I was never the guy who looked around the world and tried to understand what is going on. The reason for this being that I was never the guy in the news. It wasn't even anybody I was remotely acquainted with. But that luxury didn't last forever, and it made me look around. "Search for meaning" or "make sense of it all" as they say. I am not saying I put in much effort to do so, but even to my ignorant self everything seems illogical (although this might be self-explanatory).
The obvious absence of optimality in the schemes of killing innocent people is apparent by the vague goals of the schemes. I mean other than the very common "spread terror" and "send a message", I don't see what else they accomplish other than obtain the brunt of public hatred and bad faith of people in power (this doesn't mean that they actually care, but do it just for the sake of it because everybody wants to look good; I don't mean to say not caring is bad, I am not judge of that, I am just saying that lot of times people do/say stuff they are supposed to do/say, but actually don't care about it). I am not sure where I am going with this but I can't understand what is the agenda of terrorism. However, if a "powerful" country did what they do, it would just be the protection of independence (read Israel and China). But these countries do seem to have agenda - it amounts to land = money = power = etc and at times just suppression of opposition. I was just wondering if terrorism will be called anything else if they got themselves a more concrete agenda than "freedom of holy land" and "punishment to innocent people just because they have been wronged". I mean they must want something. They don't want to spend their whole lives fighting (although the futility of the point is apparent in the fact that the leaders are the people who actually don't do the dirty work and live in luxury, equivalent to leaders of any country using its military forces). They must want something - money, land, what. Or is there hidden agenda - population control, and they are doing a favor to the world?
Lot of things that I have said here lacks a lot of general knowledge and information and I am just a bystander standing really far away, and although I might be in someway affected by all this, I wouldn't know about it until it hits me in my face.
Come to think of it, with the same argument, I can say that the spending of millions of dollars for running a huge collider to understand the origin of mass and sending a huge telescope to figure out the origin of the universe is equally pointless. Or huge build up and the eventual victory and celebrations of the first African-American president of the United States. It is probably because I am an alien here, but I don't understand why this is considered a great leap in democracy.
But a little thought makes us realize that we do not always need to look big issues or events to understand that the lack of logic in human action. I have heard of people living their lives as per some great quote by some great person. I mean how do you understand anything by applying something someone said thinking god-knows what. This doesn't mean the quote is not artistically great (and I can't be any judge of that either), it is just that it was about some other person. What I feel is that we try to justify what we do by these things. It is not the reason, rather the justification. We have already made the decision, we just want to look good to others, so we compare ourselves to somebody whom most think of as great. But like history, the greatness of something or someone depends on who is talking about it (read whoever in currently powerful).
Talking of the way we make decisions, I feel our decisions are generally locally optimal (not necessarily temporally, rather on the number of people being affected). Religion, as I see it, is just the same thing, but with some people spending time to find a global optimum. I am not saying that any religion is more optimal than other or that they have been able to obtain the global optimum.
But if I am asked if I would like to change something, I would say no, but that is mostly because of my lack of knowledge, not because of the non-existence of anything better. What I feel is that the world as a whole is trying to find a global optimum and these perturbations happening all around are implicitly intended towards that. What we need is a guide for the world, analogous to the gradients in any optimization problem. But on the other hand, if we reach a global optimum, what next?
