Are engineers really closet terrorists?

The sociology paper published last November, which has been making rounds over the Internet and was recently picked up by The Atlantic, uses illustrative statistics and qualitative data to conclude that there is a strong relationship between an engineering background and involvement in a variety of Islamic terrorist groups. The authors have found that graduates in subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world. The authors also note that engineers, alone, are strongly over-represented among graduates who gravitate to violent groups.

However, contrary to popular speculation, it's not technical skills that make engineers attractive recruits to radical groups. Rather, the authors pose the hypothesis that "engineers have a 'mindset' that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism," which becomes explosive when fused by the repression and vigorous radicalization triggered by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries.

But what is the engineer's mindset?

The authors call it a mindset that inclines them to take more extreme conservative and religious positions.

A past survey in the United States has already shown that the proportion of engineers who declare themselves to be on the right of the political spectrum is greater than any other disciplinary groups--such as economists, doctors, scientists, and those in the humanities and social sciences.

The authors note that the mindset is universal.

Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, they pointed out that a disproportionate share of engineers seem to have a mindset that makes them open to the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" (why argue where there is one best solution) and by "simplism" (if only people were rational, remedies would be simple).

Normally I wouldn't quote the entire article, but this one all but begged to be posted in its entirety in order to preserve the context. The author missed several key points about Islamic terrorism, which is not surprising, given the lack of depth that it went into on the subject.

Islamic terrorists are generally reasonably well-educated individuals who come from the middle and upper classes of the Islamic world. There are plenty of radicals from the lower classes, but aside from being fodder for suicide bombings and acting as gunmen, they are of little value to Islamic terrorist groups. It takes intelligence and education to be able to plan a serious terrorist attack, and as such there is a premium for people who have the analytical skills necessary to critically design and carry out an act of terrorism. Engineers are obvious targets for this sort of recruitment because they are at the top of the educated classes when it comes to designing practical and thorough plans of action.

Anyone who has spent time around engineers knows that they do not tend to view things in the sort of simplistic way that sociologists, political "scientists" and others tend to view them. In fact, engineers are more likely to understand and appreciate complexity than these professions which are criticizing them here! If engineers are more likely to be right wing, or conservative as Americans understand conservatism or libertarian, it's because engineers tend to have an easier time appreciate the fundamental flaws of socialism than most people. The engineering mind quickly realizes how structurally flawed the socialist state is, and how impractical it is to have a society with a single point of failure for everything ranging from law enforcement, to trash collection, to putting food on the table as large as the socialist state. This is why engineers tend to seek simplicity in design and arguments; simplicity is easier to manage and work with than complexity.

Arguably the simplest explanation for the large presence of engineers among Islamic terrorist groups is that highly intelligent and educated young men tend to be easily embittered and frustrated. Couple that with the fact that there is a great deal to be bitter about if you are a young man in the Islamic world, and you have a recipe for terrorism. The reasons may range from the absurd and quixotic like the "tragedy" of the Spanish retaking Al-Andalus (God forbid the infidel reassert his right of home rule), to the generally understandable like being pissed off by the presence of foreign troops on one's homeland.