Making Sense - Sam Harris - #492 — The Second Plane, 25 Years Later

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris so it's been 25 years since the

00:00:28.720 morning of September 11, 2001, which means that many of you listening to this will have no memory

00:00:35.280 of that day at all. You can be out of college now and married and raising kids, and the defining

00:00:43.180 event of my generation is something you only know from books or documentaries. For those of us who

00:00:49.820 do remember it, the memory is of passing from one reality to another. There's a sense of before and

00:00:58.200 after that I never experienced before that moment. A feeling of being helplessly pulled

00:01:05.240 into the stream of history where it seemed like literally anything could happen next.

00:01:10.900 I've spoken about this on the podcast before. Five years ago on the 20th anniversary, I

00:01:15.960 devoted an entire episode to it and called it the second plane because that was what

00:01:21.220 really changed everything. When the first plane hit the North Tower, you could still

00:01:26.480 tell yourself a story that kept normal life intact. Maybe it was an accident, some catastrophic

00:01:34.160 navigational failure, or the actions of a madman. But when United 175 hit the South Tower, those

00:01:42.380 possibilities evaporated in an instant. The second plane proved that all this horror, this mass

00:01:49.820 murder of thousands of innocent people, was intentional. It proved that the people who

00:01:55.140 committed this atrocity also intended to die in the process. And once you have both intentionality

00:02:01.720 and a willingness to die, you have sincere belief. And one plane could have been the act of a lunatic, 0.68

00:02:09.480 but not two. The severely mentally ill don't coordinate to commit mass murder. 0.97

00:02:15.080 And most people who coordinate to commit mass murder aren't suicidal. So at 9.03 that morning,

00:02:21.400 everyone on earth was asking the same question. What set of ideas could possibly get sane people

00:02:29.140 to do such a thing intentionally, to murder innocent strangers by the thousands and to

00:02:34.360 kill themselves in the process? For those of us who had spent time studying the world's religions,

00:02:40.040 didn't have to search very long for an answer. It wasn't going to be the Mormons or the Anglicans

00:02:45.680 or the Jews. From where I sat, not much more information would have been added beyond the

00:02:51.960 side of the second plane hitting the south tower had we heard the hijackers screaming

00:02:56.760 Allahu Akbar from the cockpit, as you can bet your life they were. The point I made then and

00:03:02.960 the point I think bears repeating now is that an understanding of who this enemy is and the time

00:03:08.840 horizon across which they fight and the sacrifices they're willing to make should have been permanently

00:03:14.740 inscribed on our minds in that moment. We fought an eight trillion dollar war on terror in the

00:03:20.000 aftermath. We did many necessary things and made some catastrophic mistakes, but most of us have

00:03:25.940 had the luxury of moving on and forgetting about the problem of Islamic extremism for years at a 0.99

00:03:31.160 stretch. I've told this story before, but it bears repeating on this anniversary, because September 0.98

00:03:37.040 11th is quite literally the reason you're listening to me now. In the fall of 2001, I was in the middle

00:03:43.120 of my Ph.D. program in neuroscience. I had finished most of my coursework and was just

00:03:47.740 beginning my research on belief, on what happens in the brain when we accept propositions as true

00:03:52.940 or reject them as false. And I spent the better part of the previous decade immersed in religious

00:03:57.760 and philosophical literature and in the practice of meditation. So when the towers came down,

00:04:04.880 my concerns about faith, about the way it leverages human hope and fear and delusion

00:04:10.600 and tribalism were already well-formed, and on September 12th or 13th at the latest, I started

00:04:17.820 writing. I didn't know I was writing a book. I thought I was just trying to get the feelings of

00:04:22.540 horror and moral outrage out of my head and onto the page, but that document became the first

00:04:27.640 chapter of The End of Faith, and the resulting book pitched me into almost every culture war

00:04:32.160 battle we've fought since. It also got me speaking and writing about how to live an ethical and

00:04:37.120 spiritual life without believing any divisive bullshit. So my entire career as an author and

00:04:44.460 public speaker and as the creator of the Waking Up app, as the host of this podcast,

00:04:49.700 is downstream of that morning. But the end of faith wasn't only a reaction to the crimes

00:04:55.940 committed by jihadists on September 11th. It was a reaction to the confusion that surrounded

00:05:01.080 these events. We had just been attacked by religious faith at its most committed. 0.94

00:05:06.500 Nineteen men murdered three thousand people because they were certain that they were bound 0.98

00:05:11.540 for paradise. And what was our response? Well, right of center, it was just more piety. We

00:05:18.980 consoled ourselves with our own religious fanaticism, and we launched a crusade against

00:05:23.760 evil. On the secular left, something arguably worse was happening. Within weeks, serious people,

00:05:31.620 or seemingly serious people, credentialed people at any rate, began telling themselves and the

00:05:37.240 world that the hijackers had been driven to take these desperate measures by poverty, or by American

00:05:42.280 foreign policy, or by despair. And it didn't matter that the hijackers themselves and the people who

00:05:48.220 trained them, told us why they did it. They left letters. They made videos. Twelve of the 19

00:05:54.640 hijackers had attended college. All four of the pilots had earned FAA credentials. These were not,

00:06:00.900 as a group, poor and desperate men driven to terrorism because they had nothing to live for.

00:06:06.000 No, as it turns out, they really had something to live for and to die for because they were 0.74

00:06:11.040 obsessed with waging jihad against infidels and Jews and with achieving martyrdom in that cause. 0.89

00:06:17.240 as a way of getting to paradise directly. We know this from surveillance and from their 1.00

00:06:23.220 recovered writings and correspondence and from witness testimony. The instructions the hijackers

00:06:29.120 carried on 9-11 told them to anticipate paradise and to ask God to grant them martyrdom. The

00:06:35.380 atrocities committed that day were not political or economic or merely psychological. They were

00:06:42.000 acts of religious worship, and an entire class of Western liberals—academics, journalists,

00:06:48.460 intellectuals—simply couldn't metabolize that fact at all, and many still can't.

00:06:54.340 There's a version of skepticism and self-criticism here that isn't patently insane. You might think,

00:07:01.740 whatever the hijackers believed or intended, and whatever al-Qaeda itself took credit for,

00:07:06.740 the greatest damage of 9-11 came from our response to it.

00:07:11.340 3,000 people died on the day itself,

00:07:13.860 but we answered this evil by waging two decades of war

00:07:17.300 and wasting trillions of dollars

00:07:19.320 and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

00:07:22.100 We didn't kill all of these people directly.

00:07:24.660 It's estimated that we killed anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 civilians

00:07:28.040 in Afghanistan and Iraq in all our years of waging war there.

00:07:31.680 But our interventions unleashed civil wars in both places,

00:07:35.500 leading to ten times this number of dead at the hands of sectarian militias and other combatants.

00:07:40.620 And many more people died from the indirect effects of all this social upheaval. 0.81

00:07:45.260 So we invaded Iraq and broke that country, 0.79

00:07:48.120 creating the conditions for even more jihadist violence in the form of the Islamic State, 0.88

00:07:52.780 which we then had to deal with by killing even more people. 0.72

00:07:55.260 And after 20 years in Afghanistan, we handed that country back to the Taliban 0.88

00:07:59.300 in a withdrawal so ignominious that it stands as a monument to the foreign policy failures 0.90

00:08:05.060 of several presidents. In fact, this withdrawal declared American impotence so effectively that

00:08:11.420 many people think it triggered Putin's invasion of Ukraine. So, the argument runs, wasn't the

00:08:17.280 real lesson of 9-11 about the pathologies and misuses of American power? Well, some of that

00:08:24.980 indictment is justified. My views on this front haven't changed all that much over the years,

00:08:30.880 though the phrase nation-building now has a ring of damnation about it that it didn't have at the

00:08:36.700 time. The war in Afghanistan seemed quite necessary in 2001, and it does even in retrospect. But it

00:08:44.020 could have been very short, narrowly targeting al-Qaeda, and without our succumbing to the

00:08:49.220 delusion that we could turn Afghanistan into a secular democracy. And delusional or not,

00:08:54.700 the war had to end sometime. However, the manner of our exit under President Biden

00:09:00.340 was a disgrace, however you look at it. And the subsequent abandonment of our Afghan allies,

00:09:06.440 the thousands of translators and others who risked their lives to help us struggle to drag

00:09:11.060 that country into the modern world, stranding them at the mercy of the Taliban, as the Trump

00:09:16.000 administration has now done, is one of the greatest self-inflicted moral injuries I can

00:09:20.540 think of. We made these people a promise, and we didn't keep it. And many of them will die

00:09:27.100 because of that. It's absolutely shameful. If any people on Earth deserve expedited green cards,

00:09:35.500 it's these Afghans who risked their lives to help us, along with their families.

00:09:40.700 The war in Iraq always seemed like a bad idea, though I admit it's hard to imagine the

00:09:45.720 counterfactual and be confident that leaving Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic sons in place 0.66

00:09:51.000 for the last 20 years would have been good for the people of Iraq or for the world. Anyone who 0.86

00:09:56.260 is confident about that is either Nostradamus or a little crazy. But the claim was never that

00:10:03.580 American foreign policy is perfect or even good enough. It's neither. The claim is that we have

00:10:11.520 enemies whom we have not merely made. Are there people who have rational grievances against America

00:10:17.900 or against the West? Sure, but we have other enemies, and we really must understand them.

00:10:24.800 The claim, and this was obvious before 9-11, but the second plane should have proved the point for 0.71

00:10:30.080 all time, the claim is that jihadism is a machine for converting sincere religious belief and

00:10:36.880 spiritual aspiration into mass murder. And unfortunately, the gears of this machine

00:10:41.680 exist perpetually, in plain language, in scripture that a quarter of the world's population

00:10:47.620 considers to be the literal word of the creator of the universe. Nothing we did wrong in Fallujah,

00:10:53.520 or at Abu Ghraib, or in the aftermath of World War I, makes that claim false. And no doubts about

00:11:00.520 the wisdom of nation-building tell us what to do about people who can sincerely claim

00:11:05.240 to love death more than we love life.

00:11:09.360 Say whatever you want about the failures of American foreign policy,

00:11:12.420 this criticism does not address the reality of jihadism.

00:11:17.620 One thing that makes this anniversary strange

00:11:20.080 is that, in one sense, we have won the so-called war on terror,

00:11:25.660 or at least we bought ourselves an astonishing reprieve.

00:11:29.500 Bin Laden is dead, and in the 25 years since 9-11,

00:11:32.720 and jihadists have managed to kill no more than a few hundred people inside the United States.

00:11:37.880 A few hundred people in a quarter century.

00:11:40.860 In a country where that many die of drug overdoses every day,

00:11:44.140 how much more successful could we have hoped to be?

00:11:46.840 And it's worth reflecting on that,

00:11:49.000 because this relative freedom from chaos and violence

00:11:51.540 was secured by the very apparatus that critics of the war on terror have always deplored.

00:11:58.100 Independent analysis by Rand and others

00:12:01.000 suggest that our counterterrorism efforts have stopped something like 100 attacks on American

00:12:05.720 soil in that time. There have been a few small ones, mostly lone wolves, but almost everything

00:12:12.640 that was being coordinated with overseas organizations has been stopped. We did trade

00:12:17.940 away some significant freedom, both at home and abroad, for this increased security, and it appears

00:12:24.360 to have worked. So most of us have enjoyed the luxury of moving on to other concerns. The media

00:12:30.160 moved on. The foreign policy establishment moved on. I've moved on for long stretches of time

00:12:36.400 in my writing and on this podcast to all kinds of topics, to AI and free will and wealth inequality

00:12:43.960 and the absolute wreckage of our politics, research on psychedelics, meditation. The war

00:12:50.420 on terror began to feel like an artifact from history. That is, if you weren't paying close

00:12:54.980 attention to what was happening elsewhere on earth. There was never any reason to believe

00:13:00.160 had moved on. And October 7, 2023, put this back in perspective. What happened in southern Israel

00:13:08.060 on that morning was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and it was documented by

00:13:13.880 the perpetrators themselves on GoPro cameras. We have the audio of a young man calling his parents

00:13:20.940 to boast in a state of rapture about how many Jews he had just killed with his own hands.

00:13:27.700 If you listen to that audio, that's not what despair sounds like.

00:13:32.400 That is what religious certainty sounds like.

00:13:35.560 And it was the same certainty that had been running in Muhammad Atta's brain on 9-11. 0.69

00:13:40.880 The continuity between September 11th and October 7th could not be more clear. 0.95

00:13:47.660 Martyrdom, paradise, the murder of Jews and infidels as a sacrament. 0.99

00:13:53.280 Anyone who understands the problem of jihadism recognized this immediately. 1.00

00:13:58.560 But then came the Western reaction, which is where 25 years of seeming progress collapses

00:14:05.140 into nothing. 0.99

00:14:06.580 In 2001, it took the apologists and useful idiots a few weeks to organize and spread their 0.99

00:14:13.100 confusion. 1.00

00:14:14.220 In 2023, it took minutes.

00:14:16.600 There were people celebrating in the streets of New York and on the campuses of our most

00:14:20.720 prestigious universities before Israel had even begun to defend itself. Over 30 student groups

00:14:27.260 at Harvard held Israel entirely responsible for the massacre of its own civilians, for the rape,

00:14:33.240 mutilation, and murder of kids at a music festival devoted to peace who were the same age and

00:14:39.320 probably shared the same politics of the kids who were celebrating their murder, and spoke of this

00:14:45.040 carnage in terms of liberation. It was resistance to occupation. It was decolonization. And they're

00:14:53.640 still doing this. This is worse than the confusion I saw back in 2001. The old confusion was political.

00:15:01.000 It referenced root causes and blowback and poverty as an engine of terror. That was total bullshit. 0.99

00:15:07.480 But it wasn't a new religion. The new confusion is a kind of religion. It's identitarian. 1.00

00:15:15.040 There's now a pseudo-moral framework, which appears utterly dominant in elite institutions,

00:15:21.140 in which the only questions worth asking about any conflict are, who is the oppressor and who

00:15:27.500 are the oppressed? And once those roles are cast, no facts on the ground can revise them.

00:15:34.460 A theocratic death cult that's explicitly committed to committing genocide and that

00:15:40.820 throws gay men from rooftops, gets classified as a liberation movement at Harvard and Stanford 0.87

00:15:48.660 and Columbia. The political rise of Zoran Mamdani in New York and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan,

00:15:56.260 whatever else it represents, tells you how little an entanglement with Islamism 0.77

00:16:01.420 now costs a person on the left. If anything, it's an asset. We have a term, in fact, 0.96

00:16:06.980 Islamo-leftism, or a red-green alliance, to name this phenomenon. And we now have a mayor of New

00:16:14.220 York, which is home to more Jews than any place outside of Israel, who won't clearly condemn the 0.83

00:16:20.420 phrase, globalize the Intifada, when he knows perfectly well that these words advocate for a

00:16:26.680 global campaign of terror against Jews. And we have a Democratic Senate candidate, and likely

00:16:32.740 future senator, El-Sayed, who in the aftermath of an attempted massacre of his own constituents

00:16:38.420 in a synagogue in Michigan, said that hurt people hurt people, and then linked this barbaric attempt

00:16:45.100 to kill 140 preschool-aged children to Israel's war in Lebanon. And he's since apologized for this

00:16:52.180 out of political necessity. I don't mean to be cynical about apologies in general. I think it

00:16:58.440 should be possible to apologize for something like this, but in the absence of any honest

00:17:02.500 reckoning with the problem of jihadism, and in light of his continued association with

00:17:07.080 the raving anti-Semite Hassan Piker, I think we should understand the apology for what

00:17:11.780 it is, his attempt to just barely appear like a decent enough human being to get elected,

00:17:17.620 all the while saying nothing to disappoint the fanatics on the far left and in the Muslim

00:17:22.220 community who've converged to support his campaign.

00:17:26.020 Again, ideas have consequences.

00:17:28.940 This truth shouldn't be remotely controversial.

00:17:32.100 And yet it has long been taboo to acknowledge this

00:17:34.920 when discussing the religion of Islam.

00:17:37.820 We don't even have a standard terminology to guide our thinking.

00:17:41.100 When emphasizing the political dimensions of the problem, 1.00

00:17:43.960 the term Islamism often seems best. 0.99

00:17:46.940 When referring to Islamists who are eager to die as martyrs for their cause, 1.00

00:17:50.560 we generally speak of jihadism. 1.00

00:17:52.600 And I've used both words here.

00:17:55.020 Depending on the context, we can also use terms like radical Islam,

00:17:58.720 or Islamic extremism, or militant Islam, or even Islamofascism.

00:18:04.240 Call this dangerous, zealotry, whatever you want.

00:18:07.280 What you cannot do, honestly,

00:18:09.920 is claim that it has no connection to the mainstream religion of Islam.

00:18:13.960 And this is why a topic that's now central to the health of open societies

00:18:17.440 remains taboo to discuss.

00:18:20.320 And there are several reasons for this.

00:18:22.820 First, there are actual racists and xenophobes in every Western society.

00:18:28.280 And wherever such people exist, their bigotry can be used to discredit rational concerns about Islam.

00:18:33.780 Second, Islamists have worked very hard to make any criticism of Islam as a system of ideas seem like bigotry.

00:18:41.300 It would be natural, of course, for Muslims to feel uneasy about having their faith singled out for scrutiny, 0.88

00:18:47.500 whether by governments or by the media.

00:18:49.040 But much of this resistance reveals something more sinister, coming, as it so often does, 0.71

00:18:55.100 from genuine Islamists, who know precisely how deep their theocratic aspirations run. 0.93

00:19:01.680 Throughout the West, we find Islamists and their apologists working to increase their 0.92

00:19:06.760 political power within a social order that they clearly despise, and which they hope to subvert

00:19:12.640 by using the values and norms of liberal tolerance to undermine liberalism itself.

00:19:18.840 This can take countless forms,

00:19:21.000 from valorizing the hijab as a symbol of female empowerment, 0.95

00:19:25.180 where it is in fact the most conspicuous means

00:19:27.100 of enforcing gender apartheid throughout the Muslim world,

00:19:30.680 to seeking to criminalize blasphemy at the United Nations,

00:19:34.140 to blaming Salman Rushdie for the fatwa against him,

00:19:37.500 and the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists

00:19:39.020 for getting themselves butchered by jihadists.

00:19:41.660 They should have been more sensitive

00:19:42.800 to the delicate sensibilities of the Muslim community. 0.99

00:19:46.060 Please don't lose sight of what is happening here 1.00

00:19:49.220 and how it is a direct assault on liberal values. 1.00

00:19:53.240 Islam is the one religion on earth that seeks to force everyone, 0.87

00:19:58.780 even those of us outside the faith, to live by its strictures. 1.00

00:20:03.960 Take the cases of Rushdie or the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists

00:20:07.700 or the Danish cartoon controversy or dozens of other cases.

00:20:12.980 The claim isn't that Muslims can't criticize or even depict the Prophet Muhammad in artwork

00:20:18.940 without the risk of being killed.

00:20:21.400 No, the claim is that no one can.

00:20:24.400 And the truth is, that is our lived reality now, even in the West. 1.00

00:20:29.920 Of course, there's no shortage of useful idiots to help in this cause. 0.99

00:20:33.520 I'm sure many kids at Harvard and Columbia and Stanford 1.00

00:20:36.400 actually believe that the hijab is a sign of female empowerment. 0.99

00:20:40.640 But Islamists know that it isn't, and they're very happy to use identity politics and grievance 0.96

00:20:47.880 culture and the very norms of liberal tolerance as weapons against liberalism itself. It's a 0.95

00:20:54.660 remarkably cynical strategy, but it's working. For decades now, Western liberals have defended

00:21:02.540 Islamist intolerance in the name of tolerance. There is simply no question that this masochistic 1.00

00:21:10.620 folly puts open societies at risk. And crucially, it empowers the far right, because if liberals

00:21:18.560 won't protect us from Islamic theocracy and now Islamo-leftism, fascists will. And it's here that 0.96

00:21:25.840 the term Islamophobia gets deployed to confuse matters by conflating any criticism of the

00:21:31.980 ideology of Islam with xenophobia or racism or an irrational hatred of Muslims as people.

00:21:38.620 And this is why critics of Islam, even those who are born into the faith and speak Arabic or Urdu or Farsi and are non-white, even they can find themselves described as anti-Muslim extremists or, absurdly, as racists and even get profiled on the Hate Watch page of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

00:22:00.200 This inability or refusal to distinguish between a criticism of dangerous ideas 0.57

00:22:05.380 and a hatred of people is itself a capitulation to the forces of theocracy.

00:22:11.500 The term Islamophobia is routinely used as though it were analogous to anti-Semitism,

00:22:16.500 but it really isn't analogous to anti-Semitism.

00:22:20.060 As a religion, Judaism is non-proselytizing.

00:22:23.300 In the general case, the way you become a Jew is that you're born one, 0.88

00:22:26.020 because your mother was born one. 0.81

00:22:27.500 It's possible to convert to Judaism, but almost no one does this, 1.00

00:22:30.600 because Jews don't tend to make it very easy. 1.00

00:22:32.800 However, the more important fact is that Jews are not looking for converts,

00:22:36.740 and as a result, there are only 15 million Jews on earth,

00:22:39.700 nearly all of them born to parents who are themselves Jewish.

00:22:43.300 So Jews, along with the people who hate them, tend to agree about at least one thing.

00:22:48.900 Being Jewish has ethnic and racial implications, at least most of the time.

00:22:54.540 Islam, by contrast, is an aggressively missionary faith,

00:22:58.600 and so it has nothing in principle to do with a person's ethnicity or race.

00:23:02.900 There are now over 2 billion Muslims, a quarter of the world's population,

00:23:07.120 and over 50 Muslim-majority countries, 1.00

00:23:09.280 and none of them are good places to live if you care about human freedom. 0.99

00:23:13.460 This is unlikely to be an accident.

00:23:16.020 Is it actually a surprise that killing people for apostasy

00:23:18.960 has a chilling effect on free thought?

00:23:21.460 Might the explicit denial of political equality to women have something to do with its relative

00:23:26.240 absence throughout the Muslim world? Even though our best newspapers and magazines still use the 1.00

00:23:32.200 term, there is no such thing as Islamophobia. There is such a thing as racism. There is such

00:23:38.220 a thing as xenophobia. Both of these concepts cover any bigotry against immigrants from Muslim

00:23:44.320 majority countries. Obviously racism and xenophobia are worth condemning, but Islam is not a race

00:23:51.220 or an ethnicity or a nationality. It's a set of ideas. Criticizing ideas is not bigotry. It's the

00:24:00.260 essence of liberalism, in fact. Criticizing Islam as a system of ideas and noticing the terrible 1.00

00:24:07.920 effects that some of these ideas have on our world is no more a form of bigotry than criticizing

00:24:13.980 communism is. A third reason that any special focus on Islam can seem suspect is that many of

00:24:21.600 Islam's critics harbor other apparent loyalties. And pick any organization that focuses on the

00:24:27.540 spread of political Islam or the dangers of jihadism, and you'll often find that it has

00:24:32.460 been founded or funded, or both, by Christian fundamentalists or Orthodox Jews or ex-Muslims,

00:24:40.780 some of whom may have since converted to Christianity.

00:24:43.680 While it's natural to view such people as having conflicts of interest,

00:24:47.360 in my experience, their outsized contributions to this topic

00:24:51.080 result from the comparative blindness of secular liberals.

00:24:55.180 Generally speaking, the people who most readily understand the threat of radical Islam

00:24:59.540 tend to be devout believers in another faith, or former Muslims,

00:25:04.500 because they know what secular liberals often do not.

00:25:07.780 that religious fanatics actually believe what they say they believe.

00:25:13.200 When jihadists shout, 0.98

00:25:14.740 we love death more than the infidels love life, 1.00

00:25:18.140 all evidence suggests that we should take them at their word. 1.00

00:25:21.620 And if we care about maintaining the liberal values of open societies,

00:25:25.820 tolerance of diversity, free speech,

00:25:28.420 political equality for women, secularism, scientific rationality, 0.99

00:25:33.180 we have to admit that we do not want more Islamists and jihadists in those societies. 1.00

00:25:40.560 And this has implications for how we think about immigration. 1.00

00:25:43.840 It means vetting people for their ideological commitments before letting them in.

00:25:48.820 I have zero sympathy for the racist or xenophobic concerns of people who simply don't want 0.78

00:25:54.700 more dark-skinned foreigners in their countries. 0.92

00:25:58.020 They don't want any more Indian or Persian or Ethiopian restaurants. 1.00

00:26:01.860 They don't want to hear any weird music on their streets.

00:26:04.980 That is not where I'm coming from at all.

00:26:07.960 I'm actually a xenophile when it comes to that type of cultural diversity.

00:26:12.720 However, we do not want radical diversity around the core values that make open societies possible.

00:26:21.360 We don't want to open our borders to people who do not share the values that every liberal democracy depends upon for its very survival.

00:26:29.680 This has nothing to do with American foreign policy or Israel's conduct in any war.

00:26:37.320 The next jihadist attack in Paris or Madrid or Mumbai will have nothing to do with America or

00:26:46.740 Israel. Nothing. And it will be perfectly continuous with the events of September 11th

00:26:52.760 and October 7th. We have to break this spell of delusion. Jihadists are enemies that we have not

00:27:01.760 made. They do not have rational grievances that we need to understand or accommodate. And we should

00:27:08.380 never forget that the first and most numerous victims of Islamic extremism are Muslims themselves.

00:27:15.820 There are dissidents and reformers and apostates and secularists fleeing or attempting to flee 0.76

00:27:22.040 these theocracies. And these are precisely the people we should welcome into Western countries,

00:27:28.680 and they're the ones who understand the problem of jihadism better than anyone.

00:27:33.440 So what does a quarter century amount to? I sometimes think about what I would tell the

00:27:38.600 person I was on September 12, 2001, sitting down to write and fully expecting that the argument

00:27:45.620 I was making would be conventional wisdom eventually. The strange sadness of this

00:27:51.580 anniversary, is that the thesis of that book has required no revision at all. Beliefs matter.

00:27:59.380 Specific doctrines about martyrdom and paradise and apostasy and blasphemy produce specific

00:28:06.180 behaviors, as reliably as the belief that there's no more milk in the fridge will send a person to

00:28:10.900 the supermarket. What I clearly got wrong, at least tacitly, was the timeline for the birth

00:28:17.820 of our collective sanity.

00:28:19.780 I really thought the second plane

00:28:21.220 settled the question

00:28:22.680 about whether ideas can be lethal

00:28:24.860 on a scale that should concern us.

00:28:27.080 I didn't imagine that a quarter century later,

00:28:29.300 the most privileged people on earth

00:28:31.440 would be tearing down posters

00:28:33.480 of kidnapped children,

00:28:35.300 or that distinguishing between

00:28:36.580 an embattled democracy and a death cult

00:28:39.500 would be a career risk 0.88

00:28:41.220 in most of our elite institutions.

00:28:43.880 The second plane told us

00:28:45.800 everything we need to know

00:28:47.300 about the power of bad ideas.

00:28:49.320 The only question 25 years later

00:28:51.900 is when will we admit this?

00:28:57.100 Okay, before I go,

00:28:58.780 I'd like to say a word about the podcast.

00:29:01.100 First, we launched Community a few months back,

00:29:04.280 and that's been going great.

00:29:05.540 It's exactly the sort of conversation

00:29:06.880 I was hoping to see.

00:29:08.500 There have been some great threads there

00:29:10.120 on difficult topics.

00:29:11.660 You can just go to samharris.org

00:29:13.260 and click the Community tab

00:29:15.560 at the top of the page.

00:29:17.300 and then you just have to log in. Also, there's a Making Sense community app

00:29:21.220 in the App Store. As you know, this podcast doesn't make money the way most of what you

00:29:26.140 listen to does. There are no advertisers or sponsors. There's no network or parent company.

00:29:32.940 Most podcasts run on some mix of those. Making Sense runs on one thing. You decide in that the

00:29:39.140 work is worth supporting. As I've said before, I could read ads here because there are products

00:29:45.720 and companies I genuinely love. But I don't want to think about anyone's brand concerns when

00:29:51.620 deciding who to talk to or what to talk about. And the truth is, even those of you who wish the

00:29:56.200 podcast were free don't want me thinking about those things either. And as much as you might

00:30:01.040 be briefly amused by hearing me read an ad for mattresses or a VPN, I think you know that wouldn't

00:30:07.680 do much for my credibility. There was a recent New York Times article about certain podcasters

00:30:12.140 now being paid by political campaigns to promote various candidates, and not disclosing this.

00:30:18.100 There was some amazing footage of a podcaster dismissing a candidate at one point, and then

00:30:22.540 later on, once he was being paid tens of thousands of dollars by the campaign, pretending to

00:30:26.860 think that the candidate was fantastic.

00:30:29.300 I actually don't know how such a person gets out of bed in the morning.

00:30:32.260 The truth is, I don't know how his audience gets out of bed in the morning.

00:30:35.700 So I've been asking you to pay for this podcast for 10 years now, and many of you have said

00:30:41.240 yes, and that's why I get to do this week after week. And most of you pay because you want to

00:30:46.900 hear full episodes. Some of you also want the occasional bonus content or early access to

00:30:52.180 tickets when I tour, and those reasons are good enough. But there's one reason that matters to me

00:30:57.520 more than any, and it's why the podcast has truly succeeded, even in a world where there are now

00:31:03.360 millions of podcasts. Some of you just want this work to exist. The information landscape has

00:31:10.980 gotten much more crowded since you first discovered this show. Again, there are literally millions of

00:31:16.560 podcasts now, and many more things have a claim on your attention. As you know, most of that content

00:31:22.020 is nominally free because its creators are farming your attention and user data and selling both to

00:31:28.640 advertisers. As it's often said now, if you're not paying for a product, you are the product. And in

00:31:35.140 this context, I'd like to suggest that you not think about your support for the show transactionally.

00:31:40.400 Of course, you could run the numbers.

00:31:42.520 I've actually seen some people do this over the years.

00:31:45.020 You could say,

00:31:46.360 Netflix spends $20 billion a year on content.

00:31:49.940 So if I'm paying $20 a month for a subscription,

00:31:52.700 I'm getting access to something like $100 million worth of content

00:31:55.600 for every dollar I spend.

00:31:57.860 So by that measure, a podcast episode should never cost more than two cents.

00:32:01.940 Or you could say, I only listened to one episode last month.

00:32:04.480 So that episode cost as much as a book,

00:32:07.060 which takes a lot more work to produce.

00:32:09.200 I hope it's clear that that's not how the world actually works.

00:32:14.300 The question will never be whether you can put one rational price on all forms of digital media

00:32:19.980 and then have it metered to you by the minute.

00:32:22.880 The question is whether you want work like this done in the first place.

00:32:27.060 As you know, subscribing doesn't buy you a vote on what I say,

00:32:30.780 but it's what guarantees that no one but me has one.

00:32:34.600 And that is the only reason I've been able to tell you exactly what I think

00:32:38.400 even on the most controversial topics for over a decade now.

00:32:43.360 I think most of you would be amazed to know the kinds of conversations I have in private

00:32:48.040 with people who you would think could say exactly what they believe publicly

00:32:52.640 but can't or feel they can't.

00:32:55.720 Some of these people are rich and famous.

00:32:58.260 They're precisely the people you would think would have the power to say whatever they want.

00:33:02.940 But given how the world actually works, they don't see it that way. 0.55

00:33:07.320 I can assure you that you can be very wealthy and very famous and just fucking terrified of 0.58

00:33:15.180 being on the wrong side of a moral panic. Of course, there are exceptions, but they're

00:33:20.520 comparatively rare. Let me take the author J.K. Rowling. Now, I might not want to sign off on

00:33:26.480 everything she's said in her various skirmishes online with trans activists, but generally

00:33:33.080 speaking, I think we view the topic from more or less the same angle. Having a mob suddenly

00:33:38.580 proscribe the use of the term woman, demanding instead that we speak of birthing person or

00:33:44.460 menstruators or people with ovaries or some other absurd construction, was always insufferable.

00:33:51.740 And the fact that many of our most elite institutions, even scientific ones, 1.00

00:33:56.860 bent the knee to this idiocy is deeply embarrassing. But J.K. Rowling is only one of 0.97

00:34:04.180 maybe a dozen writers who could have withstood the assault on her career and reputation that

00:34:09.180 came in response to her pushing back against this moral panic. Again, I've been off social

00:34:13.660 media for years, so if Rowling has been radicalized and says something that I wouldn't

00:34:18.420 want to defend, I'm not aware of it. Like many people, I think she's probably been driven half

00:34:22.940 crazy by her engagement with social media, and she would do well to get off it. But my point

00:34:28.400 is that as successful a writer as she is, making a billion dollars from her books alone,

00:34:35.640 she is just barely someone who survived the pushback against her, given the incentives

00:34:40.880 in mainstream media. I don't mean physical survival, though she has received endless

00:34:45.680 death threats and doxing. You can be sure she spends a fortune on security, and her security 0.92

00:34:50.880 concerns are perfectly rational. But leave all that aside. I'm talking about just being able to work

00:34:56.700 and to do the thing you love to do. Rowling is someone for whom quite literally theme parks have

00:35:04.000 been opened and billion-dollar film franchises spawned on the basis of her books. And yet she

00:35:10.500 had the stars of those very films, everyone from Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe on down,

00:35:16.300 who owe their entire careers to her intellectual property,

00:35:20.260 denounce her essentially as a witch.

00:35:23.460 Whatever those actors actually believe

00:35:25.140 about the complex issue of gender dysphoria, 0.86

00:35:28.580 you can be sure that they were afraid not to denounce her

00:35:31.780 for fear of never working in Hollywood again.

00:35:34.940 Most writers would have been destroyed

00:35:37.740 by that sort of backlash.

00:35:40.120 Their books would have been unpublished.

00:35:42.500 Do you have any idea how many writers

00:35:45.060 agree with Rowling on this issue, but won't dare open their mouths about it. Of course,

00:35:50.660 the same thing happened with Black Lives Matter, the same thing's happening now with Israel and

00:35:55.280 Gaza, and there will be the next thing, and the thing after that. But because many of you subscribe 0.84

00:36:00.840 to the podcast, I don't have those concerns. It's not that I don't pay any price for expressing my

00:36:07.540 views. I mean, not many people have gotten smeared from both the left and the right as much as I have.

00:36:12.980 But the fact that I continue to thrive while remaining free to focus on whatever I think

00:36:18.680 is most important, that is entirely due to those of you who pay for the podcast.

00:36:24.600 Of course, with some regularity, there's a conversation that I think should reach people

00:36:28.140 who will never pay for it, and we put that episode out for free.

00:36:32.060 But again, that's only possible because of those of you who subscribe.

00:36:35.740 And this work travels in other ways, too, whether or not anyone listens to a full episode.

00:36:41.120 Ideas get clipped and argued about

00:36:43.240 and repeated by people who have never heard the original.

00:36:46.420 We've probably had a conversation with someone

00:36:47.900 whose views were informed by an episode

00:36:49.660 that they only heard a clip of.

00:36:51.880 But the work had to get done in the first place

00:36:53.760 for that clip to get out there.

00:36:55.820 So I just want to thank all of you

00:36:57.460 who maintain a subscription to the podcast,

00:37:00.180 especially with so much else competing for your attention.

00:37:04.560 Because you make everything I do possible.

00:37:08.060 And of course, if any of you want to begin

00:37:09.380 supporting the podcast,

00:37:10.580 You can start a subscription at samharris.org.

00:37:15.100 As always, thanks for listening.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - September 09, 2026

#492 — The Second Plane, 25 Years Later

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