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St Francis Magazine Vol 8, No 4 | August 2012 their religion by defining the “other” with isolation, humiliation and even death. Stigmatized groups are Jews, Christians, and Sabaeans, who ultimately have been defined as infidels (kafir) to be subjugated through the poll tax (jizyah) or to be killed. 9.4 Fear and Distrust Among Iranians a culture of fear and distrust is endemic. Bar-Tal identifies two types of fear reaction: results of cues, which directly imply threat and danger, and conditional stimuli that are nonthreatening in their nature (Bal-Tal 2001, 603). Fear is stored in memory and dominates and controls thinking and prolonged experience of fear causes overestimation of dangers and threats. His research reveals a tendency “to cause adherence to known situations and avoidance of risk, uncertainty, and novel situations; it tends to cause cognitive freezing, which prevents openness to new ideas.” (ibid, 604) He also suggests that societies may develop collective emotional orientations. Intractable conflict tends to dominate the collective fear orientation, and thus becomes embedded into the collective memory over time. Fear often becomes contagious. Oversensitized by fear, a society tends to misinterpret cues and information as signs of threat and danger, searching for the smallest indication in this direction, even in situations that signal good intentions. The fear also leads to great mistrust and delegitimization of the adversary because of its harmful acts and threats. (ibid, 609) The culture of fear and distrust appears to be an underlying reason for the disharmony and conflict so prevalent in Iranian fellowships. Cultural anthropologist Patai states that discord in the Arab world has always been present since pre-Islamic days. At the slightest provocation, violent verbal abuse and threats erupt, which easily degenerate into physical violence. The situation is complicated by the fact that “unity” is merely a very abstract and remote ideal, while strife has its historical antecedent and underpinning in the age-old Arab virtues of manliness, aggressiveness, bravery, heroism, courage, and vengefulness, which have been extolled by poets for more than thirteen centuries and survive in the Arab’s con- St Francis Magazine is a publication of Interserve and Arab Vision 424
St Francis Magazine Vol 8, No 4 | August 2012 sciousness, predisposing him to conflict even though he believes in Arab unity and brotherhood (Patai 2007, 239). Donna Hicks explains one of the dimensions to protracted ethnic conflicts in quoting Herbert Kelman: Threats to identity create a zero-sum view of the conflict, where one’s very existence seems inextricably linked to the negation of the other. An acknowledgment of the identity of the other is perceived as an act of self-destruction, as recognizing the experiences of the other fundamentally brings into question one’s own interpretation of history, the conflict, and of the responsibility one holds for the past, present, and future shared realities (Hicks 2001, 129). Donna Hicks has noted that tolerance to uncertainty and ambivalence is a way of measuring egocentrism. “The more one steadfastly holds onto beliefs, especially when there may be disconfirming evidence, the more egocentric (embedded in one’s own perspective) is one’s understanding of the world.” (ibid, 135) Added to the equation is that Iran ranks on the lower range in the GLOBE sample for assertiveness. “That is, Iranians are less confrontational and aggressive in social relationships.” (Dastmalchian, Javidan, and Alam 2001, 540) When someone suffers from a history of traumatic threats, an overload to the senses takes place. Hicks believes that the assimilation/accommodation process shuts down in an effort to stabilize core beliefs. The process causes the beliefs to become, ‘rigid and extremely resistant to change, complexity is lost, certainty of our assessment of what is “right” rises, and the feeling of ambivalence about what we “know” is lost.’ (Hicks 2001, 137) She describes the defense mechanism of self-preserving/other-annihilating as being revenge and violence threatening the other. The survival mechanism under perceived threats of trauma and humiliation are: (a) closing down of the learning process; (b) certainty about one’s beliefs solidifies and becomes rigid; (c) the need to place blame or deflection of responsibility; (d) breakdown in social interaction through retreat; (e) breakdown in trust; and (f) reaction of revenge as a survival mechanism. (ibid, 137-141) St Francis Magazine is a publication of Interserve and Arab Vision 425
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