Are the powerful in the Middle East Inclined toward Immaturity

Submitted by GWK (United States), May 17, 2009 at 05:57

From the origins of Middle East history, there seems to be a lot of cruelty and selfishness in the region. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Judaism and then Christianity seemed so exceptional -- they were democratizing ideologies emerging from a world where democracy has little precedent.

One can look at a lot of leaders in Middle East history who had an infantile preference for self preservation and for excessive cruelty to others. (But then, one can find a lot in European's monarchies of the Pre-Reformation age where regent's behaved capriciously and cruelly. But in the end, Europe moved away from cruelty, and officially sanctioned sadism on the scale of the SS was an exception rather than the norm.

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