The unfinished self — and how it is being exploited by Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah

This is the fourth piece in a series. The first, “The Visual Holds the Key,” examined how images of violence function as psychological weapons. The second, “We Need This Blood: Hamas’ Blood Charter 1988,” traced the ideological and symbolic roots of Hamas’s use of bodily spectacle. The third, “First the Blood. Now the Mind,” analyzed Iran’s penetration of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies as an assault not merely on information, but on the institutional space in which thought itself is generated.

Those three pieces made an argument about strength. They said: democratic societies possess a developmental capacity — the ability to think under pressure, to symbolize conflict rather than merely discharge it, to hold complexity without collapsing into reaction. That capacity, I argued, cannot be hacked or stolen. It is what Iran and Hamas are up against, whether they fully understand it or not. But there is a harder question that must follow. What if that capacity is unevenly distributed? What if, within a democratic society, there are populations for whom the developmental foundations of thinking, feeling, and self-determination have not been fully laid? What if the unfinished self is not the exception, but — in certain communities, under certain conditions — closer to the norm?

This is the piece I have been building toward. It is the most uncomfortable one to write, and probably the most important. AI translations in Hebrew, Portuguese and French can be found at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack where it was originally posted.

I. The Years Nobody Remembers There is a period of human development that is almost entirely invisible to the people who lived through it. The years from birth to approximately three — the zero years — leave no conscious memory, no narrative, no retrievable story. And yet they are, in the most precise sense, the years that determine everything.

What is built in those years — or not built — shapes the architecture of the self that will follow. Not as destiny, and not without the possibility of later repair. But as foundation: the substrate on which all subsequent development rests. Three information processing systems must come online and, crucially, integrate during this period.........

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