In retrospect, the 9/11 attacks may have been something of a rationalist awakening for me. Not in the sense of making me want to approach the world in a rational way, that I’ve had as long as I can remember. Rather, I think it may have marked my realization that I was living in world where communal failures of sanity posed a greater threat than mere hostility, and in our fervor to address the problem, we were going to make things much, much worse, and neither the people in power or the people who voted them into office could be trusted to know better.
I think it had more to do with the scope of the attack. For example, the response to the first trade center bombing was comparable to the response to Oklahoma city.
In terms of their fatalities, the relative magnitude of the first World Trade Center bombing to the Oklahoma City attack was less than that of the Oklahoma City attack to 9/11.
Certainly, 9/11 wouldn’t have had such a powerful effect on the public if the attack weren’t of such great magnitude. But external threats tend to unite groups much more powerfully than internal ones, and the positive feedback from that makes hate spirals much easier. If we had been confronted with a threat which we couldn’t externalize as a monolithic enemy, and were instead given a clear case of terrorism as the product of an ideological extreme within a society, the one in which we ourselves lived, the idea of declaring a state of war on terrorism would have looked far less credible.
That’s a good point. The reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing and other domestic terrorism (such as the Unabomber) supports your analysis.
In retrospect, the 9/11 attacks may have been something of a rationalist awakening for me. Not in the sense of making me want to approach the world in a rational way, that I’ve had as long as I can remember. Rather, I think it may have marked my realization that I was living in world where communal failures of sanity posed a greater threat than mere hostility, and in our fervor to address the problem, we were going to make things much, much worse, and neither the people in power or the people who voted them into office could be trusted to know better.
I think it had more to do with the scope of the attack. For example, the response to the first trade center bombing was comparable to the response to Oklahoma city.
In terms of their fatalities, the relative magnitude of the first World Trade Center bombing to the Oklahoma City attack was less than that of the Oklahoma City attack to 9/11.
Certainly, 9/11 wouldn’t have had such a powerful effect on the public if the attack weren’t of such great magnitude. But external threats tend to unite groups much more powerfully than internal ones, and the positive feedback from that makes hate spirals much easier. If we had been confronted with a threat which we couldn’t externalize as a monolithic enemy, and were instead given a clear case of terrorism as the product of an ideological extreme within a society, the one in which we ourselves lived, the idea of declaring a state of war on terrorism would have looked far less credible.