I listened to this talk by Marc Sageman a long time ago. I’ve been thinking about the radicalization of young men and techbros as parallel to the way Salafi Jihadism grew from unhappy people. When I was in my early teens my father encouraged me to read The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. That book goes into how young people–young men–are drawn into cults and similar organizations out of dispossession, loneliness, and ignorance.
Some quotes:
Well, I come from medicine. Medicine is all about data. It does not matter what an authority tells you. It’s about what are the facts.
Now, it’s a puzzle. Why would the engineer become terrorist? Well, I’ll tell you, that’s because engineers are arrogant. They’re so arrogant, they think they can read. They think they can read the Quran without any help. Now, had they had some religious education, they might have been immunized against a fairly virulent, violent reading of the Quran.
I’ve listened to his talk many times but not in many years. Thanks to my email archives and The Internet Archive I was able to find it and use Happy Scribe to get a rough transcription.
