Stardate 20040504.1341

(Captain's log): I've written about the fact that we are actually engaged in a three-way war. It's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about, and I've come to the conclusion that the most important consequence of it is simply the recognition and acknowledgement that it is a three-way struggle. Many things have happened which are inexplicable under the assumption that there are only two sides.

I wrote about this in January (one, two, three, four, and this one is peripherally related). Each of the three sides in the war is a coalition, resulting in part from historical contingency. To a great extent, each one has spontaneously coalesced rather than being deliberately formed and deliberately structured. There is a significant degree to which each of the three should be thought of as "hive-minds".

Because each is a loose movement made up of disparate elements, and because each contains contradictory elements for reasons of historic contingency, it's actually quite difficult to come up with adequate names for them. And probably more than half of humanity is not aligned at all, or only very weakly aligned with any of the three.

Each of the three dominate in some places. Each has lesser presences in other areas. All have been engaged in a long-standing power struggle to try to take control in places dominated by one of the others.

And as a practical matter, each of the three is fundamentally incompatible with the others, in world view, policy, and attitude. As long as they exist they will continue to compete, not because they necessarily want to, but because they will not be able to avoid doing so.

One of the three sides is identified mostly with radical Muslims, who are engaged in Jihad to try to fulfill a perceived religious mandate to dominate the world. But some who have been part of that side have had other motivations, such as Saddam's pan-Arabism (which was essentially agnostic). Of the three, this force is also the most well organized and structured, and the only one which exists because of a deliberate campaign.

At one point I referred to this side as "Arab Traditionalism", but that was never a very satisfactory label. Some have called it "Islamofascism", but these days the term I'm most comfortable with (which is to say, not very) is "Islamism". One of the reasons I'm uncomfortable even with that label is that Islamism is not congruent to Islam. There are millions of Muslims who are not part of it. There are many Muslims who are strong supporters of one of the other sides, and some of those who do support it are not devout Muslims. Even so, of the three sides this one is easiest to perceive and characterize; they're all cloudy and indistinct, but this is the least indistinct.

Of the three sides, Islamism as a political force appeared the most recently, within the last 150 years.

The other two sides are derived from Western philosophical roots. For them I've had to invent my own names: "p-idealism" and "empiricism". "P-idealism" is short for "philosophical idealism", and probably the single most important influence on it is philosophical principle known as teleology. In January, here's how I described it:

One world view is known as teleology, which refers to a basic assumption that there's a fundamental elegance of design to the universe, a deep sense in which things are related so that outcomes are intellectually and esthetically pleasing. When things happen, it's not just the result of localized cause-and-effect; there's also a "final cause", a deeper meaning and source of it. And because of that, it all relates; everything is of a piece, and it's all part of an elegant overall pattern.

...One of the ways in which this all ultimately manifested was in the basic philosophy of idealism, which posits that the mind is the essential and central force in the universe. There are various ways this plays out; one extreme form is a kind of limited solipsism which says that reality is in fact whatever we believe it to be, and that there is no actual "objective" reality. But in less extreme forms, this still places the mind at the center of the stage.

In philosophy [idealism] refers to efforts to account for all objects in nature and experience as representations of the mind and sometimes to assign to such representations a higher order of existence. It is opposed to materialism. Plato conceived a world in which eternal ideas constituted reality, of which the ordinary world of experience is a shadow.

And that was why you could figure it all out: if you could somehow attune yourself to that higher order o