Hope remains stronger than hate. There is still more that unites us than divides us. People in the vicinity of a savage attack who throw stools and offer phones look helplessly at a situation, try to help anyway, still say infinitely more about the human condition, what we are and what we mean to one another, than an act of brutality ever could. Democracy and pluralism still beat absolutism and violence. Each single human life is infinitely precious in a way that its random destruction only serves to amplify.

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As necessary as it feels to make these statements of resilience – to rebut the hang-em-and-flog-em voices as much as to resist the terrorism itself – they are hollow unless we also articulate the more complicated or less noble feelings that come with them, the grave sense of irreversible loss, the humiliation of fear. When one person kills another for the sheer triumph of causing pain, that event cannot be instantly parried with a motivational statement of togetherness. The sight of someone memeing “Pray for London” from Nebraska while you can still hear the police sirens or watch people walking grimly like prisoners down Borough High Street with their hands over their heads, doesn’t fill you with a sense of international strength in alliance. It’s too soon, too easy, too Facebook: the waters try to close over the disaster, but the disaster, to those who live it, cannot be so easily submerged.

The go-to statement, the one politically uncontroversial line to cover all terrorist acts, is “business as usual”. Change one behaviour, admit one anxiety, and the terrorist will have won. Yet there is a callousness to this protocol, which essentially insists that all the grieving must be among the privately affected, the victims and their families in Manchester and London, while society at large is inoculated by its British phlegm. Maybe if we can’t admit the pain these attacks bring, and the fact that in empathy we will inevitably know fear, that’s a victory for terrorism too.

IRA attacks always come up at times such as this, evidence that we can face down violence and remain unaffected. It’s constructive from some angles: it is extraordinary to note how fast the process was, from acts of hate and the language of implacable vengeance, to peace. It is salutary that nothing ground to a halt. Yet the comparison also serves to emphasise the toxic and distinct insecurity the modern spate of attacks has created.

We used to take some confidence from the rule that lightning didn’t strike twice: that one terrorist attack, requiring planning and resources, conceived for maximum impact, would make another one nearby – in time or place – unlikely. This year’s events – the similarity of the Westminster and London Bridge attacks, the awful blindside of Manchester apparently not sating any bloodlust – suggest that the opposite is now true: each attack makes another more likely. There used to be at least lip service paid by terrorists to respect for human life: warnings were given, spaces were cleared. Its purpose was terror in the service of an agenda: death was incidental.

Those verities have been reversed: attacks don’t need to be planned or spectacular, they merely need to be lethal. The tawdry mundanity of having planned nothing but hate, organised nothing but a hired van and some knives, gives the chilling impression of a modern, distributed kind of homicide. There are no barriers to entry; you don’t need training or skills, networks or mentors, weapons or sophistication, planning, discipline, a chain of command, anything we would once have understood as elementary preconditions for terrorist acts.

All you need now is a bottomless well of violent hatred and a disregard for your own life, and there is no amount of isolation or inadequacy you can’t overcome. The fake suicide vests said it all: the ideological superstructure of Islamic State and its have-a-go creed is so strong so undemanding, so inclusive, that even embarking on an attack as a fancy-dress terrorist didn’t cost them any confidence, didn’t make them feel risible, or histrionic. Take one life and you’re a warrior.

Just as in a kidnapping you can leverage money limitlessly out of the love people have for their children, so in a terrorist act you can generate anxiety endlessly out of the love people have for one another; all you have to do is repudiate love, deride its meaning. That, philosophically, was always the real protection against terror – the confidence that people of such ill-will were rare. To empty oneself of fellow feeling, of any qualm, is extremely hard: those who managed it would struggle to attach themselves to any project, even a criminal one.

An amorphous but powerful sense of security came from the simple belief that evil is rare, and can’t organise. That has now vanished. The only traditional principle these terrorists adhere to is that they still go for crowds. All the other near-certainties, practical reassurances, have gone.

Terror isn’t a single entity, arriving in one quantity: it’s on a spectrum. Everybody has a fair amount of authentic resilience to it. Whatever the scale of an attack, whether it’s organised or haphazard, people still generally go to work the next day, not as a statement, not shaking a fist at the arrogance of the assault, but because they have to go to work.

It’s the trivial acts that give you pause – going in to the centre of town to buy a kid a bracelet, taking a holiday. I don’t think it is the asymmetry between the benefit and the risk: it’s deeper than that, some sense that to bumble around in Claire’s Accessories is an insult to the city and the wound it has suffered.

This is why tourism has taken such a knock in countries with frequent attacks. In some cases – Tunisia’s, for instance – this has decimated the GDP for reasons that amount to: I don’t mind living with fear as the price of openness, of pluralism, to defend my way of life, but I don’t want to be the schmuck drinking a pina colada in the no-man’s land of a battle between good and evil.

The public realm is polluted: the vigil in Manchester was defiant and celebratory, as was yesterday’s One Love Manchester concert, even the charity testimonial for Manchester United player Michael Carrick earlier in the day, tens of thousands of people asserting that they could gather and be unafraid. But in the minute, everyday decisions, whether to cycle or take a train, whether to go home or go to a bar, whether there are soldiers on the street or not, whether to gather or to retreat, these decisions are shot through with a new reality, one in which you can make decisions on faith, or optimism, or fate, or priorities, but you cannot claim to be blithe.

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Election campaigning resumes, caught between two poles. On the one hand, it is a matter of urgency to uphold democracy in the face of enemies who hate it. On the other hand, political expression is not all noble, and triviality at this moment is repulsive; sniping, bickering and point-scoring dishonour the dead, never mind the dishonour of using the dead to further your agenda. It fosters reserve and trepidation, the feeling that the right note could so easily, even if accidentally, be missed.

We do not have to overreact, as the Met police commissioner, Cressida Dick, has beseeched us not to. But we can admit to a sadness that is immense, a sense of loss that cannot be talked away, and the knowledge that to love opens one up to a fathomless vulnerability.