What is the Answer to Terrorism?

The answer that I haven seen proposed most often by politicians, civilians, and the media is Revenge – 'nuke them back into the Stone Age' and all that.

For every attack, we will respond. If they take one of ours, we'll take ten of theirs, and we will keep doing so until they're too afraid of us to take any more.

The only question is: which side is saying that?

Answer: both.

And so you end up with the endless cycle of revenge, swirling around and around, destroying everyone.

So what is the answer? How do you stop the cycle of revenge? The cheap answer is don't start it. But once it has started, that is, of course, no answer. So, what then?

It's actually not that hard. We already know the answer. Every single one of us, though maybe we've forgotten.

It's called the Law.

People seem to have forgotten that the system of European Law rose up as answer to a system of honor-based tradition that revolved around revenge. The first laws were put into place not to form a legal system based on the extraction of wealth from various peoples, but to stop the endless cycle of family and local feuds.

Those laws established a price for every wrong, including the taking of a life, with the idea being that if the price was paid then justice had been served, and the wronged family was then no longer honor-bound to exact vengeance.

The Law wasn't meant to be fair, or just, or satisfying; it was meant to build Civil Order. And that is what it did.

It took a long time for the idea of those laws to take hold – hundreds of years. And, really, they were famous family feuds still running right up to this century. But essentially the system of laws put a cap on the running violence of that time.

Nothing has changed today. If you want to Keep the Peace, then you use police, Constitutional law, and the courts. If you want an endless cycle of violence revolving around vengeance, then you use Revenge.

It's the tougher choice. The far less satisfying choice. And we keep trying to wreck our own system of Constitutional Law by establishing laws that eke out some kind of just revenge for that very reason. But it is also the only choice currently known that brings Peace.

That is an old lesson, a lesson so old that there are Fairy Stories about it. But the romance of Revenge is so much more enticing and immediately satisfying that people forcefully try to forget this lesson, and so go back to fighting Revenge with Revenge.