remembering 9/11 is a form of subliminal terrorism

A threshold (or limen), is the point of intensity at which the participant can just detect the presence of, or difference in, a stimulus. Stimuli with intensities below the threshold are considered not detectable (hence: sub-liminal). Stimuli at values close enough to a threshold will often be detectable some proportion of the time; therefore, a threshold is considered to be the point at which a stimulus, or change in a stimulus, is detected some proportion part of the time. There are two kinds of thresholds: absolute and difference.

in attempting to remember 9/11 what we do is not just remember the heroism but also the treachery of this event. but does the heroism lie with the bombers? because they too believed that their act was an act of God. or were the enemies the buildings and structures and the people in them necessary collateral? don’t me get wrong, i think the act of terrorism is evil. what the terrorists did is what it meant to bring hell to earth.

in psychophysics there are are series of tests that the psychoanalyst administers to the subject to test their ability to respond to a set of changing stimuli, they call each response a threshold – a liminal space. it is to test our response to physical stimuli and the behaviour that materializes because of them. if a stimuli is not/can not be responded to it is said to be subliminal. quite simply psychophysics is about how attentive we are to things like audio/sound and visual stimuli, although not exclusive to the two. i would also say this is how we all relate to the world as subjects general.

that there is much about the world we don’t recognize because we have been conditioned not to. i also redefine stimuli to include things within society, such as absolute value (i.e., how we define human value, how we define relationships, how we define truth and etc.).

in the case of the terrorists they were not able to respond to the stimuli of universalized human value. to them, those who upheld a different worldview then them were the real terrorist. they reversed and over-relativised human worth. in the realm of psychophysics, the did not recognize the human next to them, to them their worldview created those outside of their paradigm as subliminal enemies. they were not able to cross the threshold that all of humanity is valuable. even them, despite their choices.

it is definitively true when christ utters that we must love ourselves before we love our neighbour. and this isn’t some rom-com idealistic notion of self-love, but rather a risky sacrifice of self for the sake of self. i use the word agape here, the violent understanding of love that calls all to die to themselves metaphorically. terrorism is a selfish act.

but so is remembering it. because all of our energy is spent on rehashing the tragic events before the response. we cannot fully remember without remembering the details. this is the tendency in traumatic events. the inability to forget the whole. think about a relationship where two people break up, we do not assume that their whole relationship was bad, but rather it was a relationship that was peppered with good and bad. and in the occasional memory of a past relationship what happens is the whole person is brought to the forefront, the being of the person is not fragmented due to the memory. the person is still intact although the person might only have a ‘good’ memory between him/herself and their previous relationship. this is the same with remembering traumatic events, to remember the good (i.e., those who died, those who survived, the national response of cohesion and etc. ) you have to remember the bad. to some this might seem obvious, but why is this important? why is this not beneficial?

closure. we don’t allow the memory to heal. we act as if the people are still alive when they are not. we simply reinforce the events and quite possibly encourage the same behavior to re-occur, almost a sort of memorial worship of not just the victims but of the terrorists, whether we mean to or not. remembering is not a form of healing, forgetting is. this is not to say that we must forget every traumatic event of never learn from it or to never remember those we love, but it is to say that the best way to heal is to defiantly continue onward, not as if the event happened, but as if the event does not have the last word. remembering says it does.

jesus at one point says something to this effect ‘you have heard it was said, but i say’… a simple way to explain this would be a paradigm shift. the claim that what was before (a memory;remembering the law and etc.) is now superceded by what is now. that somehow remembering is a form of living in the past and an advocacy of all the things that that particular idea stood for. and it is also not a forward motion of any kind, in fact, it is a step back into the past. it is a retroactive embrace of what was before rather than what is ahead. forgetting is not leaving the trauma behind it is embracing it as a shaper of current character rather than some past event to adore. i think the other treachery most seem to be fine with is how nationalistic it is to remember 9/11.

how it fortifies the communal identity to the point of self-righteous nationalism, and to me, this is the worst form of terrorism, the kind that is embedded in our psyche when we drive by and see flags hanging arrogantly from our houses and so forth. ultimately we proclaim we are the ‘greatest nation on the earth’. but by doing so we set ourselves apart as the deities of the global world and thereby separate ourselves as the gods who rule outside of the universe, as some objective judge. nationalism ostracizes and does not build up or provide healing. nationalism promotes the every tribalism that originated in the mindsets of most of the terrorists, so in a sense, to continually endorse some nationalistic memory of a tragic event is to participate in a terroristic act on a subliminal level. we might want to rethink this….