#492 — The Second Plane, 25 Years Later

Sam Harris (0:21)

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

So it's been 25 years since the morning of September 11th, 2001, which means that many of you listening to this will have no memory of that day at all. You can be out of college now and married and raising kids, and the defining event of my generation is something you only know from books or documentaries.

For those of us who do remember it, the memory is of passing from one reality to another. There's a sense of before and after that I never experienced before that moment. A feeling of being helplessly pulled into the stream of history, where it seemed like literally anything could happen next. I've spoken about this on the podcast before. Five years ago on the 20th anniversary, I devoted an entire episode to it and called it the second plane because that was what really changed everything. When the first plane hit the North Tower, you could still tell yourself a story that kept normal life intact. Maybe it was an accident, some catastrophic navigational failure or the actions of a madman. But when United 175 hit the South Tower, those possibilities evaporated in an instant. The second plane proved that all this horror, this mass murder of thousands of innocent people, was intentional. It proved that the people who committed this atrocity also intended to die in the process. And once you have both intentionality and a willingness to die, you have sincere belief.

And one plane could have been the act of a lunatic, but not two. The severely mentally ill don't coordinate to commit mass murder. And most people who coordinate to commit mass murder aren't suicidal. So at 9.03 that morning, everyone on earth was asking the same question. What set of ideas could possibly get sane people to do such a thing intentionally, to murder innocent strangers by the thousands and to kill themselves in the process?

For those of us who had spent time studying the world's religions, didn't have to search very long for an answer. It wasn't going to be the Mormons or the Anglicans or the Jews. From where I sat, not much more information would have been added beyond the sight of the second plane hitting the south tower, had we heard the hijackers screaming Allahu Akbar from the cockpit, as you can bet your life they were. The point I made then and the point I think Bear is repeating now, is that an understanding of who this enemy is and the time horizon across which they fight, and the sacrifices they're willing to make, should have been permanently inscribed on our minds in that moment. We fought an $8 trillion war on terror in the aftermath. We did many necessary things and made some catastrophic mistakes, but most of us have had the luxury of moving on and forgetting about the problem of Islamic extremism for years at a stretch. I've told this story before, but Bear is repeating on this anniversary, because September 11th is quite literally the reason you're listening to me now.

In the fall of 2001, I was in the middle of my Ph.D. program in neuroscience. I had finished most of my coursework and was just beginning my research on belief on what happens in the brain when we accept propositions as true or reject them as false. And I spent the better part of the previous decade immersed in religious and philosophical literature and in the practice of meditation.

So when the towers came down, my concerns about faith, about the way it leverages human hope and fear and delusion and tribalism were already well formed. And on September 12th or 13th at the latest, I started writing. I didn't know I was writing a book. I thought I was just trying to get the feelings of horror and moral outrage out of my head and onto the page. But that document became the first chapter of The End of Faith. And the resulting book pitched me into almost every culture war battle we fought since. Also got me speaking and writing about how to live ethical and spiritual life without believing in any divisive bullshit.

So my entire career as an author and public speaker and as the creator of the Waking Up App, as the host of this podcast, is downstream of that morning.

But The End of Faith wasn't only a reaction to the crimes committed by jihadists on September 11th. It was a reaction to the confusion that surrounded these events. We had just been attacked by religious faith at its most committed. 19 men murdered 3,000 people because they were certain that they were bound for paradise. And what was our response?