ISBN: 978-1-937570-97-2

Bonnie Selterman

New York University

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What does love have to do with terrorism? Perhaps everything. Evelin Lindner's latest book is an encyclopedic source connecting love, honor, humiliation and terrorism, and a call to action. Love of one's group, dressed in honor codes, deeply wounded by political, cultural or economic humiliation, may well motivate terror acts. And our narrow-minded focus on the individual acts, rather than the conditions that engender them, ensures their perpetuation. Readers are recruited to accept responsibility to co-create viable ideas to rectify this – in local and global arenas, from the top down and the bottom up. It's in everyone's self-interest, dominators and underlings alike, to transition to social structures that extend equal dignity and sustainable use of natural resources to all. Ideals of human rights have spread seductively, yet remain unrealizable for too many, intensifying humiliation, instigating further cycles of revenge terror. While Dr Lindner's appeal is eminently rational, drawing from across the intellectual spectrum, including psychology, neuroscience, economics, history, and ecology; she also embraces personal experience, and indigenous knowledge, for authentic appeals to emotional and relational human needs. With concern about radical and state terrorism, nuclear, economic, cyber, or environmental terrorism, honor and humiliation must not occupy humanity's driver's seat. In today's intricately interconnected world, we face the necessity and the opportunity for consciousness transition, and attendant economic, political and ecological transformations. To insist on equal dignity, unity as a human family – in diversity, not uniformity, releasing the fullest creative potential for human flourishing and collective survival – is it naive? Lindner responds: Is it not naive to think our current destructive path can continue?