Terrorists and ironworkers both work in risky professions; however, terrorists are willing to work without pay!
Abdelhamid Abaaoud had "deep friendships" with the people such as Salah Abdeslam in his group. Canadian citizen Momin Khawaja became an Islamic radical in isolation; he was apprehended in Britain before he could participate in a terrorist activity with a cell.
Morgan Freeman and Arie Kruglanski discuss the trolley problem.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season7
#episode1
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
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#terrorist
Abdelhamid Abaaoud had "deep friendships" with the people such as Salah Abdeslam in his group. Canadian citizen Momin Khawaja became an Islamic radical in isolation; he was apprehended in Britain before he could participate in a terrorist activity with a cell.
Morgan Freeman and Arie Kruglanski discuss the trolley problem.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season7
#episode1
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#terrorist
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00We're at war, and the battle lines have been redrawn.
00:09Terrorism can strike anywhere, and everyone is a target.
00:18Science is peering into the dark heart of terror networks
00:23to find out why terrorists embrace unspeakable atrocities.
00:28Are they so different from us?
00:31Or do we all have the ability to give our lives for a cause?
00:36Could we all learn to dehumanize our enemies?
00:40Or could science show us a way to stop terrorism?
00:45And understand what makes a terrorist?
00:50Space. Time. Life itself.
01:00The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:06When four planes dropped out of a clear blue sky on September 11, 2001,
01:25it was shocking to realize we were all potential targets.
01:32Today, al-Qaeda and ISIS claim the headlines.
01:37But it was once the IRA and Basque separatists in Europe,
01:42or anarchists and the Ku Klux Klan in the United States.
01:46Terrorists, like any group, have ideals they believe in,
01:50a cause to rally around.
01:53But for them, the cause justifies the deliberate targeting
01:57of innocent civilians.
01:59How can they think that way?
02:02Can we peer inside the mind of a terrorist?
02:07Anthropologist Scott Atron has spent years trying to understand the enemy.
02:23He went to the front lines of Iraq,
02:26embedding himself with American allies
02:28to meet terrorists face-to-face.
02:30This is the forward-most position on the front lines.
02:3410 kilometers west of Mahmur.
02:38So we went to Iraq in 2016 to follow up on a battle.
02:43Some 500 Kurdish soldiers had cornered fewer than 100 ISIS fighters.
02:49When all appeared to be lost to them,
02:52and the last 15 were retreated,
02:54seven of them blew themselves up to cover the retreat.
02:57The Kurdish forces, seeing this,
03:02decided it just wasn't worth trying to hold on to the territory,
03:05even though they vastly outnumbered the Islamic State fighters.
03:09Scott wanted to know how such a small group
03:12were able to hold off a much more formidable force.
03:16He sat down to interview captured ISIS fighters
03:19and put them through a battery of tests
03:22to assess the strength of the group.
03:24Is that the important part?
03:26Yes.
03:28Scott discovered there was an incredible bond between these fighters.
03:34They would do anything for their cause.
03:38Scott has been studying the dynamics of groups for years.
03:44Humans are the preeminent group animal.
03:48That's what allows us to build things like that.
03:51It's a collective effort.
03:53They have to coordinate.
03:54They have to take risks for one another.
03:56In fact, they have to be able to sacrifice for one another.
03:59One World Trade stands as a testament
04:02to America's resolve after September 11.
04:07When the towers came down in 2001,
04:10it was the iron workers from Local 40, amongst others,
04:14who rebuilt the site a decade later.
04:18Terrorists and iron workers seem like polar opposites to us.
04:23But to an anthropologist, both groups share a crucial trait.
04:31These New York City iron workers risk their lives every day for each other,
04:37maneuvering these massive beams while balancing hundreds of feet in the air.
04:42They have an extremely close group dynamic.
04:48Today, Scott is going to measure how strong it is,
04:52administering to them the same test he has given to terrorists in Iraq.
04:58We're interested in how individuals relate to the groups they live with and they work with.
05:04The test is simple.
05:07It involves five cards.
05:09Each card shows a pair of circles.
05:12The small one represents me.
05:14The large circle represents the group.
05:17In the first pairing, the me circle and the group circle are totally separate.
05:23But gradually, they begin to overlap.
05:26In the fifth pairing, the me circle is entirely contained within the group circle.
05:32The two identities fully fused.
05:35And what I'd like you to do is pick the one that defines the way you think you are.
05:41The iron workers see their identities closely overlapped by the groups.
05:45Scott expects this.
05:48It's a natural byproduct of a tight-knit group in a highly risky profession.
05:53So, how do the iron workers' answers to the test compare to those of terrorists?
06:00He's not intuitive about it either.
06:03Terrorists' answers were unlike those of any other group Scott had studied.
06:08For them, the group was all-consuming.
06:11The individual was nonexistent.
06:14Well, they did this with the guerrillas in Libya, where they actually rubbed it out and blackened out the me and the group as if there were no difference.
06:22Well, then we say they're completely fused with the group.
06:25100%.
06:26Yes.
06:27What makes their dedication so extreme?
06:30Scott says it has to do with the values that hold the group together.
06:35Iron workers are loyal to their brothers, but probably wouldn't go to work if they weren't paid, or their families were being threatened.
06:44Not so for ISIS fighters, who see their group as their salvation, and an Islamic state as absolutely non-negotiable.
06:53These values have become sacred to them.
06:56Sacred values are often religious values, because they're transcendent.
07:01You wouldn't compromise and negotiate to trade off your children.
07:06Many of us wouldn't negotiate or compromise to trade off our country, or our religion, for any amount of money.
07:13Under any social pressure.
07:15Do you should know that you might retaliate for forever?
07:20Yes.
07:21They respond on all other measures.
07:24Willingness to fight, to die, to sacrifice for one another, to torture, to have their families suffer.
07:31And so, if you have a group of people fused around a set of ideas they hold sacred, for which no negotiation and compromise is possible,
07:39well then you have the most formidable fighting force possible.
07:44And ISIS is no exception.
07:46Scott's work has shown how terrorists are single-minded and absolutely committed to a cause.
07:53But how do they take this behavior so far as to load a car full of explosives and blow up a building full of innocent people?
08:06How do we shut down our ability to care for others?
08:11According to psychologist Jay Van Bevel, our brains have a remarkable ability to dehumanize others under the right circumstances.
08:21Jay has designed a test to demonstrate how we recognize humanity in the first place.
08:28People came in, we took an image of a doll and morphed it with a human face that looked very similar.
08:34When does this face look human to you?
08:41Jay asked participants the same question.
08:44And right about...
08:46Just past the halfway mark between the doll face and the real face, most of us perceive that the face is human and has a mind.
08:55Right there.
08:57In Jay's field, it's called perception of mind.
09:02But he says it's not fixed.
09:05Jay adjusted the experiment and told his subjects what college the person in the photo went to.
09:12Their own college, an in-group.
09:15And right about now.
09:17Or a rival college across town, an out-group.
09:21This rivalry had a measurable effect.
09:25What we found was that these students were able to see a mind behind the in-group face much faster.
09:31And they were slower to see the humanity in students from another college.
09:36Right about now.
09:38These are subtle kinds of dehumanization.
09:41How do we get into the mind of a terrorist who can view a tower full of civilians as a justifiable target?
09:49Jay believes it's easier than you think.
09:52For a second experiment, Jay divides subjects arbitrarily into two teams.
09:58The Rattlers and the Eagles.
10:01We told people that we were keeping track of points and the winning team would walk away with the money.
10:06Jay is creating the essence of conflict.
10:09Two groups competing for resources.
10:12So now I'm going to read both teams a number of statements.
10:15He reads the group's short stories about people who supposedly belonged to neither team.
10:22Jane managed to get indoors before it started to rain.
10:26These stories are designed to measure empathy.
10:29If you empathize with the person's story, you put your thumb up.
10:34If you don't care, thumb down.
10:37Brandon got soaked by a taxi driver through a puddle.
10:42Eagles and Rattlers give equally empathetic responses.
10:47Then Jay changes the game.
10:51Andrew sat in gum on a park bench.
10:53Andrew is a member of the Eagles.
10:55So there's one right.
10:58Even in an entirely artificial setting, the results are profound.
11:04Once there's competition added to the mix, conflict can escalate very quickly towards our group.
11:09Team members actually take pleasure in the other team's pain.
11:14Remember, they've only been assigned to these teams for a matter of minutes.
11:19The thing that's really remarkable is that there needs to be no history of conflict or any stereotypes towards the groups
11:25for them to start to feel negative towards them.
11:28Right there.
11:30Jay's tests reveal that dehumanization can happen with very little prodding.
11:35Whenever groups compete, the dehumanization process begins.
11:42When that competition includes whole cultures, the results can be deadly.
11:48If science has discovered anything about terrorists, it's that we all have the potential to think like one.
12:02All of our brains are programmed to dehumanize.
12:07We all have values that we can't compromise.
12:11So what stops us from thinking and acting in extreme ways?
12:17The answer to that lies less in what you believe and more in who you know.
12:27After every big coordinated terrorist attack in Europe, the U.S. or Asia, we wonder how it could have happened again.
12:36How did a terrorist cell live among us for months or years before deciding to strike?
12:43What's the glue that binds them together?
12:46And how can we dismantle them before they strike again?
12:51A cafe in central London may seem like a strange place for a lab, but this is where social psychologist Nafiz Hamid is trying to uncover the structure of terror networks.
13:05My goal is to understand the how of recruitment.
13:09If you start with how, you understand the networks that are in play.
13:14Nafiz is trying to figure out how terror networks function and how they can be pulled apart.
13:21It's not a simple task.
13:24There's a lot of theories out there, but there's very little data.
13:27And this is largely because it's hard to get jihadis to go into a laboratory.
13:31But Nafiz, a Pakistani-American living in London, tried something a little out of the ordinary.
13:41He called them.
13:43Salaamu Alaikum, brother. How are you? How's it going?
13:47I decided to just contact them directly online.
13:50Found them on social media, on Twitter, on various accounts.
13:54Getting terrorists on the phone is not as hard as you think.
13:58I'm very honest, and that's the key.
14:00There's so many people, intelligence officers and so forth, who are pretending to be people they're not, who contact these people.
14:06And they can usually sniff those people out.
14:08How's the weather in Sean today?
14:11Nafiz uses the conversations to make social network analysis models of terrorist groups.
14:17He's not tracking likes on Facebook.
14:20He's looking at terrorist real-life social networks, friends, family, and acquaintances.
14:27He's talked to members of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, groups all over the world.
14:32Nafiz's research leads him to believe the reasons people join a terrorist cell have little to do with how religious their family is, or how poor their neighborhood is.
14:45There doesn't seem to be a correlation between the ecology of an environment and who radicalizes and who doesn't radicalize.
14:52Instead, your best predictor of whether someone's going to go join an Islamist group is whether they have a friend who's already a member of that group.
15:00Friendships basically create an echo chamber that allows the radicalization process to take shape.
15:07So, does knowing how these networks form tell us how to break them apart?
15:14Paris, 2015.
15:19Brussels, 2016.
15:23After the attacks, attention focused on an ISIS terrorist cell from the poor Brussels suburb of Molenbeek and their radical leader, Abdelhamid Abaoud.
15:36What's amazing about the Paris Brussels attack is that a terrorist cell carried out a major attack on European soil, then had the weight of all of the police and intelligence agencies of Europe brought down on it, and then was able to successfully carry out a second attack within months.
15:57How were they able to do this?
15:58How were they able to do this?
16:01Nafis applied social network analysis to the Molenbeek cell to see how the group functioned.
16:08Nafis measures each man's importance to the group by the quantity and type of his connections within it.
16:16How long had he known the others?
16:18From where?
16:19Had they served on the battlefield or done time together in prison?
16:23In order to carry off an attack of this magnitude, you need deep friendships with people.
16:30In the end, you're trusting these people with your lives.
16:33So, if they're siblings, if they're childhood friends, prison mates, and you really see this in this network.
16:40Predictably, Abdelhamid Abaoud has the most connections.
16:46But Abaoud was killed in a police shootout right after the Paris attacks.
16:52And instead of falling apart, the terror cell struck again in Brussels.
16:57Nafis says that network analysis doesn't just track how many connections you have.
17:02It also tracks how you know those connections.
17:05Are you the only one bridging one group to another?
17:09Do you only know people who live close to you?
17:12Using all of these metrics, a seemingly minor player named Salah Abdusalaam rises to the surface.
17:22Salah was a guy who never went to Syria, never recruited anyone himself, was supposed to blow himself up in Paris, but chickened out at the last minute.
17:32This was a guy who was clearly less radicalized than Abdelhamid Abaoud.
17:37Salah didn't know as many people as Abaoud, but he knew more kinds of people.
17:42He was often the only bridge between different groups.
17:46Salah Abdusalaam was driving all over Europe, back and forth, connecting people, moving money around.
17:52He was connecting players that wouldn't have been connected to each other had he not been filling that social network gap.
18:00Facilitators, like Salah, are often less radical, less visible.
18:06They stay off the radar and help a terror group survive, even after the leader is taken out.
18:13Generally, police, intelligence agencies don't pay enough attention to the facilitators.
18:19If you go after those people, you will do more and reduce the efficacy of that network than if you go after the central figures.
18:26Focus on the facilitators. This is a good rule of thumb. Until it's not.
18:34As law enforcement has grown more successful tracking terror cells, more attacks are being carried out by solo actors.
18:42And these lone wolves could be anywhere.
18:50The lone wolf. The killer who's part of no self, who arouses no suspicion until he acts.
19:00In September 2014, ISIS issued a global call for its followers to attack the West.
19:07And since then, the pace of lone wolf attacks has been accelerating.
19:13The Orlando nightclub shooting, the deadliest attack by a lone gunman in American history, was part of that horrifying trend.
19:23Can science trace the origin of lone wolves and help us stop them?
19:29Social psychologist Sofia Moskalenko researches radicalism at a University of Maryland think tank.
19:38She grew up immersed in the subject, but not by choice.
19:43I was born in the Republic of Ukraine.
19:47And when I was growing up, I was part of the Soviet Union's effort to radicalize all of its citizens.
19:55I often questioned that and got into a lot of trouble at school for questioning it.
20:01Radicalism is still the focus of her life.
20:05Now, she studies the path people take to terrorism.
20:09Most frequently, people become radicalized through groups or through people that they already know who belong to terrorists or radical groups.
20:18On rare occasions, however, people radicalize on their own.
20:23Typically, these lone wolves, like Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber, or Omar Mateen, the Orlando mass shooter, are disturbed misfits.
20:34And people like that can turn to terrorism to escape their demons.
20:39But in 2004, UK investigators uncovered a plot that challenged everyone's notion of what makes a terrorist.
20:47They were tailing a terror cell.
20:50All the members were known to law enforcement except one man, who only was discovered when another member picked him up from the airport.
20:59They saw someone they didn't yet know, who in fact turned out to be Momin Kawaja.
21:0624-year-old Momin Kawaja lived in Ottawa, Canada.
21:10He was a computer programmer with no criminal record.
21:14He had become radicalized in total isolation, just like a lone wolf.
21:20Police arrested Kawaja and the others before they had time to act.
21:25The cell was plotting to make and detonate a number of fertilizer bombs in and around London.
21:32And Kawaja's role in the plot was to design and make detonators.
21:39Captured terrorists rarely take you back to the turning points of their youth.
21:45But Kawaja was different.
21:48In blogs and emails, he chronicled his journey.
21:52Growing up in the suburbs of Ottawa, Canada, in a house much like this.
21:58Kawaja was unique in that he liked to write down his thoughts, his feelings, his intentions.
22:08For Sophia, finding these written records was like stumbling upon a terrorist private journal.
22:15I once was a normal kid too.
22:20I played basketball, went swimming, bike riding, and did all the naughty little things kids do.
22:26For us as researchers, this was a very rare opportunity to look into the mind of a terrorist as radicalization was unfolding in real time.
22:38How did he turn to terror?
22:41He and his family had no contact with terrorists.
22:45He lived a typical teenage life of friends and school work.
22:50In his writing, he expressed one motive for his radicalization.
22:55Empathy.
22:57He identified deeply with the suffering of fellow Muslims.
23:01Kawaja was emotionally affected.
23:04He watched fundamentalist Islamic videos that depicted injustices perpetrated by the West on Muslims,
23:12or revenge that Muslims take on Westerners.
23:18Then, right after I got out of college, the invasion of Afghanistan happened.
23:23I felt that something was wrong, terribly wrong.
23:27He was driven by ideology and felt compelled to pick a side.
23:33He picked the side of terror.
23:36He was a very sensitive individual who couldn't just stand idly while someone else was suffering.
23:45Finally, fully radicalized, Kawaja boarded a plane to a terror training camp in Pakistan.
23:54That's where he first met the other members of his cell.
23:58Kawaja combined many qualities that can be prized in any society.
24:05He was a self-starter, he was very smart, and under different circumstances,
24:10if he became a doctor, which, you know, he contemplated at one point,
24:15he would have utilized all of those talents and propensities in a very different way.
24:20But he was instead put on this path that led him to terrorism.
24:30The goals of men like Momin Kawaja are a despicable perversion of empathy.
24:37Psychologists say most young terrorists share the same traits as young people everywhere.
24:44They desperately want to belong to something.
24:48But how can they decide to kill themselves for their cause?
24:55It may be easier than you think.
25:00Suicide attacks.
25:02The most insidious aspect of terrorism.
25:05Killers who walk calmly among their victims before they strike.
25:10The phenomenon has haunted us for over a century.
25:14The first we know of was a Russian revolutionary who assassinated a tsar.
25:20Since the 1980s, the number of suicide attacks has risen dramatically,
25:24taking the lives of almost 50,000 people.
25:27How can this happen so often?
25:30What can make someone want to end their life in an act of mass murder?
25:43It's a question psychologist Ari Kruglansky has long grappled with.
25:48The early assumption on the part of social scientists was that it reflects a kind of psychopathology.
25:55That these people are basically mentally disturbed and abnormal.
26:00That was in the 70s and early 80s.
26:04But research has never shown that terrorists have any more mental problems than the general population.
26:09So how do they decide to kill themselves in order to murder many?
26:14Surely most people would not make this choice.
26:18Or could they?
26:20Let's go Big Red!
26:23Could these cheerleaders become martyrs?
26:26Let's go!
26:27It's an absurd question.
26:30But Ari believes anyone can, given the right push.
26:34In this particular experiment, we try to emulate the process of group identification.
26:41What are you ready to commit on behalf of the group?
26:45Ari divides his subjects into two groups.
26:48Then he asks each group to read a story and to circle the pronouns as they go.
26:53But Ari has given each group slightly different versions of the story.
26:59One group has a story which only has singular pronouns.
27:03I, me, and my.
27:06I go to the city often.
27:08My anticipation fills me as I see the skyscrapers come into view.
27:12The other group has the same story, but with plural pronouns.
27:16We, us, and ours.
27:19We go to the city often.
27:20Our anticipation fills us as we see the skyscrapers come into view.
27:25Ari is priming his subjects, activating their subconscious to focus on belonging or not belonging to a group.
27:34It has been demonstrated that once you prime these plural pronouns, a person gets into a mindset of group identification.
27:43After this priming, it's time to test exactly how much the we and the I groups would sacrifice for members of their own group.
27:54He asks the cheerleaders to participate in a classic psychological scenario called the trolley problem.
28:01It portrays individuals who are in danger of being run over by a trolley.
28:08And the dilemma is for a person who could save them by sacrificing their life and throwing themselves in front of the trolley.
28:15First, Ari tests the subjects who were primed to think of themselves as individuals.
28:26Only 30% say they would give their lives for their friends.
28:33Then Ari tests the we group.
28:37The difference is profound.
28:42Over 90% of people primed with the we, ours, us pronouns were willing to self-sacrifice for the group.
28:52Ari's experiment shows that group dynamics have incredible influence on individual behavior.
29:04Even a subtle feeling of belonging can dramatically change what you are willing to do.
29:10That doesn't mean that everybody is equally susceptible to the influence of violent ideologies.
29:16So there are individual differences, but by and large, it's not a psychopathological phenomena.
29:22These people are not crazy.
29:23So it's a question of group pressure, group influence.
29:27Ari says that group pressure and the human desire to belong is the lever that allows terrorists to give their lives for a cause.
29:37Under certain circumstances, even the most normal person can become a violent extremist.
29:43If subtle cues can push someone toward violent self-sacrifice, the right push in the other direction might stop it.
29:54What kind of push?
29:57The first step to changing an extremist mind might be to agree with him.
30:05We've looked inside the mind of a terrorist.
30:08What we really want to know is whether there is a way to get into that mind and change it.
30:17You've heard the expression, winning the hearts and minds of the enemy.
30:22With terrorists, that seems like a tall order.
30:26But there might be a way.
30:28And it starts by making a slight adjustment to another old phrase.
30:35If you can't beat them, agree with them.
30:41Psychology professor Eran Halperin studies the science of changing minds.
30:47It's an uphill battle in his country, Israel, home to the intractable struggle between Israelis and Palestinians.
30:54One of the reasons most traditional peace interventions do not work is that we have two groups of people with opposing views trying to reason with each other.
31:05Israelis and Palestinians argue like humans everywhere.
31:10One side expresses an opinion, the other counters it.
31:13When someone tells you something that you disagree with, the most automatic reaction is to try to confront him with the counter-message.
31:23But we've all been in arguments where reason gets you nowhere.
31:27For deeply held beliefs, say for gun control or abortion.
31:32Science has shown that counter-messages can actually be counter-productive.
31:37Because basically their beliefs, their attitudes are part of their identity.
31:42And then anything that contradicts what they believe in sounds to them or looks to them like a threat.
31:47In psychology, we call the state of mind frozen.
31:51This kind of freezing can happen around any tightly held belief.
31:56And it happens with terrorists.
31:59Their beliefs are sacred to them.
32:00And they become frozen, resisting any argument no matter how rational.
32:07As a young man, Eran looked around his homeland.
32:11He saw a conflict seemingly without end.
32:15And a sea of frozen minds.
32:18I was very seriously injured in the Israeli army.
32:21And I decided that this is my mission.
32:24We cannot just accept it as the reality.
32:26I mean, this cannot be the only situation in which we can live in.
32:31But how do you change minds without having an argument?
32:36Eran and his students at Tel Aviv University had an idea.
32:41We are going to tell people with extreme views, you know what? You're right.
32:47Eran calls it paradoxical thinking.
32:50It's like mental jujitsu.
32:53You use people's own opinions against them.
32:57Let's go back to a rivalry we already know.
33:01Say you have a friend who is a rabid fan of the rattlers.
33:05You could tell him how awesome the eagles are.
33:08But this will just freeze his love of the rattlers in place.
33:12However, if you use a paradoxical thinking technique,
33:16you tell him how awesome the rattlers are.
33:18You tell him it's the best team ever.
33:22Better than family, better than love, better than anything.
33:26Overwhelmed, your friend might reconsider his love of his team.
33:33Eran wanted to test his theory on Israel's most pressing issue,
33:38the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
33:40So he made some ads about it.
33:44It's meant to shock.
33:49The text reads,
33:51Without it, we would never be just.
33:55For justice, we probably need the conflict.
33:57We took the core ideas that Israel believed in, and we practically took them to the extreme.
34:07Israelis, by and large, believe their side in the conflict is just.
34:12But the ads concluded that not only was the conflict just, but Israelis needed the conflict.
34:19For the sake of these ideas, to preserve these ideas, we have to preserve the conflict.
34:26And this is an absurd in the eyes of most Israelis.
34:29Eran started the experiment small, with a focus group of conservative Israelis.
34:35While they were watching these videos for the first time, Israelis got really, really angry.
34:41But as the time went by, and as they saw these video clips again and again and again,
34:46they started what we call a process of unfreezing.
34:49When bombarded by views even more extreme than their own, the test subjects started to question their own positions.
34:58Even those who had said they would never compromise with Palestinians, suddenly signaled a willingness to talk.
35:06It seemed to work with Iran's small sample.
35:10How would it work in a real Israeli town?
35:12It is called the Givach Muel, a city mainly dominated by Israeli rightist and centrist people.
35:21And we tried to implement this intervention on this entire city of Givach Muel.
35:27Eran and the other researchers handed out flyers on the streets, put up billboards,
35:33and targeted the video clips to people in the neighborhood who were online.
35:37What they discovered was a change beyond their expectations.
35:44Again, in some cases, at the beginning, people got very angry.
35:49But then when they discussed these issues, when they talked about them,
35:52when they re-exposed themselves to these ideas, suddenly they started reconsidering their positions.
35:58In fact, the intervention worked best with people who had the most hard-line views.
36:03One year later, Eran found the shift in opinions and the test group had held steady.
36:10We hope that by exposing more and more people to this paradoxical thinking intervention,
36:16we can help them consider more seriously positive or peaceful solutions to the conflict.
36:21But one scientist has another far more radical proposition to reduce terrorism.
36:30Complete disengagement.
36:32Our struggle against terrorism feels like a war with no foreseeable end.
36:45We take out Osama bin Laden and we find ourselves fighting ISIS.
36:50And a military victory over ISIS in Iraq or Syria won't end their attacks on civilians around the world.
37:00For every terrorist we eliminate, many more seem to take their place.
37:05What can we do?
37:07Is there any way to stop terrorism once and for all?
37:11Evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin has combed through the library of our collective history to study the rise and fall of nations.
37:24He rose to prominence by making one stunning prediction.
37:28My book, War and Peace and War, which I published in 2005, two years after the occupation of Iraq by the U.S. and allies, I wrote the following prediction.
37:39The Western intrusion will eventually generate a counter response, possibly in the form of a new theocratic caliphate.
37:47The U.S. went to Iraq in part to promote nation building.
37:56According to Peter, that effort was a stunning success.
38:01The name of that success is ISIS, an Islamic caliphate declared in 2013, eight years after Peter's prediction.
38:11What had Peter seen that others had missed?
38:18Peter is not your typical anthropologist.
38:21He takes a dim view of most so-called lessons of history.
38:26One German historian counted how many explanations people have proposed for the fall of the Roman Empire.
38:34And he counted over 220.
38:36Peter wanted to find a way to put historical hypotheses to a scientific test.
38:43He developed a new mathematical approach to history called Pleo Dynamics.
38:49I see it as a slayer of theories.
38:52By the time we are done, I want to have whole cemeteries of dead theories out there.
38:57In the early 2000s, he started to build mathematical models to do just that.
39:02One theory he wanted to explore was what causes the rise of strong nation states.
39:08He hypothesized that strong nations form when two dramatically different cultures go to war.
39:15He thought of these wars as a global version of Darwin's survival of the fittest.
39:20It's a little like a backgammon tournament where players stand in for nation states.
39:27The conditions of intense warfare create a constant struggle for survival amongst armed groups.
39:34The group that wins is the one which is the most cohesive, the most functional, and oftentimes the nastiest one.
39:44Peter set a team to work collecting data points.
39:55Over 100,000 in all.
39:58Birth and death rates, whether they had iron weapons, agriculture, anything that might measure a nation's strength or weakness.
40:06He observed that the more the groups fought, the stronger the winning group became.
40:15Eventually, he developed a mathematical formula that predicted the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
40:24The rise of the Ottoman Empire, and the historical growth of Islamic Caliphates in the Middle East.
40:29It seemed to work in the past. How would it work in the future?
40:34That's when Peter turned his attention to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
40:39So after the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein, this created a large swath of territory, which was essentially stateless with multiple armed groups battling against each other.
40:56Eventually, the strongest, most ruthless group survived.
41:04ISIS.
41:06If data can predict the rise of ISIS, can it tell us how the Islamic State could be defeated?
41:13So how should we deal with the Islamic State?
41:16We have three options.
41:18One of them is stay the course, which essentially means continue using air power.
41:22Peter believes this would only perpetuate warfare, the evolutionary pressure that gave rise to ISIS in the first place.
41:32The second option is to escalate.
41:35This means we must be more ruthless than our enemy.
41:39But given that this would cause widespread civilian deaths, Peter believes it's not an option.
41:45The other opposite extreme is to do nothing.
41:50In the face of a brutal organization like ISIS, doing nothing seems shocking.
41:56But Peter is convinced that if we completely turn our backs on the region, the war that created ISIS will diminish.
42:05They'll be left like a backgammon champion with no one to play against.
42:09Peter knows this course will be painful.
42:13ISIS and the horrors they perpetuate will not go away in an instant.
42:18We'll have to sit by and let it happen.
42:21But Peter points to his data.
42:23This is the best option in terms of saving most lives.
42:28Essentially, it means closing the board and going home.
42:32In this era of terrorism, we may not lack our options, but disagreements and debate are what make us free.
42:45Today, the tools of science offer us new approaches.
42:50The war against terror is a war of ideas.
42:53As terrorists seek to impose their rigid ideas, our greatest weapon is our openness to new ideas.
43:03This is a war against terror and disillusionment war against Aristotle.
43:05This is this event.
43:06The war against terror.
43:07The war against terror.
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43:14The three rebels of the war against terror.
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