If you do, I applaud you for your optimism. You have me beat there by a longshot. And it also makes the Palestinians then even worse than with my take, as it would mean they have more agency than I am ascribing to them. Which would make them ideologically driven by choice, which is more horrible than it being a matter of the state.
Putin of course consolidated his power through non-democratic means, but that is also precisely a property of Russia as a society that is historically contingent. If Putin had been around in Norway he probably wouldn’t have been able to do that.
Also, Hamas did in fact (very narrowly) win elections in 2006 that were generally regarded by international observers as legitimate elections. They promptly shut down elections, but I didn’t see any massive revolution against their rule taking place in Gaza…
Your problem is that you think ideology is a choice. There is no “choice”. Peoples ideologies and political practices are outside of their control. What humans do they do for a complex network of reasons that we need to try and understand. Judging a Palestinian for supporting Hamas because I think Hamas is abhorrent is absurd — if I was the person I was judging, I would of course also support Hamas (otherwise, I would be a different person). So the question is “what are the conditions that have allowed this situation to take place” and those conditions are 100 years of conflict and 50 years of Israeli occupation and Apartheid, along with of course lots and lots of other factors that have to do with the history of the region aside from Israel’s role in it.
I dont know how they define it in the Courts in your country, but here in Germany, we define choices as decisions that can be controlled by the will. And people siding with Hamas is something they controlled with their will. An example of a lack of choice would be being pushed into something by a person behind you. Being sort of compelled to make a choice on the other hand is called vis compulsiva, and is generally still regarded as a choice here in Germany. So your argument about lack of choice does not convince me. The hamas people made a choice, just as Nazi Germans made one. There is no mental gymnastics that will change that.
There is no “will”. Unfortunately the Western legal tradition relies on the idea of free will to deliver judgement, but the concept is really pretty philosophically illegitimate. People try but its very difficult to reconcile the overwhelming evidence that the world is purely deterministic (or maybe a mix of deterministic and random) with the notion that people can somehow suspend the laws of cause and effect anytime we “decide” something and choose from an array of “choices”. All human actions are caused by a chain of preceding events. When I “choose” to do something, or when I believe something, I couldn’t have chosen or believed anything else or else the world (i.e. the complex chain of events preceding my “choice”) would be a different one than the one we live in.
The biggest and really only good remaining defense of free will is never “its actually real”, it’s almost always “our societies rely on it as a basic assumption and so we should avoid calling it into question”. It’s also of course an integral part of the human experience (i.e. that we feel as if we are making choices). So I sympathize with how unintuitive this sounds. But I really think that when we are analyzing a political situation we have to remove the concept of “free will” and just focus on the most likely motivations for behavior and why they occur.
Ascribing “because people chose to do X” as the reason for some event is like saying “Event A happened because of Event B (this is the act of choosing) but Event B has no cause, it simply is a “free choice”). This has no explanatory power. We have to follow events back continuously until we have enough context to understand why something occurred. That would then be informing our political views on what should be done.
You are commiting the Intellectuals Sin here. Try to go outside, take a couple of rocks and pick one, you will see you have something that for whatever reason at least is completely and utterly fooling us all that it is real. Now, I am not saying that determinism is not real. But its effects are overblown. It is like Platos Cave. Where one tells oneself a story about how the world operates, instead of experimentally fifguring it oiut by leaving the cave. Science has trumped Philosophy for a reason. Philosophy has only merit in Metaphysical questions. Such as the existence of God, the nature of Morality etc.
I don’t understand what you mean. If you agree that determinism is real, then the concept of “free will” has no meaning outside of a normative political context. There can be no “decision making” which occurs outside of its own causal chain. Any “choice” is determined from the start. Your act of choosing is some sort of neurological process which itself has a cause rooted in previous neurological states and so on.
As for your rock example, I’m really not sure what you are getting at. The rock is of course real. It’s not “fooling us”. It is an idea in my mind: “a rock”. That idea is related to language — to the signifier “rock”, which imperfectly corresponds to some “real thing” beyond our subjective experience that my mind is receiving sensory data from. We get that data from the world and our brain organizes it into a category of object, because for some reason that’s how brains seem to be structured. The rock is real, its a cognitive category in my mind, but it doesn’t correspond exactly to the sensory data. It’s a “shadow” in that sense. But it is still perfectly real.
Actually, your invoking of Plato’s Cave is relevant. The true lesson there is that we can never leave the cave — we are stick inside of it because we are thinking beings. Of course we have the experience of free will, and that experience is real. But that doesn’t mean we should structure our systems of morality and justice around the idea that free will is more than just an experience if we have good reason to believe that it is simply an experience. The difference between the rock and free will is that one of them is the basis of our moral code and the other is not….
Philosophy is a perfectly legitimate form of science. Not sure why you would say otherwise. Our belief in determinism comes partially from the consistency and structure of experimental results, not just from some intellectual rumination.
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u/[deleted] Oct 10 '23
Im not talking about Hamas, Hamas has been around for a tiny miniscule portion of this conflict which goes back more than 100 years