Making Sense with Sam Harris - #61 — The Power of Belief

Episode Date: January 15, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with author Lawrence Wright about al-Qaeda & ISIS, Arab culture, 9/11 conspiracy theories, the migrant crisis in Europe, Scientology, parallels between L. Ron Hubbard and Donald Trump, the Satanic cult panic, and other topics. 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. Today I am speaking with Lawrence Wright. Lawrence is a journalist and an author and a screenwriter and a playwright. He is very well known as a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, and he has written many works of non-fiction, a book called Remembering Satan, The Looming Tower, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, Going Clear, the revelatory work about Scientology that was made into a documentary, 13 Days in September, and his most recent book is The Terror

Years, which is a compilation of all his writing on al-Qaeda and the Islamic State that he did for the New Yorker. So needless to say, our interests on a variety of topics here overlap. I've never met Lawrence. I've never gotten a chance to speak with him before. So it was great to have an excuse to do it. That's one of the amazing things about having this podcast as a forum. I can send someone I admire an email, I ask them if they want to have a conversation. Sometimes they do, and you get to hear it. So without further ado, I introduce you to the great Lawrence Wright. I have Lawrence Wright on the line. Lawrence, thanks for coming on the podcast. Good to talk to you, Sam.

So I will have introduced you before we got on here, but tell people how you describe yourself. Do you think of yourself as a journalist first, or are you an author more generally? How do you think of yourself? I guess I think of myself as a writer. I write, in addition to journalism, I write plays and movies and I've written a novel. So I like experimenting with different forms. most admire about what you're doing. I'm a huge fan of your work, but the quality of the work aside, I love the way you use so many different platforms to communicate your ideas. It often starts with a New Yorker article, but your articles often become books, and some of these books become documentaries, and one became a stage play and then became a documentary. And so it's very creative, and you're like the king of media at this point. It's really very cool to see. Thanks for that. But mainly I think there's a

the hardest thing as a writer is finding the ideas that you want to write about. And there's such a paucity of ideas that you want to devote your life to. And so when I hit on something that I'm really intrigued by, then I sometimes try to work it into different forms. Well, is there a primary concern or set of ideas that unifies all of your work? How do you decide what sorts of topics to address? You know, it's very intuitive, but now that I'm older, I look back and I see that I've had a lifelong interest in religion and why people believe one thing rather than another. It seems to be a thread that goes through much of my work.

I was thinking along those lines myself. It seems to me that you and I share a common interest in the power of belief, and in particular, the power of bad beliefs, bad ideas that become ascendant in some context or another. And we'll get into specifically these different topics, but you spend a lot of time thinking about Islamic extremism and Scientology and other cult-like phenomenon like Jonestown. And what's interesting to me, and this has been a point of frustration, but it's something I really admire about how you've treated these topics, is that many people actually doubt whether or not ideas matter very much. And it's very common to meet people who think that good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things, and that ideology is more or

less always just a pretext for good and bad people to do whatever they were going to do anyway. But one of the most refreshing things about your discussion of these aberrant belief systems is that you make it clear how much beliefs matter and that bad beliefs can get even very good people to do terrible things. I would limit that mainly to, at least in our era, to religious beliefs. beliefs. I think the notion that beliefs are discountable mainly comes from observing the hypocrisy of political figures and people who hold strong political views, but then act completely differently in their own behavior. Whereas what intrigued me as a journalist, you know, religion has very little status in the world of journalism.

It's seen as like covering cooking or something like that in your daily newspaper. You know, the religion beat would be off in the back section. But I observe somewhere along the line that people can have very strong political views without it changing their lives at all. But people who have strong religious views, that tends to determine their behavior in a very powerful way, for good or ill. Yeah. Well, so let's get into, first I'll name the books. There's really three books I want to focus on here. The Looming Tower, which is your amazing book about Al-Qaeda. And we could also throw in here the stage play and documentary, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, which is also

fascinating and connected to that book. And then you have your most recent book, The Terror Years, which again is also on the same topic. And then there's Going Clear, which is your book and the subsequent documentary on Scientology. And if we have time, I'd like to touch on your book, Remembering Satan, because that is just one of the strangest stories ever told. We'll see if we get there. Let's start with jihadist terrorism in New York, and then kind of the attendant infringements of civil liberties that came in response. Do you remember at what point you were aware of jihadism as a global issue and not just a

local problem that was narrowly focused on Israel? Well, you know, I had lived in Egypt as a young man, and I was there when Nasser died in 1970. And one of Sadat who succeeded him, one of his first actions was to let the Muslim brothers out of prison. And, you know, one of our professors had a brother who got out, and I was aware, you know, this stirring inside Islam, I suppose, before a lot of other Western people were. And then when I was working on The Siege, this was in the middle 90s, and Egypt was in tumult at the time. But my producer had asked me to write a movie about a woman in the CIA.

And that was the whole idea. It wasn't really, it was just a notion really. And I was trying to think about, well, this Cold War is over, who is the enemy? And it wasn't obvious at the time. And finally, I realized that the CIA did have a real life antagonist and it was the FBI. And what they were struggling over was who was going to control terrorism in the United States. and played the FBI chief. And Annette Bening was a CIA woman that the idea had been spawned from. And as I began researching that, I turned up the information about bin Laden and about, of course, there was Omar Abdel Rahman, who was known as the blind sheikh, who had a plan afoot to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel and the Statue of Liberty. And, you know, there were a lot of terrorist plots that were going around at the time. And then the movie, the trailers in the movie appeared in August of 98. And that, of course, was the same month that the American embassies in East Africa were blown up by al-Qaeda.

It was their opening blow. There was another bombing that same month in Cape Town, South Africa, that people don't really know very much about. It was at a Planet Hollywood. And it was an Islamist, a radical Islamist group claimed credit for blaming the trailers that were for the movie, The Siege, as their provocation. And the reason they struck Planet Hollywood is that Bruce Willis, one of the co-stars of the movie, was a partial owner of that chain. So, you know, it was a real shock to me because two people were killed and a little girl lost her leg. And all of this came about because I had written this movie. So I was affected by terrorism, I guess, earlier than most Americans.

Yeah, yeah, I heard that story. I think you talk about that, at least in my trip to Al-Qaeda. criticisms of Islam into the relevant languages, because I remember Salman Rushdie's experience of, you know, apart from his experience of having to go into hiding, just his experience of finding out that his translators and foreign publishers had been killed or attacked, and that had to be rough. Did you feel there would have been very little basis, or at least most people wouldn't have formed an expectation that anything like that would happen in response to a film like this at that point. Were you just blindsided by it or did you feel? I was totally thunderstruck. Of course, now, at the same time, when the movie came out, there were protests. Muslims were angry at being depicted as terrorists.

They thought that was a stereotype of Hollywood and they were picketing the theaters. It was a big box office failure until 9-11 when it was the most rented movie in America. But it was it was a really it was a scarring experience. And, you know, it came out of the blue. Where were you on 9-11 and what were you working on? Well, I, at that time I was having breakfast with a group. Every Tuesday morning we'd get together and speak Spanish. So that's where I was. And at the time, I was planning to get out of journalism. I had the idea that I'd become a movie director. I was writing scripts for me to direct. And then suddenly 9-11 happened, and I realized I was going to get back on the fire truck. truck. And in all the work you have done since on jihadism, what would you say you've learned about it? Well, I've learned, for one thing, that belief is very powerful in affecting

even violent behavior. But one of the things that intrigued me about the origins of this movement, especially in Egypt, is that a lot of the people who went into al-Jahad, which was the Egyptian organization, and then later al-Qaeda, weren't really very religious. They were drawn, in some ways, they were drawn into protest. In some ways, they were drawn into protest. You'd have to understand that living in Arab countries, being a member of the government, a bureaucrat, or a member of the army. And then there's a very diminished private sector. And then if you want to have any kind of alternative expression, you go to the mosque. And that's where the Muslim brothers arose. So there were people that I think were drawn into this movement. And some of them were, you know, idealists, the kind of people that you could build a country on in other respects. But their dreams had been kind of perverted and drawn into these radical expressions of Islam. perverted and drawn into these radical expressions of Islam. One of the problems in the Arab world is there's so few spiritual choices. You know, you can only believe one thing. Your choice is

to believe it more or less. And so what happened in Egypt was that young men who were not originally very pious would be drawn into these kind of radical groups. They were wanting to affect some kind of change in their country, but in the same time, they underwent changes themselves. And they became radicalized by the more strenuous views of Islam. And they began to use those views to justify the actions that they were taking. Yeah, I want to drill down a little bit on what you just said there, that they were not very religious, because I think people can misunderstand what you're saying, or perhaps you and I disagree about the implications of what you're saying, because it's true that many people don't come from madrasas, many people don't show any signs of religiosity, much less extreme religiosity, in their earlier life. But the

people who become suicide bombers, at the point they become committed, really do believe what they say they believe. I mean, the beliefs are operative at that point. And the history of how they got to that point is an interesting one. And I mean, you can have, you know, kids in Orange County becoming radicalized. But once they are actually radicalized, they do share this belief system. And so it's a lot of people take, I think, a false comfort in looking at the biographies of some of these people. And they say, well, this person didn't come out of Madrasa. This person went to the London School of Economics. So clearly this isn't about religion. There's something else going on here. But for the person who has an awakening experience of some

kind that gets channeled into Salafi-style Islam, and they take it all the way into the end zone of wanting to get into paradise, you know, right now. However secular they had seemed up until a year ago or 15 minutes ago, at a certain point, what gets them to actually act is this worldview that has gotten communicated to them somehow do you disagree with that do you think there's a secular route to to martyrdom that is equally well subscribed in in this world well if you look at you know the world that we're talking about now the radical Islam there are Islamists who become radicalized and there are radical radicals who become Islamized you know they you know, you can

come from both of those directions and arrive at the same point. And then you have people like Ramzi Youssef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Not at all religious. He was just using, you know, religious ideas. He didn't really express them himself, but he used religious compatriots and he worked with Omar Abdulrahman, the blind sheikh, but he was not at all religious himself. And there are people like that. Although he wasn't a suicide bomber. No. But the world of suicide bombers inside is a fairly small one. The world of radical Islam is quite large. of Islam without sincerely believing all of its precepts. And in their gradations of this, I saw that you had interviewed my friend and collaborator, Majid Nawaz, which I had forgotten. I had seen My Trip to Al-Qaeda some years ago when it first came out, and then watched it again in

anticipation of this conversation, and then was surprised. I didn't know Majid when I had first seen it, obviously, because I had no recollection he was in there. So Majid is, when he was an Islamist, was not a budding suicide bomber. I mean, so there are different points of commitment on that spectrum of being organized under this banner. But for me, the most toxic part of the center of the bullseye here for the role of belief is in particular this sincere belief in martyrdom, because it seems to me this has two consequences. It allows people to actually love death more than we love life. That becomes a sincere statement of just psychological fact. And therefore, to seek death, in this they become really undeterrable. And you describe people like this in The Looming Tower and particularly the early al-Qaeda members who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan who were taking absolutely no steps to protect their own lives. And when queried about this, they said, yeah, the whole point is to get

killed here, right? But the other thing is that it allows people, whether they're suicide bombers or not, to kill innocents without any compunction, because really, by this worldview, nothing can go wrong. The good will go to heaven, the infidels will go to hell where they belong, and you can blow yourself up in a crowd of children, and have literally done nothing wrong because there's no conceivable outcome that is a bad outcome, given that God is overseeing all this and everyone gets what they deserve in the end anyway. We have people that are acting out of beliefs that are giving them a moral cover for actions that one can't otherwise understand. But there are also psychopaths in this as well. And they're drawn like moths to it. And I think that a lot of the phenomenon of ISIS is fed by that.

I mean, people are excited by the carnage and they flock to it. And then on the way, they pick up these beliefs almost like garments. You know, a lot of the people that you see, you know, they don't have this extremist religious background before they get there. And I don't know how seriously, we're talking about, there's not a single unified theory for why all these people arrive at the same place. There are many different paths to it and different personalities that are animated by different philosophies and longings and dysfunctions. And so they can come in many different routes. There's an interesting theory about Stefan Hertog wrote a book called Engineers of Jihad. And he talked about the number of people who come into jihad from a technical, especially engineering background, and even speculates that some of them are on the autism spectrum. And I think, you know,

you can look at, you know, if you have the whole universe of people who are dedicating their lives to Islamic jihad, you're going to find that a lot of the leaders are going to be those kinds of engineering people who can use, well, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a perfect example, not a religious man himself, really. And he's Ramza Yusuf's uncle. But he was able to use people who had these beliefs to force, you know, to like the hijackers of 9-11 and persuade them to give up their lives to enact the vision that he's created. created. Yeah. Yeah. I was struck in watching my trip to Al-Qaeda again, because I had first seen it before anyone had even heard of ISIS, I believe. I was struck at one point, you were reading from some of the stated goals of Al-Qaeda at that point. And it was interesting to see how much ISIS had achieved those goals. They seemed to be in the process of losing those gains. But I had forgotten how explicit al-Qaeda's goal was to form a caliphate in Iraq and to use it as a basis by

which to ultimately create a global one and to draw us further into a quagmire there. It just seemed like ISIS was the culmination not merely of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the crazy sectarian sadism that got expressed there, but the original vision of al-Qaeda. How do you view ISIS as being the same or different from al-Qaeda at this point? Well, they're stylistic differences and, you know, their, their goals are the same. You know, they, they want to Islamize the world. They want Islam to be the only superpower in the world. And, uh, they feel resentful that, uh, that has been put on the back shelf in the way, uh, there for, to some extent, the idea of the caliphate was something that bin Laden had in mind

as a distant goal because first of all you would have to persuade Muslims that this is something they were going to have to implement eventually and but Abbas Sabal Zarqawi who was the founder of

Al Qaeda in Iraq which became the precursor to ISIS, he was in a hurry and he was not patient as as bin Laden was. And also he had a he had a yen to create a civil war inside Islam, which he succeeded in doing by waging war on the Shiites. You know, bin Laden wanted to fight the West. He wanted to drive the West out of Arab and Muslim lands and so that it could be thoroughly Islamized according to the, sorry, his Salafi philosophy. But and then eventually, you know, you would create a caliphate. And Zarqawi had just a different battle plan. And so he became very prominent when we had al-Qaeda under such pressure that bin Laden and Zawahiri and the other leaders of al-Qaeda couldn't keep their heads above the ground. Meanwhile, Zarqawi's out, you know, creating total mayhem on the ground

in Iraq. And this was exciting to a lot of young Muslims who wanted to get in on the action and believed in the goals that Zarqawi was espousing. He seemed to be a proper psychopath. in the goals that Zarqawi was espousing. He seemed to be a proper psychopath. Would you draw a line between someone like him and bin Laden, just psychologically there? They're fascinating differences. You know, when I was working on the looming tower, I was puzzled because Al-Qaeda was essentially an Egyptian organization with a Saudi head on it. And there were a couple of Jordanians in it. But essentially, you know, there were Persian Gulf Arabs and Egyptians. And I looked around and I wondered, where are the Palestinians?

Where are the Lebanese? Where are the Jordanians and the Syrians? The region that we call the Levant. Where are they in Al-Qaeda? And I realized that there was actually another training camp in Afghanistan at the same time bin Laden was running his. And it was run by Zarqawi. And he actually got money support from bin Laden, although he was not formally a member of Al Qaeda at the time. But that was the group that went into Iraq after we invaded and began to prosper there. And so you look at bin Laden, he know, college educated, wealthy, uh, extremely wealthy at one point. Um, and, uh, you know, sort of the, I, I compared him, I, I, I described him as Saudi Arabia's first celebrity.

And, uh, you know, he had a lot of, uh, not charisma, but more of a mystique about him. And, uh, and he was in some ways kind of delicate in his mannerisms and so on. Whereas Zarqawi was a criminal. He was a street thug and sex criminal. And he was in prison. And it was in prison that he became close to the Sheikh Makdizi, who's a very influential jihadist philosopher. emboldened by this Islamist philosophy that gave him a warrant to act out the way that I think that he normally wanted to anyway. So, you know, his kind of madness, the way that he rampaged across Iraq, killing anyone in his path, suddenly he had absolute divine permission to do so. suddenly he had absolute divine permission to do so. And there was something awe-inspiring about the way that he waged this unlimited war against the Shiites.

And for people that are, you know, drawn to conflict, he caught a lot of attention. I, you know, I imagine you're familiar with Freud's term, the narcissism of minor differences. I think that that's really fascinating where religion is concerned because, you know, Freud talks about how people that are very, very similar in most respects can be the biggest enemies because of very small differences between the two of them. And the Sunnis and the Shiites are a perfect example of that. You know, for outsiders, they're just Muslims. But for Zarqawi and many people who followed him, the small historical differences and the stylistic differences in the way they prayed, for instance, were incredibly inflammatory. And, you know, it has created absolute chaos inside the Islamic universe. That gives me an opportunity to point out something that I often point out when I'm talking about Islam and Islamism and jihadism and where everything I say is more or less implicitly or explicitly in criticism of the doctrine here and the consequences of these ideas and linking this doctrine to violence. The thing to point out is that the most common victim of this violence is another Muslim.

Yeah, by a thousandfold. Yes, yeah. I mean, this is not merely the effete concern of a pampered Westerner who doesn't want terrorism in his movie theaters. this particular form of sectarian conflict. And, you know, now we're witnessing very likely Europe break apart in part as a result of this conflict in Syria and Iraq and the attendant migrant crisis, something I might raise with you in a minute. But tell me about Ayman al-Zawahiri in this context. So how do you view him as a personality compared to Zarqawi and bin Laden? Well, he was a man of science, which is interesting. You know, he was a medical doctor, a surgeon. His father was a professor of pharmacology at Cairo University.

So he came from a science background, but he was also very religious as a young man. And as was bin Laden. There was not a conversion experience for either man. They just became more deeply implicated in their religion. And it was, you know, I think the experience of when Zawahiri went off with Muslim Brother Doctors to Afghanistan during the Mujahideen war against the Soviets, I think that that was a turning point for him. And he had already, at the age of 15, you know, had created a cell to overthrow the Egyptian government. Just think about it.acity of this young man. Partly, I think he was very influenced by his uncle, who was Sayyid Qutb's lawyer. And Sayyid Qutb is, in some ways, the...

The godfather. Yeah. I mean, it's always intriguing to me, Sam, how movements and belief systems always go back to a book. And, you know, you can trace it in, you know, the Bible or the Koran or, you know, Das Kapital or Hitler's Mein Kampf, you know, or even animal rights as an animal liberation. I mean, there's always at the bottom

of it, a book that is so influential. And the book that really gave rise to the Islamist movement was a book that Kutta wrote called Ma'alam fil Tariq, which means signposts along the road or milestones. and came to America where he was alarmed and disgusted by the American habits, especially our sexual mores. And he spent time in this little town called Greeley, Colorado, which in some respects would be a total advertisement for the American dream. Yeah, it's a darling little town and had a lot of churches and so on. But there was nothing that anybody could do that pleased him. Even his barber didn't do his hair right. And but he saw some things about America that I think Americans weren't willing to look at. You know, for instance, Saeed Qutb was a very dark Egyptian, and he experienced the racism that was common at the time. He had crazy notions about a lot of things about America, but he went back to Egypt and wrote some very influential articles and then became the head of the sort of underground wing of the 1952, Nasser offered Qutb an influential post in the new government,

but it wasn't influential enough. And Qutb fought against Nasser and the regime, and eventually Nasser had him hanged. And that, you know, he became this martyr. But this book that he wrote on scrap paper that he smuggled out of the prison became the document that aroused the—and he called for a vanguard of young men who would make this vision real. And Zawahiri was certainly one of those people. One thing that's rarely remarked on, but you do it in places, is that the men in Muslim-majority countries grow up largely outside the company of women. And I mean, for instance, like you just, the story you told about Qutub, as I recall, the crisis point for him in his sojourn in Greeley was he went to a dance where he saw

the, you know, the young, must have been teenagers, young men and women dancing in, I think, in the basement of a church. So the fact that they had used their church for this desecration, and he saw, you know, these young men and women kind of pawing at each other. And there's a passage in somewhere where he talks about just the utter shamelessness of the batting eyes of the women and the skin exposed and what comes through. The song was Baby is Cold Outside. I mean, there is such obvious frustrated lust here and the role played by sexual taboos and the disempowerment of being on the outside of any sphere in which you could plausibly gratify your desires in a way that seemed psychologically and morally healthy to you. It's just, there's something

psychologically so maladaptive about the way sex is viewed in this context. And so I just want to do to reflect on that. Is there anything we can generalize about the consequences of keeping the sexes so radically apart and the attendant misogyny, the political non-equivalence between men and women in these societies? Well, my experience of it was especially acute in Saudi Arabia. Um, I went there in, uh, I said it was 2003, I guess, 2003 or four. And, um, you know, the Saudis wouldn't let me in as a journalist. So I, I took a job as a mentor to these young journalists in Jeddah, which has been Laden's hometown. And, um, the men and women really have almost no interaction at all. We think of, for instance, the women all dressed up in black

and sometimes their faces covered as well. But the men are pretty covered up too. They're in white and the women are in black. It looks like sometimes I would feel like I was in an opera with a kind of cappuccino monks or something like that. And one of my reporters, we went to a mall and there are some malls where men can't go by themselves if they're not in a family. But this was one mall where we could go in. My reporter was an especially avid Romeo, and he spotted a couple of Saudi women coming down the escalator, and they were totally encased in black. Even their eyes were covered. I mean, sometimes you can't even tell what direction they're facing. And he turned to me without a trace of irony. He said, check them out. There's some power that he must have to see through those garments. It's clairvoyance.

I was always aware. I was totally aware of this sense of longing and of frustration. And also, you know, a lot of civilization is young men learning how to please girls. You cannot get past that. And when they're outside of that world and in a world of men almost exclusively, then it's a totally unsettled situation where behaviors are not moderated. And also, they take out their frustrations in other ways. You know, what's intriguing about Saudi society is that there's a great sense of passivity. And I think, you know, it's born of being demoralized. And at the same time, you have so many, so much of the stream going into radical Islam, into Al-Qaeda or other groups, come out of Saudi Arabia. And certainly the ideas, the propaganda that feeds these religious ideas comes out of Saudi Arabia. It's not entirely traceable to the Jindar apartheid, but it is a part of it. And the absence of civil society, the inability to have,

to mix freely and talk openly, you know, all of those things create this stifled atmosphere. Yeah, there's also the fact that this division between the sexes is part of a larger honor culture. And what happens there is you have the women become essentially props in the honor economy of the men. I mean, women become viewed as, especially their sexual lives and the prospect that there could be some sexual indiscretion, whether it's your wife or your daughter, the fact that that would reflect back on you and your social currency as a person of honor, that all seems so dysfunctional and such a perfect recipe for unhappiness. And yet it's hard to see how to change it given the status quo.

it's hard to see how to change it given the status quo. Well, you know, one thing we should not make the mistake of taking away any sense of agency from these women, the Saudi women. I had several young Saudi women reporters who I was supposed to mentor. And at first they wouldn't let me see them. They all worked in this little office under the stairwell. And I said, I can't mentor them if I can't see them hijab over her head. But she she but she would put on gloves. She she talked about how she tried to become more conservative every year. And it and I also reflected on the fact that, you know, Saudi women are the mothers of these boys. Yeah. They have a responsibility in in how they turn out. And I went to Saudi Arabia thinking that women would be a reservoir of progressive movement of some sort. And I didn't find that.

There were some women who were that way. But in general, I would not say that Saudi women are a force of liberal ideas. I would be surprised if they were. The beliefs exist on both sides of this divide. And when I see how a friend like Ayaan Hirsi Ali gets attacked by women who are defending their faith from her criticism, or Majid Nawaz gets attacked by women as an Uncle Tom. You see what's going on there. Can you say something about the prevalence of conspiracy thinking in the Arab world as you encountered it? Yeah, I was thinking about that as I was preparing to talk with you,

because I find that there's a kind of parallel through the kind of fake news that we're going through now. And when I was working in the Arab press in Saudi Arabia, one thing I noted is that you can have opinions and the newspapers are full of columnists, can have opinions. And the newspapers are full of columnists. But what was dangerous were facts. And when I was trying to teach these young reporters how to go out and gather facts, I was actually providing them with skills that they weren't going to be able to use. going to be able to use. So the newspapers were vacuous and gossip mongering. And after 9-11, I remember when I was in Egypt and I was talking to this Egyptian woman who suggested to me that 9-11 was something that the American government did to itself, which was a very common thing. I ran into it again and again. And I said, how can you believe that? I mean, there's no evidence

that the American government had any desire to do that or had any way to participate in it. I mean, it's a totally nonsensical, prejudicial view. What causes you to say that? And she said, well, in Egypt, nobody ever tells us the truth. So we have to determine for ourselves what it might be. And the first question we ask is who benefits? And in her view, the beneficiary of 9-11 was the American government because it allowed the U.S. to wage war on the Muslim world. Well, this, I can't tell you how common this view is. And, you know, there's absolutely nothing to sustain it. It is just a conspiracy theory that has taken root and unfortunately given some support by a number

of American conspiracists as well. Yeah, have you gone down that rabbit hole very far, the 9-11 truth phenomenon in the West? Oh, yeah. Oh, they used to follow me around in my speeches and Alex Jones, and I've had a conversation before, he's one of the main propagators of this kind of nonsense. And I've talked to them at length. If you analyze their view of how 9-11 happened, there's not any doubt that the planes struck the World Trade Center, at least among most of them. Unless you think they were holograms or not actual planes. Yeah, there are people that- They had no windows.

They go even further, that it never happened at all. Yeah, it was like the moon landing never happened. But the 9-11 truthers normally believe that the planes did strike, but that's not what would happen if a plane hit a skyscraper. And, of course, this experiment has only happened twice. So, and in both cases, you know, the buildings fell down. But according to the truthers, that's not what would happen. When have you ever seen a building fall into its own footprint, Lawrence? Yes, right.

So, what happened? Yes. Right. So what happened? Well, there must have been explosives planted inside the building to make sure that they fell. And that's where the American government came in because they had to be stealthily and there are a lot of truthers who say that that was a missile. It wasn't a plane. If that's the case, where are the passengers? Where's the plane? What about all the people who saw the plane flying low over? Once you start picking apart the things they accept as gospel, there's just nothing but a ludicrous thread of conspiracy all knitted together into something that's totally absurd, but which corresponds to their view of how the world works. Yeah. And crucially, when you follow each one of these anomalies to some alternative conclusion, it's never the same conclusion. There's no unified view of what would explain everything that happened here. There's dozens or hundreds or more different things, all of which are mutually incompatible, but all of which are different from the prevailing story that Al-Qaeda did it.

But there is no unified view that makes it the perfect work of evil genius to have George Bush sitting, reading My Pet Goat when this thing goes off, you know, what evil genius decided to do it that way. I mean, this larger phenomenon of conspiracy thinking, which, again, now once you connect it to the fake news phenomenon that we're living through now, it becomes hugely consequential. It's like this, I've always thought of conspiracy thinking as a kind of pornography of doubt. There's an itch that people are scratching here. People who, for the most part, feel disempowered and imagine that people in power are always doing something malicious and that whenever you can explain something based on incompetence, it's never really incompetence. The irony here is they're attributing a superhuman level of competence to people where there's never any evidence of this kind of competence. Bill Clinton couldn't stop a semen-stained dress from appearing on the evening news, right? Presidents can't do these sorts of things. And yet we're asked to imagine that thousands upon thousands of psychopathic collaborators killed some of the most productive people in our society in downtown Manhattan just for the pleasure of sending us to war in the Middle East, not to Saudi Arabia, where the hijackers came from, but to Iraq, when we could have easily found a pretext to go to war there anyway, and what a great war that was. And yet they did this without a single leak. There's not one person with a guilty conscience

who got on 60 Minutes and spilled the beans, and yet, generally speaking, you can't even keep the next iPhone from being left on the bar before it gets released. It's an amazing double standard of reasonableness there that gives us this kind of thinking. So what's your feeling about the fake news phenomenon that we're now looking for? Well, I think that the elevation of fake news to the level of... 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,

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