The Grand Universal Illusion. By Michael J. Totten. World Affairs, February 13, 2013.
(See Morsi and Egypt here.)
Totten:
Kristof
assumes the Chinese government is at least marginally interested in opening and
reforming Pyongyang because he, like plenty of Americans—myself included—wish
to see reform in non-democratic countries aligned with the United States. He’s
projecting our own psychology onto Beijing.
This
is what Professor Richard Landes calls cognitive egocentrism. “The act of
empathy,” Landes explains, “can often become an act of projecting onto another
‘what I would feel if I were in their shoes,’ rather than an attempt to
understand how the person with whom one is empathizing has reacted to their
situation, how they read and interpret events.”
People
do this sort of thing all the time. We do it to our family, friends,
colleagues, and neighbors. It’s hard not to. We also do it to foreign people,
and they do it to us.
Look
at the naïve early predictions about the Arab Spring. Cognitive egocentrism
explains at least part of it. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood was routinely
described in the Western press as a party of mainstream religious conservatives
who deeply believed in democracy and free markets, as if they were Egypt’s
version of the Republicans in the United States. Likewise, the kids in Tahrir
Square were seen as Egypt’s Democrats. Both assumptions were outrageously wide
of reality.
Middle
Easterners do the same thing to us. I couldn’t begin to count the number of
times I’ve heard the American government described in hysterically
phantasmagoric terms that would make even Noam Chomsky blush. A Syrian friend
of mine in the United States used to describe the British and American
governments as snakes (his word), not because he’s inherently anti-American but
because he was raised on propaganda by the house of Assad and because for the
first thirty years of his life he suffered under a regime that really was like a snake. For him, suffering
under a predatory snake-like government was a perfectly normal state of
affairs. He had never known anything else and assumed people everywhere were no
different. (I should add that he has been here long enough now that he no
longer thinks of the American government in these terms. A few months ago he
even said he misses George W. Bush, something I’d sooner expect Nancy Pelosi to
say.)
Plenty
of the Middle East’s ridiculous anti-American conspiracy theories are produced
by this sort of thinking. The Middle East is a place where real conspiracies
actually happen. Military coups, palace coups, secret police, assassinations by
unknown shadowy figures, election fraud, and massive official disinformation
are part of the everyday scenery. Because these things are tragically normal
over there, people feel helpless and paranoid. They also assume these things
are normal for everyone else, that the American government (along with every
other government in the world) is just as venal and corrupt and self-serving
and murderous as the governments of Bashar al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, and
Moammar Qaddafi. These people are projecting their own experiences of the world
onto us. They assume their experiences are universal. Until recently in human
history, their experiences were
practically universal.
