Quoting from David Berreby’s US AND THEM: The Science Of Identity, 2005/2008 (p. xxiii):
“It is not what people *are* that matters; it is what they are *persuaded* they are… As David Kilcullen, the U.S. State Department’s counter-insurgency specialist, noted in 2006, persuasion is the essence of the problem. [Persuasion here is not a verb but a noun meaning a mix of disposition, attitude, viewpoint and opinion. Persuadedness may be a better word. Berreby says,] … fewer and fewer people today believe that identity is destiny. They realize that civilizations do not clash, people do.”
As Kilcullen puts it, “when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,” I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate. Speaking of an Indonesian Islamic insurgency (and its similarities with a Christian insurgency on another Indonesian island), Kilcullen told the New Yorker’s George Packer, “It’s not about theology. There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.'”
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