Say you’re confronted with a single person who wants to do you harm. Then blowing that person up will actually be a fairly effective approach (excluding moral concerns). If you have two enemies, the same is true: kill ‘em all and you’ll probably be safe. On small scales, revenge works.

If you have fifty enemies, the pattern starts to change. If you kill all these people then you will outrage everyone in their circle of friends and relatives. And when enough people get outraged together, they tend to amplify others’ emotions and encourage each others’ actions. Soon you’ve got a hundred new enemies in place of your fifty former foes.

Now imagine that an entire culture is angry with you (justifiably or not). Killing a randomly-chosen subset of them is clearly not going to fix matters – it will just upset the others even further, creating an ever more dangerous adversary. The strategies for fighting a social movement are very different from those for fighting individuals.

The problem is that, as a species, we suck at this sort of scale-shifting change of attitude. We can play poker with a half-dozen friends, but can’t understand the workings of a financial market. We can describe how two planets will interact under gravity, but any more than that and our brains explode.

Needless to say, this lack of comprehension is not a nice feeling. We tend to avoid things that don’t make us feel good. So any news source or political party that has the chutzpah to take a simplistic “kill the lone black-hat” line will get a lot of support. It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it any less daft.

Bottom line: we as a species need to raise our game.