A Consequence Of People Looking For Meaning

I stumbled upon footage of 9/11 shot right next to the twin towers at the time of the attack. The first video (there's a link to the second one in it) begins after the South Tower has been bit. At about 3:00 in the video, the North Tower is hit by a passenger jet. The attack caused the deaths of 2,996 people, including the 19 attackers, and over 6,000 non-fatal injuries.

What makes people do such things? What motivated this attack in particular? Obviously, the attack was motivated by Islamic extremism. But why do some people subscribe to that particular ideology? Commentators have suggested many different explanations. Among them is the theory that this is the downtrodden fighting back against American hegemony. The United States is involved in a lot of conflicts around the world and is an ally of the arch enemy of its Arab neighbours. But there are all kinds of injustices and grievances in the world and not all of them inspire a global wave of terrorism under a single ideological umbrella. This is, obviously, religious and the motivations are religious. The attackers were affiliated with al-Qaeda. Fifteen out of the entire nineteen were citizens of Saudi-Arabia. Two were from the United Arab Emirates and two were from Egypt and Lebanon, one from each two. Let's take a look at who the four pilot-hijackers were, each of whom were tasked to fly each aircraft into a target. Each had a small team of men whose task was to subdue the pilots, the rest of the crew and the passengers.

Mohammed Atta

Mohammed Atta was born in an Egyptian small town in 1968. Mohammed Atta's socioeconomic background was upper middle class. His father was a lawyer, a strict man, he prioritized his children getting a good education above all else. As a child, Mohammed Atta was shy and polite child, according to his father who gave an interview with the New York Times. He studied architecture at Cairo University and continued his studies at the Hamburg University of Technology. He became radicalized while in Germany. Atta met two of the other attackers there while he was involved with the al-Quds Mosque. He spent several months in Afghanistan in the years before the attack. Mohammed Atta was the mastermind of the attack.

Marwan al-Shehhi

Marwan al-Shehhi was born in the United Arab Emirates in 1978. His father was a Muslim cleric. At university in Hamburg, he was a pious and observant Muslim who prayed five times a day. He had joined the military in the UAE and studied the sciences in Germany at the same university as Mohammed Atta on a military scholarship.

Ziad Jarrah

Ziad Jarrah was born into a wealthy secular family in Lebanon in 1975. In 1995, he left for Germany to study at university in Hamburg. A teenager in Lebanon, Jarrah loved partying hard. While studying aerospace engineering in Hamburg, Jarrah drifted into a circle of pious Muslim students. He had a Turkish-born girlfriend and he was planning to marry her.

Hani Hanjour

Hani Hanjour was born in Saudi Arabia in 1972. He was one of seven children of a fruit farmer. He studied English at the University of Arizona prior to receiving a commercial pilot certificate in Arizona in 1998. He was hand picked by senior al-Qaida leaders to fly one of the planes in the operation. Hanjour had had difficulty in his studies both because he had received bad grades and because of financial trouble. He was under some pressure from his family to marry and start a family of his own. Hanjour had wanted to succeed in his aviation career first.

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What the leaders of the hijackers had in common was middle class to upper class background. They came from wealthy families who could afford to send them abroad to receive a university education. They were all radicalized while studying abroad. They did not have particularly religious family backgrounds, except for Marwan al-Shehhi. Three of them studied STEM fields. Their families represented the Egyptian urban upper middle class, Lebanese upper class that led a comfortable secular lifestyle in the times prior to the civil war, Saudi and UAE middle class - both countries developed and at peace.

Based on what I know, my guess is that these young men, who came from privileged backgrounds by Arab standards, were drawn to religious fundamentalism for reasons similar to why people are drawn to religious fundamentalism in general. With the exception of the Saudi who had problems with his studies they did not seem to have any serious personal problems. They most likely needed a purpose to their lives larger than themselves and found it in religious fundamentalism. That may have been exacerbated by their living abroad in non-Muslim countries cut off from their familiar surroundings. In their culture, religious fundamentalism leads to violence.

I can imagine how religious fundamentalism, giving definitive answers to life, universe and everything can be appealing to some individuals suffering from existential anxiety. I do have a baseline of low-level anxiety like most people but it's nothing I can't manage and I've never associated it with an idea of meaninglessness of life. I accept and am comfortable with the idea that life is inherently meaningless. All things run their course and are replaced by other things. Nothing is permanent. We exist for no particular reason at all. (Jeremy England of MIT has come up with an interesting hypothesis based on statistical physics stating that the laws of chance favor the arising of life-like structures because they are particularly efficient at turning other forms or energy into waste heat, that is, increasing enthropy.) It all ends in the heat death of the universe or a few other possibilities. That's it. No need to blow up airplanes or dedicate life to waiting for the second coming, going door to door. No ability to outperform devout Christians at surviving the Gulag, either. But it is not in my character to cling to any notions of certainty.