What people don’t get about what yelling louder means

Yelling louder often means you’re going to lose or you fear you’re going to lose so you yell louder in the hopes that yelling will terrify the enemy. If you’re confident you’re going to win, you ‘speak softly’ because you ‘carry a big stick’. This form of yelling louder is exactly what PA President Abbas is doing. That has particular resonance in the Arab mind: you not only yell louder the more you are threatened with actual defeat, but the more absurd you become. That may sound mean. It is mean, in a sense, because I’m describing a cultural trait – not something built into them as humans but a cultural trait passed down through generations – which places tremendous value on what the group thinks of you. I’ve talked about this many times: the honor codes, the sexual codes, the controlling of women, all these and more define a set of expectations that people internalize. They feel a need to conform to those rules, the same as kids feel a need to like Star Wars because so many others do (and then you like Star Wars too and you’re sometimes not sure why you didn’t before). It isn’t that Abbas is becoming irrational but that his behavior is entirely rational in the context of a culture where evading responsibility. That’s where this gets interesting to me: the room of responsibility, the one that runs from acceptance to evasion of responsibility. You can accept lots of responsibility for things you didn’t do, while evading responsibility for all the things that didn’t work out. You can accept responsibility for your own actions, but not for the actions of others, so you evade those. This means you can say, ‘I had a great vision’ to accept responsibility, with the caveat that ‘but they ruined it’ or some other version of evading blame. In a society which believes in success, which is knocking out walls for an open concept, accepting blame can be a good thing because blame means you recognize a wall has been knocked down both in you and perhaps in larger society. In a restrictive society, one where your daughters’ sexuality reflects on your status, accepting blame is much more difficult because you have obligations to the group, things to do that are necessary to restore your status. That can include child murder, which is one of my favorite bits again: that the actual message of the Abraham/Isaac story is ‘don’t kill your children’ and specifically ‘don’t sacrifice your children; God doesn’t want that’. That this has become ‘be steadfast in your beliefs’ has twisted the meaning so it can be used by the best and the worst to justify their behavior. Back to Abbas: think of Saddam’s ‘Mother of All Battles’ line. He meant that if he lost, if they lost, it wasn’t their fault because they were overwhelmed in the mother of all battles. This means you can tell the story as a great resistance in the face of overwhelming odds – which is how Arab losses to Israel are turned into victories. It also means if you win, then you’ve claimed the most responsibility imaginable: the drive to over-state is fueled by both the responsibility you can attain and what you can evade. I’d take this not so much as Abbas losing his mind as Abbas losing, realizing that’s what’s happening, and wanting to evade the responsibility for the loss. He also wants to exaggerate his claims for specific responsibility: how he has not only fought against the greatest odds one can imagine but he has taken this struggle all the way back through history to claim a link in the chain of battles – all of them defeats, btw – to ancient Canaan. This is rational behavior. It’s insane outside the culture, but perfectly sane within it.