Nayef Al-Rodhan Quotes
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Addictive drugs misuse the brain’s existing pre-programming, activating reward mechanisms and extreme feelings of pleasure. When stimulated, the brain’s pleasure centres emit signals to repeat the behaviour. In this sense, the brain is pre-programmed to feel good.
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Security, stability and prosperity will depend on the application of the multi-sum security principle that captures the multi-dimensional aspects of security and insists on the centrality of global justice for lasting security.
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Each high point in the history of human civilisation has taken place where the conditions were ripe and has borrowed and built on the achievements of other cultures whose golden age may have passed.
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Indeed, collective triumph will also depend both on the application of reason and the recognition that a great deal of knowledge is indeterminate and may be temporally, spatially and perhaps culturally constrained.
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The history of human civilisation is a history of mutual borrowings.
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In other words, it is my view that the brain is preprogrammed to feel good (i.e., to seek a sense of well-being/gratification). This is what I term the gratification principle. This usually occurs as the result of instinctive salient/relevant acts or what we normatively decide are salient/relevant acts.
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Civilisational triumph is important because if it is not actively sought, conflictual relations between members of geo-cultural domains may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Morality, if present, should not be relied on because it will be trumped by self interest in most circumstances.
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International cooperation is required to prevent anarchic situations developing and the unmasking of ever-present brutality and injustice that results from fear for survival in such situations.
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Policies that assume that human nature is a tabula rasa (clean slate) should be reviewed and revised to reflect that man has an in-built genetic code for survival with no evidence for innate morality.
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Much of what we often consider knowledge is actually a point of view held without sufficient grounds: in a word, dogma.
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Globalization is a process that encompasses the causes, course, and consequences of transnational and transcultural integration of human and non-human activities.
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By promoting justice and thus the interests of the international community as a whole, a state will be able to make its influence over others sustainable and achieve its own national interest.
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Policies should take account of the emotional dimensions of human behaviour rather than assuming rational action.
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Human beings are emotional amoral egoists, driven above all by emotional self-interest. All of our thoughts, beliefs and motivations are neurochemically mediated, some predetermined for survival, others alterable.
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Almost every golden age of geo-cultural domains has been characterised by good governance, exchanges, borrowing, innovation and the adaptation of earlier contributions to forms of knowledge, and rationalism.
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Justice is paramount to civilisational triumph because of its centrality to human dignity needs, the success of individual geo-cultural domains and the well-being of human civilisation.
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Considerations of justice are also integral to efforts to generate transcultural security in the first instance and, ultimately, transcultural synergy.
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There is only one collective human civilisation comprised of geo-cultural domains and cultures.
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Focusing purely on extremism, whether in the Arab-Islamic world or the West, will not alleviate the root causes of tensions between members of different cultures. It will only alienate those who do not recognise themselves in those stereotypes, and generate fear and misunderstanding.
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Those who are outside the centres of power, because of the need for a positive and not simply a stable identity, are likely to find an independent identity appealing.
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Indeed, there is no evidence to suggest innate morality. It is therefore important to create the conditions under which the expansion of our moral communities may become more likely.
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Harmonious interstate relations will be guided by the paradigm of Symbiotic Realism that stresses the importance of absolute rather than relative gains.
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Cultural essentialism is, thus, intimately tied to power relations. Fixity, homogeneity and separateness are prioritised within an essentialist framework. Therefore, part of any effort to resist essentialism is recognising diversity within difference, contingency, mutability and connectedness.