Standing before a crowd in my home state of Ohio in late June, Trump casually asked his supporters what they thought of waterboarding. “I like it a lot,” he said, as though he were commenting on an appetizer. “I don’t think it’s tough enough.”

As much as I am horrified by Trump’s words, I am not surprised. Recent surveys have shown that torture has the support of roughly two-thirds of the US population: 82% of Republicans and 53% of Democrats believe it is justified at least some of the time. Trump, ever the opportunist, is simply tapping into a sentiment that few want to believe exists.

And exist it does. I experienced this sentiment firsthand last semester, while teaching two writing courses at the University of Illinois at Chicago – courses designed around the topic “terrorism and everyday life”.

I chose it because terrorism, as the title of the class was meant to suggest, is a fundamental part of daily life in the 21st century. No longer is it something that encroaches upon us from “outside”, as the planes did on 9/11. Daily life is now structured around the possibility of attacks, with news headlines about bombings and shootings flashing across our electronic devices on a routine schedule.

For many of my students, though, I assumed terrorism wouldn’t just be confined to the headlines. University of Illinois at Chicago is located in the heart of city’s downtown, and has one of the most diverse student populations in the country. While creating the syllabus for the class, I assumed we would have discussions of what it meant to live in a major city that remains on constant alert. I thought we would tackle the steady rise of Islamophobia and have debates about the relationships between religion, poverty and violence. I wanted my students to become good writers, but to do this I wanted them to confront the ways terrorism has touched them personally: the anxieties they might have, the discrimination they may have experienced.

And we did have some of those conversations. We talked about the role of media, its glorification of tragedy and its lopsided coverage of attacks that affect westerners. We talked about the normalizing of violence in many parts of the world, and what it might mean to live under occupation.

Then, inevitably, we talked about torture.

Although torture wasn’t a major topic on the syllabus, it seemed to be waiting in the background. Some of our primary texts included essays written by Sam Harris, himself a proponent of torture in some instances, as well as Noam Chomsky, who refuses to accept any justification for torture (and frequently criticizes its use throughout US military history). Likewise, many of my students seemed to want to write about two broad topics: “terrorism and the media” and “preventing terrorism”, a vague category that included things such as foreign policy and military tactics.

I was hesitant, at first, to open the box on torture and the ethical dilemmas that surround it, but eventually decided to broach the topic by showing them the first episode of 24’s seventh season. This particular episode seemed relevant, as it deals with the ethical problem of torture as a preventative measure and, as a television show on a major network, is one of the most prominent examples of how the media portrays terrorism in a post-9/11 world.

Jack Bauer in 24: torture porn? Photograph: Sky/Imagenet

The writing is laughably bad: as the opening credits flash across the show’s iconic multi-camera collage, iconic CTU agent Jack Bauer sits before a Senate committee hearing on the use of torture. With his blasé rogue chic, Bauer insists that his use of torture was justified because it saved lives. He did “what was necessary”. When pressed by the senator if he was above the law, Bauer’s response is crucial and cuts to the core of American ideology: terrorists don’t play by our rules, so he wasn’t going to be limited by them either.

I showed my students this episode right around the time Trump repeated Bauer’s remarks, almost word for word, at a campaign event. I even made the joke that Trump’s foreign policy adviser was Jack Bauer himself, hoping my students – many of whom had protested Trump’s recent event on our campus – would see the absurdity of the position.

To my surprise, or rather disbelief, almost every one of my 46 students wasn’t bothered by the use of torture. The general consensus was both simple and eerily confident: “It may not be ideal, but sometimes it’s just necessary.”

I was at a loss for words. These weren’t the stereotypical, angry conservatives who I had always naively imagined supported torture. They were a diverse group of liberal college students coming of age in a post-Abu Ghraib world. They understood how racism and Islamophobia functioned in the broader national security discourse, and found the “it’s religion, stupid” views of thinkers such as Sam Harris and Bill Maher rightfully problematic. When I first introduced them to Chomsky, they were thrilled to finally read someone willing to call out America on its imperial legacy of exceptionalism.

The general consensus was both simple and eerily confident: 'It may not be ideal, but sometimes it’s just necessary'

How, I wondered, could they be so accepting of torture?

The predicament almost exclusively used in discussions of torture is the so-called “ticking bomb” scenario: an evil terrorist is withholding critical information about an imminent attack, and in order to save thousands of lives, he must be tortured to elicit the details.

On its face, this scenario seems difficult to refute. It is almost common sense to agree that such an attack should be prevented at all costs, and the rights of one immoral person are worth considerably less than the lives of thousands of innocents.

Such utilitarian logic is troubling. Leaving aside the remarkable implausibility of such a scenario ever taking place, it reduces human life to a vague notion of “worth” without sufficiently offering up a picture of how such value is established. It is an abstract way of thinking about life that often favors quantity over quality and ignores the particular experiences of different lives. By this logic, one American life, even an innocent one, should be worth less than hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. As we have seen countless times in the past few decades, this is simply not the case.

When I presented this argument to my students, many seemed to agree. Nevertheless, they couldn’t really see why torture should never be used. Why did it need to be forbidden so absolutely, especially considering those clearcut examples when critical information is needed to save lives? Shouldn’t we do everything we can to save lives?

At the time, I didn’t know how to respond this question. Quite honestly, I had made the error of assuming what my students would think ahead of time, and as a result wasn’t prepared. I couldn’t give them a simple answer, and it bothered me that I couldn’t give them a simple answer. I just wrung my hands and shook my head and sort of laughed in disbelief.

Looking back, it seems to me that this inability to answer, my not knowing how to respond, is precisely the point. The logic of every justification of torture is that it offers a foolproof solution to an impossible problem: lack of knowledge.

What I should have said to my students was that scenarios justifying torture never question whether the person being tortured actually has information, nor how the torturer knows this person has information. The scenarios simply accept it as fact that the person has “something” important. If you reframe the scenario and say “we don’t know if this person has information, but we’re going to torture him on the off chance he does”, things begin to look a little different.

When listening to someone such as Trump casually endorse torture, it becomes clear why people are so receptive to it. It promises a solution to the terrifying reality that we simply can’t predict, with 100% certainty, when the next attack will be.

My point is not that we need an argument against torture. We shouldn’t have to argue against torture. My point is that torture, even in the most implausible of scenarios, isn’t actually the solution to the problem, but rather something that obscures the problem by presenting itself as a solution. What’s really bothering us isn’t that another attack is possible, but rather that we often can’t “have all the facts” and prevent this attack.

As a teacher, students expect you to have answers to their questions. Students look to you for guidance and authority. My own students were bright and insightful, but they also didn’t feel as if they had enough authority to speak about big issues with any degree of certainty. Their default position, in these instances, was to shut down and not engage. One of the things I always stressed is that it’s OK to not know. It allows you to ask questions you might not otherwise ask, and perhaps arrive at a more thoughtful conclusion.

The problem is that in the Information Age, and the conquering of the world by Google, such a position of uncertainty is less accepted. We’ve been trained to demand, and expect, immediate answers. This is fine if you need to convert feet to meters, or translate a Latin phrase to any language of your choosing. But what about those things that don’t have easy answers, the things we fear, the things that affect and shape our lives?

Things like terrorism.

Jake Gyllenhaal in Source Code: the ticking gets louder and louder. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

In addition to showing my students that episode of 24, I also had them watch the film Source Code, a science fiction film about a terrorist attack that takes place, appropriately enough, in Chicago.

The premise of the film involves a great deal of quantum physics, but the basic plot involves Jake Gyllenhaal, a US army captain, inhabiting the last eight minutes of consciousness of a school teacher aboard a commuter train that explodes. By returning to these last eight minutes just before the explosion, Gyllenhaal is able to find the bomber and prevent an attack that is to take place later in the day in downtown Chicago.

While watching this film with my students, it occurred to me that the film was a cleverly disguised ticking bomb scenario, one that seems to implicitly promote torture: Gyllenhaal’s character is repeatedly thrust through time and space, forced to return again and again to find information that will prevent an attack. When he objects and begins to realize what is happening, those in charge adopt the sinister, clinical language of torturers. “Who’s the bomber?” they ask, ignoring his questions. “Find the bomber, and this will all be over.”

Of course, Gyllenhaal’s character is a US army captain, a hero, and in the end comes to sacrifice his own concerns and patriotically accepts his mission. Nevertheless, the film plays into the fantastic logic presented by people such as Harris and Trump. It plays into our fears and satisfies our demands for a solution: with the right amount of technology, or heroic sacrifice, we can prevent an attack.

America loves heroism. We love someone like Jack Bauer, a man willing to do anything to prevent the loss of innocent life. We love the fantasy of being saved at the last minute from a ticking bomb.

In real life, though, there are no ticking bomb scenarios. There is just the ticking, the fear and anticipation. Trump understands this well. Despite his talk of heroism and greatness, he isn’t actually interested in the rescue mission.

He just wants to make sure the ticking is a little louder, so we can all hear it.