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In this context, I was struck by a tweet put out by the Toronto Sun’s Lorrie Goldstein on Tuesday: “In today’s world, I think we all know what we’re thinking it could be. Let’s hope it isn’t.” That puzzled me. I tweeted back: “What should we hope it is?” Should we hope it is “merely” a deranged individual, whose addled perceptions and inchoate self-pity have merged to produce the insane idea that mowing down a crowd of peaceful strangers will somehow serve to close the loop on his personal anguish?

That to me is a far more unsettling thought. Islamist terror is at least something we have come to understand. Jihadists are not insane, even if their amateur acolytes are often mentally unstable. Their attacks are premeditated along fairly predictable lines. It begins with radicalization. We generally know what they believe. We know how these beliefs are spread. We know who is financing the propaganda mill into which lone-wolf jihadists get sucked.

So when we learn that an attack is based in ideology — whether it’s jihadism or even the terrorism perpetrated by the Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s and ’80s — we at least have something positive to do with our grief. We can transmute it into white-hot anger. Our thoughts turn to probable suspects, analysis of the event, of our security policies, of ways to prevent another attack. And we do prevent many.

Photo by Dave Abel / Toronto Sun / Postmedia Network

Knowing that an evil action is part of a pattern, rather than a random act over which we hadn’t a scintilla of preventative control, is the difference between feeling helpless and feeling purposeful, between feeling utterly vulnerable, with no possibility of counter-action and feeling empowered, galvanized to counter-action. On a more metaphysical level, it is the difference between mental order and mental chaos.