irrational actors

I am reading a book by Mosab Hassan Yousef. Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the seven founders of Hamas. Yousef the younger spends much of the book discussing his relationship with his father, whose gentleness and personification of the loving side of Islam he admired. However, as his father began to support violence against Israeli citizens while remaining nonviolent himself, Yousef the younger found it difficult to reconcile who his father wanted to be with who he was becoming. He comments on his father's own cognitive dissonance, explaining that sometimes he felt that his father had to justify his own beliefs to himself.

I want to spend my life gaining a better understanding of terrorism. In doing so, I have taken the approach of trying to find a universal theory that explains why people engage in terrorism--a string theory of international conflict, per se. But what I have learned is that to simplify terrorism is to make assumptions.

For centuries, economists have created models that rest upon a key assumption: people act rationally. In recent years, however, economics has gradually begun to depart from this idea, because research and practical experience shows that people's actions often tend to not make sense. Cognitive dissonance is a fact of life--certainly not a logical one, but logic is for, well, economists, not real people making real decisions in the real world.

The actions of Sheikh Hassan Yousef are certainly paradoxical, and if we are going to understand him and others like him, we must accept this. String theory, after rigorous investigation, has not been settled upon as the long sought after "theory of everything". The theory of everything is this: entropy reigns. How will people act? Uncertainly.