zlacker

This is what many people think, but it is demonstrably false. Most terrorists are highly educated and some are rich. The terrorists involved in 9/11 all had university degrees, for example, and some of them from western universities. These are not people who would be committing suicide anyway out of depression caused by miserable circumstances.

Frankly, I suspect that at least part of this comes from the aversion of highly educated and rich people to the idea that somebody much like them in those respects could do such a thing, and that it must be a poor lowly educated person doing it.

>>jules+(OP)
I know very well what you mention, but you're not reading what I wrote: "either in material or spiritual terms". Well-educated people are the first to know that society is full of lies and deceit, and without some spiritual rooting (be it familial love or something else), they are at high risk of being depressed but functional individuals. Alienation is a very powerful force. We used to say that only the rich can worry about being sad.

My second statement is coherent with this view: what education should give people is such a rooting. This is not necessarily what it does currently give them. In fact, a lot of academic tracks do their best to kill off any ounce of sentimentalism in one's heart. If it's really "all about data", killing a few hundreds "for the greater good of billions" doesn't look like such a terrible choice. This is something we really should keep in mind.

>>toyg+l2
I'm not sure what your stance is in that case. I certainly agree with you that these people are spiritually maladjusted. They way I see it there are two competing theories. One is that terrorism is mainly the result of economic and political grievances against the west and already present psychological disorders. The other is that in addition to economic and political grievances, religion and theological grievances play a major role, and that these people aren't crazy people but people who have become convinced of a crazy idea. The former is the mainstream left wing theory, and while I am generally sympathetic to the left, this theory simply does not fit the data.

If true we would expect terrorists to be more lowly educated and poor people who mainly come from countries that have suffered under the west. We would expect these to be people who hate life, not people who love death. We would expect terrorism to be weakly or not at all correlated to religion. We would expect that the terrorists are not explicitly telling us that they're doing it because of religious dogma. We would expect terrorist groups to be fighting against the west, and not mass murdering Yazidi's for example, who have absolutely nothing to do with what happens in the world. Of all western countries, we would not expect these attacks to be against France so many times. Why have previous attacks and outrages focused on cartoonists? I could go on and on. What we actually observe is the opposite.

All of this is explained perfectly well by the second theory.

>>jules+3g
The two are nonexclusive. If you are a disaffected/disenfranchised third-generation Algerian immigrant, you have a predisposition to pick a fight with the old colonial power, and you just need an excuse. Same if you come from Syria or Egypt and are well-educated; you have no idea of the amount of propaganda and West-blaming people in these countries grew up with for generations, because of things like the never-ending problem with Israel/Palestine, the Iranian coup against Mossadiq, the Iran/Iraq war and all the other conflicts "we" had an active role in. In the '70s, a lot of violent action was justified with marxism or fascism; today they can be justified with wahabism. If a particular religion was so magic, we would have had "islamic" suicide bombers for 5 centuries, and we just hadn't. You can't make chocolate cake with just chocolate.

> Of all western countries, we would not expect these attacks to be against France so many times.

And why not? They have been among the most brutal colonial powers, with shocking behaviour in Northern Africa and ongoing active military engagement across Africa -- in large part because of their ideological bent on absolutist superiority of the French republican model. They actively worked to blow up Lybia and actively support anti-islamic forces there. And of course they have now joined the anti-IS bombing campaign, because they hate to be left behind when there is to engage around the Mediterranean Sea. All the while, they have huge swaths of disenfranchised 2nd and 3rd generation-immigrant youth in their midst that they simply don't know what to do with. They are the easiest target after the UK, but unlike Britain they are not an island, their borders are very porous, and their security services are clearly less effective than the Five Eyes axis. On top of that, this: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/14/france-active-p...