An article with the same title appeared in the Sunday, February 12 edition of The New York Times. The author, Kamel Daoud, writes about the extreme authoritarianism in the Arab World, it’s degradation of women and the destructive emotional,including sexual, consequences on the people. He alludes to the destabilizing effects of the Arab media. Influenced by the West’s media they peddle the promise of unattainable bodies of Lebanese singers and dancers and impossible sex to Arab youths. The Internet and religious TV shows have taken monstrous forms often devolving into the undisguised expression of the secondary, destructive layer of armored humans, a kind of porno-Islamism.
The writer, intuitively understands that the driving force behind suicide bombers originates from their frustrated sexual longing. Suicide is equated with the fantasied orgastic release.
The social breakdown that is currently happening in Middle East countries first started in the West around 1960, when Western society transformed from authoritarian to anti-authoritarian. This was heralded as the “sexual revolution.” When in 2011 it spread to the Middle East as the Arab Spring, it was hoped to bring freedom and happiness to the Arab world. In fact, it did exactly the opposite. It resulted in the hell on earth that we see today. This is a vivid example that armored people are incapable of living with the amount of freedom that they mystically long to be given to them by their leaders. To the degree that they are individually armored they need their armored social conditions to survive. The sexual chaos that is occurring in the Arab World is qualitatively the same but quantitatively worse than that which is happening in the West.
Before any real progress can happen in the Middle East and elsewhere, a distinction must be made between people’s feelings of genuine love that move outward unimpeded by armor from their biological core (“healthy sex”) and people’s incapacity to experience these feelings because of their armored condition (“sick sex”). Without making this distinction and dealing with its consequences, all “freedom movements” where ever they originate from will fail.
Neither Left Nor Right
The Emotional Plague
Charles Konia, M.D. 