It is a law of nigh economic certainty that, the more price conscious a person is in their evaluation of competing goods, the lower the price they will end up paying for their chosen good. This isn’t a matter of logical or metaphysical necessity, but virtually certain probability. An individual who is not being forthrightly price conscious may find themselves entertaining the choice of buying something which, if they had begun with an evaluation of the price, would not have otherwise allowed themselves to entertain, thus developing an emotional attachment which influences their decision to spend more. Rarely, in terms of the qualities an individual will tend to find preferable in some given item, does quality correlate to the lower price, and that usually in cases where they are afforded the opportunity to employ arbitrage or the seller is giving a discount for the purpose of finding new customers to try their product. Thus we may derive as a law of the psychology of exchange that an individual who emphasizes price consciousness will tend to spend less than an individual that does not.

From this perspective, we can derive a great deal of criticism not merely of how governments respond to terrorism, but even that they respond to terrorism. Usually when “at any cost” is brought up in the context of justifying material and social resources spent, not even counting opportunity cost, we will find that what is given up to obtain the good of value supposedly beyond measure is not really quite so dear. Counter-terrorism measures in response to terrorist activities are directly costly; when the indirect effects of the counter-terrorism response, and not merely the terrorist act, vastly outweigh the terrorism itself, it is worth considering that the counter-terrorism response is not actually opposed to terrorism, but is rather intended to be an extension of the terrorist act itself. Counter-terrorism is part and parcel of terrorism. It does not even accomplish the end of thwarting present and future terrorism, but effects an increase of its effects and the likelihood and severity of future terrorist acts.

Now, a single terrorist activity will not pose an existential threat to a healthy society. Likewise, a wasp does not typically pose an existential threat to an individual human being, save for the case where the individual is allergic. However, an over-response to a wasp, under certain situations, can pose exactly that existential threat which the lone wasp could not otherwise accomplish. How? Well, suppose one were driving a car, and he became so irritated at the buzzing of a wasp and fearful of being stung that he took his eyes off the road for a second…

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaida which directly claimed 2,996 lives, it is estimated that the temporary suspension of air travel and subsequently increased road usage led to an extra 1,600 Americans dying in automobile accidents which would not have otherwise taken place. But I’m scarcely talking about displaced risk and opportunity cost. More significantly, the drastic response of counter-terrorism incites terrorism, as predicted by my first law of society.

By this I do not mean that counter-terrorism makes some Muslims angry, who go on to commit terroristic acts as a consequence. Undoubtedly there are some Muslims somewhere angry at the idea that, say, the French government should defend its citizens against Islamist terrorists who are themselves acting to punish those who insult Islam, and believe that the French government should rather have recognized the error of its ways and gone on to submit to the will of Allah. Rather, the drastic response by the French government following the Charlie Hebdo massacre is global, 24/7 advertising of how significantly random, isolated acts of terror can generate a severe social allergic response. World leaders may have participated in a superficial, and essentially meaningless, ritual of solidarity, but in general opinion in the West is further divided and polarized as a response. Opinion makers in the West are spending more resources attacking each other for having the wrong opinion formed in response to the massacre than there is any real sense of unity in the face of a belligerent outsider. It is like a king’s court squabbling over who should be blamed for murderous fiends launching attacks on the capital and never getting around to agreeing that it is imperative to shut the goddamn gate against these barbarians. The right which says “I told you so” is excoriated by the pro-immigration left as Islamophobic, while the left in turn is excoriated for saying “We should be careful to not blame Islam for this.”

A Muslim who believes in the superiority of Islamic society and the evil of Western societies can only find this kind of polarization in the West positively delicious. Not only that, they are likely to be encouraged this. This inability of the West to unite itself to ward off a warring invader corroborates the thesis of its essentially heathen nature. An ardent Muslim that might not have otherwise been persuaded to join in terrorist activities will now believe that these asymmetric, violent acts against Western nations are effective for securing the triumph of Islam over infidels. Poetically, Western societies even humiliate their own citizens rather than merely turn away the fiends. The West is weak, and Islam is strong.

What to do, then, in the face of a terrorist act? Very simple: obliterate the terrorists, suppress news coverage and social media speech about the act, and prohibit the entry of any and all Muslims to your country. Everyone can agree to the first, conservatives will agree to the latter, but likely neither side agrees that suppression of news coverage is justified. Why not? For conservatives, this is a prime instance in which they feel they get to outdo leftists at their own game; they can proudly tout how they support free speech with absolutely no restrictions. Smug in their superiority, the conservative will not go on to question how much they are giving up in this case to outdo leftists at leftism. Likely, they will not even realize that absolutely free speech is straightforwardly nonsensical or that the ideologically flexible leftists will not care that any call for prohibition of ostensible “hate speech” apparently contradicts this principle. When leftists say they are in favor of free speech, they mean that they are in favor of free speech for themselves, to protect against any bans on speech which conservatives might use to stem the dissemination of leftist belief. Conservatives are right that leftists are hypocrites and unfair, but like first described above, we should consider not only the apparent benefit of something, but also its cost. Is getting to outdo the leftist at free speech worth being slowly choked out by the implementation of suicidal leftist policy? This conservative is unpersuaded.

As to the prohibition of entry to Muslims onto sovereign soil, which is after all the right of a sovereign nation which gets to enforce something like property rights about who can and cannot enter its borders, leftists will naturally decry this as being unfair to moderate Muslims. Indeed, it is, but given moderate Muslims on the one hand have effected nothing whatsoever to limit the level of Islamic extremism and on the other are also sympathetic incubators of radicals, this unfairness is a price they must suffer for the cost of Muslim immigration is far too great for Western nations. As of yet, there is not a nation which has managed to solve the problem of Islamic extremism within its borders short of the effective prohibition of entry to Muslims. Even those countries which have adopted Islam as its animating ideology are still targets of terrorism by Muslims of other sects. Whether this Islamic problem with terrorism is due to the nature of the Mahometan memeplex itself or the kinds of people it attracts, it remains the case that it is highly correlated to monstrous acts of violence and only the complete removal of Muslims obtains the removal of Islamic terrorists.

The West is a civilization divided, grounded in principles that pursued absolutely lead to its decline and demise. It not only incites further Islamic violence against itself by how it chooses to respond to Islamobarbarism, Western societies are incapable of responding in a way that does not extend the negative effects of terrorism.

Charles Martel, who once blessed the West with a reactionary zeal that pushed out Muslim influence and permitted the development of society free of its toxic ideology, has been failed by his descendants. The only proper response by the West to the obstinate savagery of Muslims would have been a Crusade, but the West no longer has either a Pope or a people possessed of the will to defend and cherish its own life. The West, I daresay, deserves its fate; it has dallied from the task of civilization, and so it is sundered for the sin of prideful pacifism.