Nothing Osama Bin Laden Did Was Wrong
The Gist: Everyone looks at the world differently, and even the most evil among us believe in what they’re doing.
This weekend, September 11th, marks the tenth anniversary of the greatest act of courage ever enacted by man. The most incredible and elaborate scheme ever concocted and executed under great risk and against all odds.
A day when the underdogs stood up to the establishment and said, “We will not go lying down.” A true David versus Goliath story. Today is a day for celebration.
At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what Osama Bin Laden would say if he were still around.
For the rest of us, it marks the day life changed for the worse, forever. The day when happiness and peace were suspended and replaced by fear and sorrow. Life would never feel quite the same again, and we’re not sure if things will ever go back to normal. For the vast majority of us, this weekend is a time for mourning, remembrance and a promise to ourselves to never let something like that happen again.
Who’s right?
Morality can be pretty murky waters to tread in. But in this case, it’s pretty cut and dry; the attacks on September 11 were just that—attacks—and were undeniably wrong. They demonstrated a complete lack of respect or compassion for human life and were a step backwards for society as a whole.
But the fact remains that nothing Bin Laden did was wrong… in his eyes. And as long as that fact remains, it doesn’t really matter how we see it, does it? As long as we continue to look at and try to fix problems like these from our own perspective, there’s a great risk that they’ll keep happening.
This affects all of us together on a large scale, but it’s a problem for each of us in everyday life as well.
How do we solve it?
What You Don’t Know You Know, and What You Think You Know You Don’t Know
I usually think I’m a pretty smart guy (no laughing!). The truth is, most of us think we’re pretty smart. And most of us are pretty smart. At least most people reading this—the latest scientific studies show that Riskology.co readers are well above average in the brains department.
Little do we realize, this is a big problem.
Because we think we’re so smart, we think that not only do we know ourselves better than anyone else knows us, we also think we know everyone else better than they know themselves. This is the illusion of asymmetric insight.
Do you see the contradiction here? If you put two people together, they’ll both think that they know themselves and the other person better than the other. This is, of course, impossible.
Ever had a friend that just couldn’t get their life together? You probably knew exactly what they needed to get back on track. You probably even told them a few times. Maybe they even listened once when you wouldn’t stop offering advice.
How’d that turn out?
The truth is that we don’t actually know what we think we know about the people around us. We just think we do.
Let’s go bigger.
When Osama Bin Laden and his band of goons attacked the United States that fateful day ten years ago, the world was shocked. Most of us had never experienced anything like it before. It was tragic, it was sad, it was life changing. We couldn’t understand why anyone would do something like that. So we tried to explain it. The answer we came up with was:
Osama Bin Laden hates our freedom. Therefore, he attacked us with the hope that he could make us afraid and take our freedom away from us.
Osama hates freedom. End of story. It crossed very few people’s minds that Osama might not actually care about freedom, and that there might be another explanation.
It crossed very few minds that for many years we trained a snake to bite our enemies without realizing that you can’t train a snake to bite a specific person, only to bite. When the snake ran out of people to bite, it turned back towards us.
The World From Another View
This isn’t to say that the people who suffered that day and still suffer today deserved what they got. Not at all. This is a sensitive subject for many people, and I don’t want to give the wrong impression.
But it is to say that by trying to fix this problem by looking at it from our own perspective—obviously we must know Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda better than they know themselves—we set the course for ten more years of hardship and losses that may not have been necessary.
And if we continue to look at the problem from our own limited viewpoint, we may be in for another ten (or more), because a war on terror, much like a war on drugs or homelessness or hunger or any other abstract concept can’t actually be won.
We can’t fix problems from this approach—only treat the symptoms.
Remember the friend of yours we talked about earlier? If you knew them so well and knew exactly how to solve their problem, why hasn’t it worked yet? If it did work, why do they already have another problem?
If you want a problem to go away, you have to look at it from the perspective the person causing it, not yours.
We chose to believe that Osama Bin Laden hated our freedom because that was an easy explanation to understand and it made us feel comfortable. It made the next step easy to find.
But the real answer lies somewhere else—somewhere uncertain. Uncertainty makes us uncomfortable, so we avoid it. And in avoiding it we also avoid a real, lasting solution.
The Bottom Line
If you really want to help your disorganized friend get things together, then you have to actually help them search for the real problem that needs fixing.
In the same vein, if we want to prevent the next generation of Osama Bin Ladens from coming to power, then we have to dig below the surface and understand that the problem has little to do with freedom hating.
We have to admit that we don’t necessarily know people as well as we think we do. We have to turn off the propaganda and start looking for what causes the propaganda.
We have to stop looking for everyone else’s blind spots and start recognizing our own.
Most of all, we have to look deeper for the real motivations of people beyond just what we think they are and realize that if you’ve ever felt misunderstood, then you’ve probably also misunderstood someone else.
Osama Bin Laden was evil incarnate. There’s no doubt about that. But, if we’re willing to look, there’s a lesson that can be learned from someone like him that will teach us much about how we look at other people, approach big problems, and understand ourselves.
For now, though, may you remember this weekend in whatever way you see fit. See you on Monday.
~~~~~
Image by: ssoosay