Saudi Arabia Sentences Cleric to Crucifixion

[True Blue Door]

87. And yet somehow the Saudi monarchy is LESS Islamist than its people would prefer.

There needs to be some subtle social engineering of the Middle East, to somehow cultivate a general understanding of religious toleration and minority rights - because that's the only way that democracies can take hold in that kind of cultural soil without immediately committing suicide by popular theocracy.

I think we in the West have failed to adequately rationalize and articulate what these concepts are, because on some level we've relied on common assumptions that don't apply universally.

This is a deeper subject than it sounds on its surface: How do you communicate stable, tolerant, humane democracy to a people whose natural environment is none of those things? You can express the ideas intellectually, but democracy needs more than that - it has to be understood viscerally and emotionally. So how much do we unwittingly rely on subtexts that don't translate from temperate to desert ecosystems?

When intellectual arguments fight with what people feel, feelings win. So find a way to change the feelings.