21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Chapter 10 focuses on the importance of reducing hysteria around terrorism, which is a military strategy that uses fear over material damage to try and change a political situation. Actors adopt this strategy when they cannot inflict material damage on their enemies. Terrorists, however, do not think like army generals, but theater producers. They use spectacles of violence to incite fear and provoke their enemy. They hope that the fear and confusion they cause will result in the enemy overreacting and using too much military and political power as retaliation. States overreact because terrorism undermines their legitimacy. The legitimacy of modern states is based on the promise that the public domain is free of violence.

Counterterrorist campaigns, however, often have unintended consequences, such as committing atrocities, public support wavering, and shifting of the political situation. These unintended consequences often benefit the terrorist network. Harari believes that a successful counterterrorism campaign is conducted on three fronts. The first is that governments should use clandestine actions against terrorists. The media also needs to do a better job of putting these terrorist acts into perspectives (e.g., more people die in car crashes than terrorist attacks), which will help decrease the public’s hysteria. The third front is that the public should not allow terrorists to capture our imaginations.