&gt; Maybe engineers are just more likely to be effective extremists?<p>No , it&#x27;s just that the educated are just more likely to become ideologues (thus more dangerous) because more articulate than the common thug. Ben Laden was an educated man, al-Zawahiri is a surgeon, al Baghdadi has a PhD . A lot of them actually spent time in the West, even in US and the culture shock triggered their hatred for the western civilization, the women roaming free in the streets, uncovered, the &quot;debauchery&quot;, ... it went all against their upbringing and they can&#x27;t accept people living in a different culture than an Islamic one, and they are also worried in would &quot;infect&quot; the culture back home. That&#x27;s partly why Saddat was murdered, because he was turning Egypt into a place way too &quot;westernized&quot;, along with the peace with Israel.<p>As for the thugs who become terrorists like the ones who killed 130 people in Paris, Jihadism give them a divine justification for their violence, like religion give them a justification for their hatred of the west or their misogyny. They feel one with themselves since they can express their violence while, they think, following their religion to the letter, since the enemy is just a non-believer,worse a atheist thus can be killed and the killing be sanctioned by their &quot;god&quot;. But these thugs aren&#x27;t ideologues, they are the useful idiots that get strapped with the explosive belt, while the ideologues stay safe.