Making Sense with Sam Harris - #260 — The Second Plane

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

Sam Harris recalls his experience of September 11th, 2001, and considers the future of American foreign policy. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Anyone over 40 probably has very vivid memories of September 11th, 2001.

I certainly do. I can remember how angry I was in those first few days. Or months, really. I was angry over the event itself, of course, and for the loss of life, and for the sheer disorder that had been unleashed in our world. But as the days and weeks and months wore on, I became especially angry over how confused otherwise sane and well-educated people were about the threat we now faced. What I saw all around me was a kind of implosion of moral intelligence, and those who saw our enemy clearly were often driven by their own dogmatic religious beliefs. In my experience, the only people in the U.S. who could be counted upon to understand what we faced

were fundamentalist Christians, which gave me very little basis for hope that we would play our cards right. As many will remember, the sky on the East Coast on 9-11 was unusually beautiful. It was a condition that's apparently described as severe clear by pilots. Most of us had never heard that phrase until after it was used on 9-11 to describe the unlimited visibility of that morning. It strikes me as a very apt phrase to describe how I felt on that day, and really ever since, more or less from the moment that the second plane, United Flight 175, crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

From that moment forward, I have been unusually alert to the power of bad ideas. Up until the moment that the second plane hit, it was possible to imagine that what had happened at the North Tower had been an accident. I don't actually remember what I was thinking at the time. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what time I started watching the news coverage that morning, because it was very early on the West Coast. But I remember the difference between understanding that one plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and understanding that two planes had. And that difference is extraordinary. With the first plane, more or less everyone thought that they were witnessing a tragedy. And whether it was some kind of horrific navigation error or mechanical malfunction, I mean, what could it be? Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security advisor, had been briefed that July about an impending al-Qaeda attack, even one that might involve the use of hijacked aircraft.

But upon learning that a plane had hit the North Tower, even she reports thinking, well, that's a strange accident. And that doesn't actually surprise me. There's no question that 9-11 represents a massive failure of intelligence. And this is something that's well documented in Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower. But in the moment, in the presence of the unthinkable, it is hard to think clearly. No question. There were 17 minutes between Flight 11 hitting the North Tower and Flight 175 hitting the South. So there were 17 minutes to live with the illusion that we were witnessing a tragic accident and its horrible aftermath. Flight 11 had hit the North Tower between the 93rd and 99th floors.

No one outside the building could have known this at the time, but it had destroyed all the stairwells, trapping over a thousand people above the point of impact. So I believe it's true to say that no one who was above the 92nd floor in the North Tower survived. And in those 17 minutes, many things happened that are very hard to think about, and some seem very hard to understand. First, in the South Tower, many people saw no need to evacuate. In fact, people who did begin evacuating were told to return to their desks.

Even in the North Tower, many people who were below the zone of impact felt no urgency to evacuate. They thought the fire department would just put out the fire, and many thought they were being responsible in leaving the stairways clear for the fire crews to ascend. It's just an amazing detail, given what was about to happen. It seems almost no one had an inkling that a fire of that sort could lead to a structural failure, and that the whole tower could collapse. We have testimony from people in the South Tower who gathered at the north-facing windows and watched as papers came billowing out of the north tower and rained down on lower Manhattan like confetti. And then suddenly came the

recognition that some of the objects that were falling were in fact people. An estimated 50 to 200 people jumped or fell out of the towers before they collapsed. There's the famous Falling Man image that appeared on September 12th in newspapers all over the world, and then never appeared again. And I believe some news organizations briefly ran videos of people jumping. But then everyone seems to have decided that that was just too much. And it was too much. However, even in some of the more benign videos that just show the towers burning at some distance,

you can still hear the crash of people hitting the ground. There's just no getting around it. There's something especially heartbreaking about these jumpers on a day when everything was heartbreaking. So just imagine what it was like to be in the South Tower, witnessing this horror unfold, or standing on the street looking up. It's just an impossible moment that would seem to admit of no further possibility of astonishment, right? And then comes the roar of the engines of Flight 175, traveling at nearly 600 miles an hour. There are several videos of this, and they never cease to be astounding.

cease to be astounding. The imagery aside, even the sound is astounding. We never hear the sound of a large commercial airliner flying at full speed, up close. That roar of the engine alone told us that something was profoundly wrong with the world. with the world. So what changed with the second plane? Well, it proved the intentionality of the act and the suicidality of it, and therefore it established its ideological origins. In fact, it established the truth of what was happening as fully as it would have if you could have heard the hijackers shrieking, Allahu Akbar, from the cockpit of the plane. With one plane the same behavior could have been the result of mental illness, right? But not with two, right? The severely mentally ill don't organize in this way. So in that moment everyone was asking the question,

what force on earth could get people to do something like this? And those of us who knew something about the differences among the world's religions didn't have to spend very long searching for an answer. I don't remember how long it took to implicate al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. As I recall, bin Laden said something celebratory but somewhat ambiguous soon thereafter, but didn't take clear credit for 9-11 until around 2005 or 2006. But very soon, I think within 24 hours or 48 hours at most, the fact that we were dealing with Islamic extremists of some sort was established. And then the experience for me was something like a feeling of limitless clarity on a few points,

along with an ability to spot the moral confusion of others at what seemed like a very great distance. Of course, this will sound utterly tendentious and even delusional to those of you who disagree with me about the connection between extremist Islam and Islam, or those who imagine that America has no standing to even complain about the events of September 11th, because we've always been the world's worst terrorist state. These are obscenely stupid positions, but they are not straw men. I've argued with these people ever since, the moral relativists and the people who think there's no real connection between any religious ideology and human behavior. The anthropologists and sociologists who have

convinced themselves that religion is always a pretext for economics or social status or politics or some other terrestrial variable. There are seemingly unlimited numbers of overeducated people who imagine that nobody really believes in paradise. Not really. And I spent more than a decade arguing with these people. And I'm honestly not sure what the result of all of that has been. But I know that I don't have anything new to say on the topic. It's such a simple point, and I am always mystified that people don't see it or refuse to see it. Some political scientist will emphasize the territorial claims of certain jihadists or their sense of humiliation, say.

But when we look at the claims themselves, when we hear what these people say, both in their public and private conversations, in many cases we know what they say in private. It always comes down to one thing above everything else. Paradise. Yes, Osama bin Laden objected to the presence of foreign troops on the Arabian Peninsula. That's what motivated him. So that sounds like a quasi-rational political grievance, right? But American troops were there at the request of the Saudi government. We had saved them from a likely invasion by Saddam Hussein. They wanted us there. Osama bin Laden's grievance was theological. It was, in his view, a sacrilege

to have infidels in the Holy Land. Muhammad himself had said there should be no two religions there. And bin Laden was rich enough to do anything he wanted with his life. and bin Laden was rich enough to do anything he wanted with his life. There is no economic explanation for what he chose to do, and the religious explanation is perfectly explicit and perfectly rational given the requisite beliefs. If, after all we've witnessed in the intervening years, having seen privileged people living in the West join the ranks of the Islamic State by the thousands, dropping out of medical school in

London to join the Caliphate. If you think it's all just politics and economics and social bonding that gets people to behave this way, well then I think there really is no reaching you. And in that case, you are as far from the reality of what happened on 9-11 as the 9-11 truth conspiracy theorists are, these people who took what was probably the most witnessed event in human history and turned it into a kaleidoscope of paranoid illogic. At one point, 16% of Americans claimed to believe that 9-11 was an inside job, that we did it to ourselves to motivate a war in Iraq, to steal their oil, right? Rather than just purchase the oil, we decided to fly planes into our own buildings

and murder ourselves and start a couple of wars. Because that would have been, what, less expensive? Of course, this prefigured all the madness that was to come. I mean, this was before social media. Can you imagine what 9-11 would have been like if we were all on Twitter? There were people, there probably still are, who believed that the planes weren't planes, that the Pentagon had been hit by a missile, not American Flight 77. It didn't matter that some people had spoken to their loved ones on that flight, up until the moment of impact.

It didn't matter that others had seen the plane crash into the Pentagon with their own eyes. some people had spoken to their loved ones on that flight, up until the moment of impact. It didn't matter that others had seen the plane crash into the Pentagon with their own eyes. It didn't matter that there were plane parts on the ground. No, it was a missile, proving the involvement of our own military. In fact, some people believe that the planes that hit the Twin Towers weren't planes either. They were holograms. And they believe that the voicemail messages from the doomed passengers were faked by CIA technology. And they believe that all the people who were supposed to have been on those planes were quietly murdered by our government. And they believe that the towers collapsed not because these buildings

weren't designed to absorb the impact of fully-fueled passenger jets. No, they had been rigged to explode. For months, an army of psychopaths had smuggled explosives into these buildings in the dead of night. Now, you can take a few of those preposterous assertions a la carte, or you can take the whole lot. That's what millions of our neighbors claimed to believe about 9-11 before the advent of social media. Can you imagine what would happen now? Anyway, back in the real world, we launched a war on terrorism,

which was always a misnomer. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.