Game Theory 2: Sorting Gods and Bullies (WWMD?)

Second of X Part blog on decision making, and how to deal with Boko Haram and other self-righteous bullies. Can understanding faith and belief help us understand the fanatic's game?   This essay was written over 2-3 hours in the middle of the night, and contains some big ideas that are going to have to be tamed and homogenized for public consumption.

Sorting Gods from Bullies

“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.”  ― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Jesus spoke in cool parables and analogies, and got into these Platonic debates (Pharisees trying to "test him").  He'd ask questions with "Does not...?" as the prefix.  It was nurture-logic.  Jesus used integrity, virtue, and nurture to elicit mercy towards people at the bottom of the pecking order.

The philosophy of mercy and charity went viral.  A mere thousand years or so later, that power was harnessed to build cathedrals, burn witches, and wage wars.   Today, Christianity has been made safe for the pecking order of the wealthy.

And we all know that that's what Boko Haram is about, it's about an under-performing group in a rapidly-developing nation.  It's about pecking order, and keeping women at the bottom.   It has about as much to do with Islam's teachings as the Ku Klux Klan, for all its crosses and robes, has to do with Christianity.  There's a perceived threat that a subjugated minority - women in the Sahel or African Americans in reform period Georgia - is left to ripen into mob justice.

Any pure religion can be harnessed to achieve bullboys ends.  Environmentalism, as it becomes a Taoist or Shinto expression of western ethics, must not consider itself immune.   Rural areas are not immune from heroin, small governments are not immune from embezzlement, and recycling non-profits are not immune from profit motives.

Televisions and computers are giving a voice to people - such as women in Nigeria - who were never allowed to even enter the mosques of power (any more than they can enter Catholic priesthood).  A group in power hundreds of years ago set up rules that limited access to expression of sermons and fatwahs, and affordable electronics are undermining the monarchies of communication.

Your continent here x

That's right.  Boko haram is a reaction to digital communication, grown from networks of surplus/replaced analog cell phone towers (replaced a decade ago on the US and Europe) and the used cell phones that communicate through them.   As Frederic Somda told the Fair Trade Recycling summit a year ago, in Burkina Faso, internet and cell phones are far more important than running water and paved streets.

It's a colorful game.

African Women Have Knuckles

There are many ways by which Northern stereotypes of "the south" and Western stereotypes of "the east" get mixed and shuffled - like hearts and diamonds called a flush.  It's not the color of the cards that proves the claim.  Clarissa Shields proteges from the USA will have a lot of competition in future olympic boxing matches.  As they get more integrated into African city economies, African women may be million dollar babies.

From LATimes:  Op-Ed:  The Heroic women of Africa are Standing Up to Boko Haram"

Yadji Moussa's niece in Yenwa

"As a woman and a mother, I pray for the safe return of all the abducted girls. I also applaud the strength of the women who continue to fight for them. They are African women — women who can function under the harshest conditions, who in the face of murder and rape continually stand up to fight. Strong. Resilient. Powerful. It is time for the world to put away the image of African women as victims and see them as the everyday heroes they are."

Leymah Gbowee writes this in conclusion to her op-ed in the Los Angeles Times this morning.  The headline is a breath of fresh air.   As awful as the images of disempowered African women are, as horrible as the statistics of rape and sex crime and modern slavery are, they do not mean African chicas are "weak".

Game Theory 1: What Would [Massively Intelligent Persona] Do?

WWJD, or "What Would Jesus Do?" was a welcome Christian riff about 15 years ago.  I looked it up in part because of the upsetting crisis of Boko Haram near the eastern Nigerian border, very close to the part of Cameroon I taught school in the 1980s.

The phrase "What would Jesus do?" (often abbreviated to WWJD) became popular in the United States in the 1990s and as a personal motto for adherents of Evangelical Christianity who used the phrase as a reminder of their belief in a moral imperative to act in a manner that would demonstrate the love of Jesus through the actions of the adherents.

What would Jesus do, or Muhammed do, about lunatic fringes in religions established in their names?

"Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy" - Aristotle

Boko is a Hausa word, and Hausa is a society which was massively splintered by Western lines-drawn-on-maps in Africa.  England and France drew Vertical lines (Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon west-east borders), whereas the African societies tended to follow latitudes associated with climates.   The band of Sahel and Sahara stretches longitudinally north of the forests and mountains to the south, and it's a big "Bantu-v-Islam" historical and geographical context ignored by historical cartographers. Of course, with no lines at all, the ports and trade would still have drawn economic maps and boundaries, and either way, north is the loser.