# Banal Terrorism - Response By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2025-12-15 Indeed, language is consequential, and the enable/obfuscate framework is genuinely helpful in understanding how rhetoric shapes political possibility. One area to explore further is that rhetorical escalation is not unilateral. It operates on both sides of any contested issue and is fundamentally relational. Drug policy reformers spoke carefully for decades and were ignored, so they spoke louder, harsher, more provocatively. Communities experiencing cartel violence found "trafficking" bureaucratically bloodless because it failed to capture their felt reality, so they reached for something that did. When people are not heard, they escalate, and escalation alienates exactly the people they need to persuade. The knife cuts both ways; each side's extremism justifies the other's. The remedy of critical thinking offers hope, but it is precisely here that language, biological programming, our culture, and our technology betray us. Critical thinking has been democratized into a posture rather than a practice. Everyone believes they are the ones seeing clearly, while others remain captured by rhetoric. The identity is widely held; the capacity is rare. The deeper issue is not that people are uninformed but that they are differently informed. Someone can be deeply versed in cartel violence statistics or overdose mortality rates with absolute precision and still possess no framework for evaluating whether "terrorism" is a legitimate category for what they are describing and the impact it will have on society. We have facts without wisdom, details without discernment. This reveals a fundamental error inherited from the Enlightenment: the assumption that knowledge of facts constitutes thinking and that thinking naturally produces wisdom. The printing press, universal education, and the internet were each supposed to liberate humanity through democratized information, yet facts without shared interpretive frameworks produce fragmentation rather than understanding. The Reformation offers an uncomfortable parallel. Scripture became available to everyone, which should have resolved theological disputes by providing direct access to the truth. Instead, it produced a century of religious warfare and pamphlet battles as each faction possessed the same texts and believed they were reading them clearly. Others remained blinded by corruption or ignorance, resulting in power struggles we see to this day. Rhetorical escalation generates a negative feedback loop that is difficult to escape. Those who are not heard become isolated. Isolation concentrates them into communities of like-minded people where language becomes more extreme. Extremity alienates potential allies and attracts those seeking to manipulate the energy for their own purposes. Power accrues to those skilled at channeling escalated rhetoric rather than those capable of resolving underlying disputes. The manipulated feel even less heard, and so they escalate further. The cycle continues until it exhausts itself through violence or collapse, or until some new framework emerges capable of holding competing perspectives without prematurely resolving them. In many ways, this is an ancient problem with novel information technology accelerating its dynamics. #### Related Items [[Rhetoric]] [[Thinking]] [[Enlightenment]] [[Religion]] [[Society]] [[The Human Condition]] [[Power]]