The always-insightful Theodore Dalrymple talks about the makings of an Islamic suicide bomber:
Clearly, although the fundamental socio-psychological conditions I have described apply to millions - hundreds of millions - of people, only a vanishingly small proportion of them actually want to be suicide bombers, even if rather more admire and approve of suicide bombers.
So what pushes someone over the edge, as it were? In my experience, which admittedly is limited, and of a selected sample, I would say the following:
The suicide bomber is of above average intelligence. He, or she, is therefore searching for an explanation of his or her existential plight. (You need a certain level of intellection for this to be so.) This involves the identification of an enemy.
The person who becomes a bomber often has a special, personal sense of grievance. This can derive from an intrinsic sensitivity to perceived insult, consequent upon the normal variation of human personality, or can come from outside, eg a person is humiliatingly accused of something of which he is guilty, but regards the accusation itself as lese majeste. For example, a Muslim rapist I know wanted to become a suicide bomber, having become convinced that the West was rotten to the core, deficient in moral worth, because it took the word of a mere woman against his.
So to refine it further, we need all the general cultural and economic conditions, plus the personal particularities I have suggested.
The act of killing oneself for a cause, in the process taking a few 'enemies' with one, is an apologia pro vita sua. Let us not forget that we in the West have a long and inglorious, irrational tradition of supposing that the lengths to which people are prepared to go in the furtherance of a cause is itself evidence of the moral worth of that cause.
The kind of would-be suicide bomber I have known thinks to himself:
They have accused me of what I have done.
What I have done is no crime.
Therefore those who accuse me are the corrupt of the earth.
Those who accuse me are truly representative of the society from which they come.
The destruction of the corrupt of the earth will be rewarded appropriately. Therefore it matters not which individuals I destroy.
The belief is therefore not in representative government, but in representative guilt.
Link.
Dalrymple, by the way, published a new book this year, On Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses. Highly recommended, and we haven't even read it yet (such is our faith in the prose and ideas of TD).
