After 9/11, novelist Robert Stone attempts to answer the question: How could someone do this?

The following article appeared in the Oct. 25, 2001, issue of “Rolling Stone.” 

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Novelist Robert Stone wrote most of what follows in 1993, after a van full of explosives under the World Trade Center killed six and caused almost $600 million in damage. His acclaimed 1998 novel, “Damascus Gate,” explored the themes of Middle East terrorism, religious fanaticism, and murderous violence.

PUT YOURSELF in the mind’s eye of the conspirator. Whoever he is, it’s likely he first saw the city from the air, looked out and saw the Twin Towers mirroring each other’s dizzying rise. Maybe he stood at the window of some safe house in Queens or Jersey and looked at them. Thrusting so immodestly more than a thousand feet in the air, they mocked his passionate intensity, he no doubt thought.

The World Trade Center towers don’t have much poetry in them. It might be harder psychologically to bomb one of the old cathedrals of commerce, like the Empire State or the Chrysler Building. These seem to contain some transcendent urge to aspire beyond Mammon belonging essentially to a bygone era; they no longer challenge the world. The Michelin Guide to New York describes them for the bargain-hunting foreign tourists of the Nineties in virtually archeological terms.

The World Trade Center towers were built for an age that for a number of reasons will probably never come to pass. They represent an ultimate reduction of the American Dream: America as home of unadorned Economic Man — practical, rational, powerful, even brutal. They can be seen as the external expression of an aspect of America our true-believing enemies have learned to hate and fear.

Now, as our influence contracts, the world returns to its old romances. In Europe, blood and soil are back. In what used to be called the Third World, religion flourishes. In our radical interpretation of democracy, our rejection of elites, our well-nigh demagogic respect for the opinions of the unlearned, we are essentially alone.

Nobody loves you when you’re down and out. Our country has been so long identified with its wealth and power that a sense seems to grow abroad that the United States will eventually somehow disappear, as though we were no more than our own compulsive communicating, a media phenomenon, a pop artifact going out of style.

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Although every president since Roosevelt has denied it, we did set out, years ago, to be the world’s policeman. The image was of Uncle Sam, rolling up his sleeves and wading in to do the right things. The unheralded corollary was that we might do well by doing it. After all, the original Uncle Sam was a defense contractor.

On the international scene these days, our trumpets have sounded slightly sour and uncertain. Our pro bono military operations have been conducted with noticeable diffidence. And it has been noticed, in friendly and unfriendly quarters. Cops make enemies. The best cops are good diplomats, which we have not always been. The impression of weakness, even relative weakness, always invites predation.

Malcolm X, exercising his customary cruel wit, called the assassination of President John Kennedy a case of the “chickens coming home to roost.” His allusion was to the murder of President Diem of South Vietnam, in which some felt the United States had colluded. The world is so much smaller now than even during Malcolm’s lifetime. The poor are poorer and more restless. Entire populations are on the move. The migration of the world’s poor in the late twentieth century has been compared to the “barbarian” migrations of the fifth century A.D. Borders are porous; in jet planes and on rafts, desperate people cross oceans.

Literally and figuratively, our cities have no walls. We have lived for a long time like ancient Rome, relying on our far-flung power for defense. To a degree, we have claimed exemption from the forces of history. Now, history has come for us, presenting old half-forgotten due bills. In striking at symbols, terrorists destroy the real lives of American working people, traumatize actual American children.

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In the face of this, we will learn to cope as other nations have; we are good at coping. Eventually few Americans will remember the country as it was before the X-ray machines appeared at airports and at the vestibules of public buildings, before the minimum-wage security guards were deployed at every other corporate door.

When I imagined the conspirators’ “passionate intensity,” I was thinking of “The Second Coming,” by Yeats, the chilling, prophetic dream of “mere anarchy” loosed on the world. “The best lack all conviction,” Yeats wrote, “while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” A dozen or so individuals, as human as we, fly planes full of doomed, terrified people into the Pentagon and into the Trade Center, a teeming city in the air. Are they moral monsters? Are they really the worst, driven by sheer evil?

Though we are being judged, despite our grief and loss, we cannot really judge. We are steeped in relativism, as confined by our narratives as the murderers are confined by theirs. History is a story we have accepted, our lives are the stories we tell ourselves about the experience of life.

In the Middle East, where gods were born, where narratives were sacred and the books in which they were inscribed considered sacramental, the ancient narratives are glorified again. After the 1967 war, for example, Jewish settlers awaiting the Messiah founded settlements among their ancestral stones, risking their lives and the lives of their families, ready to kill and to die in the name of a sacred narrative soon to be vindicated.

So in the Muslim world, the sacred historical destiny of Islam is reasserted. The will of God is to be done on earth. One narrative contained in the Koran speaks of the people of Ad. “Their sin is arrogance,” the book says. The people of Ad rely on their power and their material wealth to prevail in the world. “They,” says the Holy Koran, “will be brought low.”

The dreadful sights of September 11th took on a surreal edge. All the horrors — planes hitting towers out of a cloudless sky, all the rest — seemed somehow unreal. I don’t think it was their utter unfamiliarity that caused our vertiginous denial, made us refuse to believe what we were seeing. I think it was déjà vu and a weird recognition that these images had been half-seen before. Rendered by movies, imagined, described in novels. The unreality we experienced was of something fictive. We saw in the shocking elemental collision that our conscious minds denied the violent assault of one narrative system upon another. People deeply enclosed in their sanctified worldview were carrying out what they experienced as a sacred command to annihilate the Other.

The expressions from Washington are nothing surprising — assurances of “resolve” and retribution. But in various ways our internal narrative, our social and political foundations, circumscribe our capacity for revenge as they limited our capacity for a surer defense. The internal narrative of our enemies, their absolute ruthless devotion to an invisible world, makes them strong. Our system too is a state of mind. We need to find in it the elements that will serve our actual survival.

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The power of narrative is shattering, overwhelming. We are the stories we believe, we are who we believe we are. All the reasoning of the world cannot set us free of our mythic systems. We live and die by them.

During the Cold War, we lived in fear of nuclear holocaust. Now we know that if a nuclear device ever goes off in an American city, it will not likely come launched from some Siberian silo. More probably it will have been assembled by a few people, perhaps in the guise of immigrants, in that safe house with a view of lower Manhattan. These days people are dying again for their national or religious identity. The new breed of terrorists may be those whose cause we have offended perhaps by simply being what we are.