Life & Wisdom Quote by L. Neil Smith

Smith’s line is engineered to detonate a comforting post-9/11 bedtime story: that the attacks were motivated by envy of American “prosperity and freedom.” Calling that frame a “ridiculous lie” isn’t just disagreement; it’s an accusation that the official, morale-boosting narrative is actively dishonest, a kind of patriotic varnish applied to catastrophe.

The intent is to force causality back onto policy. “Fundamentalists” are left deliberately vague, but “our prosperity and freedom” is a familiar slogan, the sort of phrase politicians use to simplify grief into righteousness. Smith treats that simplification as propaganda: a way to dodge the messier possibility that U.S. actions abroad, alliances, military presence, sanctions, and power projection created motives far more concrete than resentment of a lifestyle. The subtext is bracingly libertarian (consistent with Smith’s broader work): the state wants citizens to think they are targeted for who they are, not for what their government does. If it’s “because they hate freedom,” then war and surveillance can be sold as moral self-defense rather than as choices with blowback.

Rhetorically, the sentence works by refusing the audience a neutral middle. “Ridiculous” mocks the narrative as intellectually unserious; “lie” upgrades it to deliberate manipulation. That harsh pairing signals that the real target is domestic: media, officials, and a public appetite for clean stories. It’s provocation as counter-mythmaking, insisting that national innocence is not an explanation but an alibi.