On the Cause of Suicide Bombing: A Stoic's Point of View

"The reason why we didn't have any such [bombing] operation in the United States is not because of security difficulties; the operation will take place and you will see such operations by the grace of God and by the will of God," so threatens Osama bin Laden in his latest audiotape.

Accordingly, we should expect that a man somewhere on or near our shores is now preparing to strap a bomb to himself and tear apart the lives of numerous civilians. And, since we've witnessed this kind of killing before, we can also likely anticipate what will be said after the event. Some will claim that poverty or occupation or lack of democracy in the Middle East is the root cause of this murdering and maiming. 

Others, particularly in Europe, will predictably say its source rests in American foreign policy, such as toppling Saddam Hussein or supporting the existence of Israel. 

Still others will lecture that it has to do with abstract injustice, as when Bashir Ahmed, uncle of one of the London suicide bombers, asserted:

"These suicide bombers are desperate people. They are not getting their rights. They can see that their brothers are not getting their rights, so they take extreme action." 

Or, as some in Hollywood now claim, they will say the terrorist violence is a "response to a response," a cycle of violence whose cure is "understanding."

But all of these explanations share one philosophical assumption in common: namely, something in the external world drives men to suicide bombing. In this view, which is found more often on the political left than on the right, such terrorism must have a material and objective basis; the crimes of humanity, so it seems, are never spiritual and subjective in origin. Always and in all cases the external world — the economic or governmental or cultural context — is what causes one man to slay others. Neither an inner sickness of the heart nor a demented philosophy of the head, nor human nature itself, is responsible. It is always something outside: a lack of money, an insult, an injustice, a loss of honor.

More plainly, it is always something else's fault, never one's own inner bareness and lack of imagination. To be sure, this is a seductive notion. For from this assumption, it follows, like a train on tracks, that if we just remove the external cause then the killing will stop. 

There is an old truth of philosophy that the blessings and ills of life depend less on what befalls a man from the outside than upon the way in which he, from the inside, chooses to meet the challenges of the external world. It is not what things are objectively which necessarily renders a man happy or unhappy, or makes him a suicide bomber for that matter. What things are for him subjectively, in his own way of assessing them, finally decides his emotions and behavior. 

"All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool," said Schopenhauer, "is poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison. The objective half of life and reality is in the hand of fate, and accordingly takes various forms in different cases: the subjective half is our self, and in essentials it always remains the same." 

Politically that means outside events like "not getting one's rights" or "occupation," while certainly not preferable, are not the final determinants of one's misery and foolishness. The core influence on our emotions and behavior is the Self, our underlying beliefs, biology and instincts about any given situation, which is never entirely the same for any two men.

As readers of the American Thinker well know, if external factors such as poverty and injustice were sufficient conditions for suicide bombing, then poor Africans and impoverished Indians would be suicide bombing too, just as Tibetans would be blowing up Chinese restaurants were occupation and human rights violations the causes of terrorism. Equally true, if these external factors were necessary conditions for suicide bombing then affluent, Western educated Muslims, such as the London suicide bombers or the multi—millionaire Osama bin Laden, wouldn't be killing innocents; likewise democratically elected Hamas officials wouldn't be supporting the annihilation of Jewish civilians were democracy the cure to our problems in the Middle East. 

Simply put, external events are neither necessary nor sufficient for suicide bombing. As the old stoic Epictetus, a former slave who knew misery well, said:

"Men are not influenced by things but by their thoughts about things." 

That is why the same objective event affects men differently. One man sees it as a foolish comedy; a second as a spiritual journey rich with meaning; and a third as an enraging injustice worthy of suicide murdering. All of them confronting the same event, but each of them living in separate universes.

Indeed not even an external event as brutal and harrowing as being a victim of a Jihadist execution necessitates identical human responses, such as despondency or panic as might be expected. Witness Fabrizio Quattrocchi, the young Italian security guard taken hostage by Jihadists in Iraq . Forced to dig his own grave and kneel beside it wearing a hood as the Jihadists filmed his murder, this great son of Italy defied them by yanking off the hood and shouting, "Now I'll show you how an Italian dies." They then shot him in the back of the neck, but he died with valor and wit, proving that even horrible circumstances can be met with honor and self—control. 

What the political left — the Noam Chomskys, the Norman Finkelsteins, the Edward Saids — so frequently ignore in their political analyses is that, however similar our circumstances, each of us lives in a universe that is stamped through and through by our distinct personality, our ideas, our feelings, our desires, our instincts, our intuition, our Self. We have direct awareness only of these inner forces that filter our empirical experience, which also shapes our view of our own culture and upbringing. The buzzing external world, by contrast, is but an indirect influence. And this idea, it is worth noting, is not mere classical philosophical speculation; it has also garnered a good deal of empirical substantiation in modern cognitive psychological literature, such as Albert Ellis's Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy or Aaron Beck's Cognitive Therapy, both of which are updated versions of stoicism bolstered by scientific testing. 

According to this philosophical tradition, only when we leave behind those political explanations which teach us that the causes and cures of terrorism are found somewhere outside men's minds does the Jihadist's violence and cruelty become somewhat intelligible before our own mind's eye. We immediately see that the most ghoulish of Jihadist violence finds its source in the terrorist's subjective assessment of the world. Nothing objective, nothing external, necessarily or sufficiently explains why the Jihadist commits and joyfully observes these dreadful murders; it is instead his particular way of looking at the world, his way of interpreting his culture, his suffering and his religion, which stokes his primal pleasures in power and carnage. And this interpretation, this way of looking at the world, with the observable institutions and mosques and bomb makers that have grown up around it, is what some people call "radical Islam," "Islamism," "Islamofacism" or "Jihadism," a branch of Islam that explicitly states its desire to physically dominate the United States and Europe.

Should Osama bin Laden's killers infiltrate our shores, let the pundits decry America, scream Palestine or shout some other injustice as the "root cause" of the suicide murdering, if they wish. But they are forgetting the old philosophical truth that for any human event there are two elements: a subject and an object, a man and the cards fate has dealt him. Each man plays a decisive role in his own happiness. When the objective factor (fate) is the same for two men, but their subjective assessment of it differs, then the exterior world will be for each of them just as different as if the objective conditions of fate had not been the same. An inwardly rich and spiritually advanced person, such as the Dalai Lama and his oppressed people, will make the best of his situation and be an inspiration to the world; an immature and spiritually childish person, such as the Jihadist and his apologists, will complain and whine about injustice — even as his hands drip with the blood of the blameless. 

The life of every man bears the indelible mark of his individuality. And, in the end, it is what a man has in himself which is the main element in his joys and sorrows, whatever his circumstances. If the Jihadist finds himself "desperate," that's his fault. His narcissistic interpretations, his anti—Semitic rants, his obscene reactions are of his own making. 

Jonah Avriel Cohen holds a PhD in philosophy and religion from the University of London and teaches Humanities at Kaplan University. He can be reached at jac1974@gmail.com