21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

How then should the state deal with terrorism? A successful counterterrorism struggle should be conducted on three fronts. First, governments should focus on clandestine actions against the terrorist networks. Second, the media should keep things in perspective and avoid hysteria. The theater of terror cannot succeed without publicity. Unfortunately, the media all too often provides this publicity for free. It obsessively reports terrorist attacks and greatly inflates their danger, because reports on terrorism sell newspapers much better than reports on diabetes or air pollution. The third front is the imagination of each and every one of us. Terrorists hold our imagination captive and use that against us. Again and again we rehearse the terrorist attack on the stage of our mind, remembering 9/11 or the latest suicide bombings. The terrorists kill a hundred people—and cause a hundred million to imagine that there is a murderer lurking behind every tree. It is the responsibility of all citizens to liberate our imagination from the terrorists and to remind ourselves of the true dimensions of the threat. It is our own inner terror that prompts the media to obsess about terrorism and the government to overreact.