Yet you are twenty times more likely to die by drowning in your bathtub than in a terrorist act, and a thousand times more likely to die in a road accident. So why, given these statistics, is terrorism so effective? The core reason is that its shocking randomness makes us feel that we can’t do much to protect ourselves – in other words, we feel out of control.
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Later) Terrorism is essentially a tool of mass psychological manipulation – less of the terrorists themselves than of us, the population of ordinary people who are to be terrorized.
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