 You know, I've watched Stephen King movies before, but I don't know if they really live up to all the hype. I guess I just don't get it. You've heard it before. I just don't understand why people X. I'm as guilty as anyone of a bit of rhetorical hyperbole, especially after a couple of glasses of wine, boldly proclaiming that I just can't understand why people like sports, or that I don't know the first thing about Justin Bieber, or daytime television, and have no clue why anybody else does. Of course, it's not meant to be taken literally. I don't really question my sanity every time someone gets chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla. It's usually meant as a figure of speech, or a joke, but sometimes it feels a little more sincere than that. Some people who identify as Democrats swear that they can't fathom what would bring a sane person to vote for a Republican, and I don't really get the sense that they're joking. They really can't. Many atheists really think they have no idea how anyone with a lick of sense could come to believe any religion, and several religious people feel the same way about people who believe in different gods. It seems that sometimes this supposedly insurmountable barrier of ignorance is used to reinforce one's social or cultural allegiances, to wave the flag for one's team and distance oneself from the other team. The inability to grasp ideologies or worldviews that we want to paint as being perverse or irrational becomes a point of pride in authenticity. You see, I'm so super reasonable that I can't even pretend to process these crazy ideas. For example, one might assert that terrorists, who are most certainly despicable and not on our team, are also crazy people, whose thoughts and actions simply cannot be understood by rational folk. US Senator John Warner asserted this position in response to suicide attacks by Al Qaeda, claiming those who would commit suicide and their attacks on the free world are not rational. But is that true? Are terrorists literally insane? The idea that they have some sort of pervasive path of psychology has been tested in numerous ways, and using all the normal diagnostic criteria for things like paranoia or depression or psychosis, there's no evidence that they're any more or less likely to have psychological problems than the general population. Furthermore, it's possible that the reasoning which leads them to such abhorrent behavior isn't really all that alien to us. In this 2009 paper, Patterns of Thinking in Militant Extremism, researchers from numerous institutions around the world search for similarities in the reasoning of violent extremists, people who had engaged in homicidal activities in the name of some ideology. They interviewed and examined the written works of dangerous fanatics from all sorts of different cultures and backgrounds, from Timothy McVeigh to the Muslim Brotherhood to the Tamil Tigers to the Irish Republican Army. The only thing these individuals shared was a dedication to some cause and a willingness to kill innocent people to achieve it. From their sample of 13 violent fanatics and terrorist organizations, the researchers identified 16 themes which occurred in multiple places. Themes like glorification of dying for a noble cause, the desire to purge evil from the world, and a feeling of imminent disaster which must be averted at all costs. It's quite a less, and reading them all at once is not hard to see how believing these things might lead someone to do some pretty drastic stuff. The investigators then generated a questionnaire with a series of statements that were meant to evoke those themes. Like government is illegitimate unless based strictly on God's authority as found in the holy book, or extreme measures are needed now to restore virtue and righteousness to this world. They asked groups of students to rate how much they agreed or disagreed with the statements. You'd expect that most reasonable people would be strongly opposed to all of them, but the responses ranged from a tepid maybe to a lukewarm probably not. Not hell no. Not dear God, that's awful. Just kind of a general meh. Not only are these murders fanatics not insane in any clinical sense, but it seems that the general population isn't particularly allergic to the narratives which seem to motivate them to do horrific things. As much as we might like to believe that we're nothing like these legitimately awful people, the research suggests that most of us probably agree with them on some general principles, at least to some degree. That's a little uncomfortable, but it also seems suggestive. If we're really interested in combating abhorrent behaviors and ideologies like terrorism, throwing our hands up in the air and lamenting just how incomprehensibly crazy our opponents are isn't just inaccurate. It ignores a dangerous possibility that it doesn't take a whole lot of nudging to make a reasonable person do horrendous things. With such an unsettling and unexpected result, the authors of the paper went so far as to construct an anti-extremist ideology, a set of beliefs and attitudes antithetical to the ones they identified in their analysis, which they believe might undermine the processes which lead people to violent zealotry. It's a pretty good list, too. Moderation, adherence to moral and ethical rules even in service of sacred things, perhaps appropriate to this video, never dehumanizing or demonizing others. This collection of values may be a very useful tool for eroding the attitudes that lead to terrorism, and to obtain it, it was necessary to assume that there was some sort of comprehensible underlying structure to that mentality, a pattern that could be understood and beaten. Now, it is fun and comforting to imagine that the only reason we disagree with others is because they're simply too bizarre and divergent in their thinking, that the only way to really get where they're coming from would be to abandon reason entirely and also be insane. It removes any responsibility to try to see things from their side or even think of them as real people. But it seems that even those individuals who do what we would consider unthinkable things are usually operating under totally comprehensible and even familiar premises, and confronting the unsettling truth that we're not really all that different from those we despise can actually help us further our own ends and undermine theirs. And to be honest, it's kind of gross to where ignorance or lack of understanding is a badge of honor. There's probably more than enough celebration of not knowing stuff in the world without my hyperbolic ranting about vanilla ice cream, even on pie. What about you? Do you think there are people who we simply shouldn't seek to understand, or do you think that knowledge is power, and knowledge of someone is power over them? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe while I share, and don't stop thunking.