The Bell-Shaped Curve of Terror

Years ago, I met Dr. John Carroll, a Canadian author of the first book I ever read on computer security (1972).  He mentioned something in another of his articles about the bell-shaped curve of people in computer crime.  Out of every population, there are a certain proportion of people (about 5%) who will not follow rules, even if they know what they are required to do.  A subset of those will become criminals.  If you think about this as a principle of human nature, it can be applied to the population of terrorists.  This kind of takes religion out of the equation.

In all the world, there are a small percentage of people who are pathological killers.  It is a small subset of criminals.  They will use a handy excuse to kill and savage people who are not strong enough to defend themselves.  They rape, kill, demean, and dominate others - the enforcers of any kind of label we want to put on the dominating group.  Gangs have them.  Countries employ them.  Religious groups use them.  People who use them, can train them to be better at their job and give them justification to help them sleep at night.

Along the curve, there are people who tolerate this kind of behavior just to be comfortable where they are.  To survive, they may have to.  There are people who use this kind of person for their own benefit, but stay away from enforcement so they don't get their hands dirty; this includes a group of folks financing their operations.  There are people who object to their behavior but can't do anything about what they are doing.  There are people who actively fight them.

What we need to do is keep our perspective on who the enemy might be.  It isn't all Russians, all Uighurs, all Muslims, or all of any population.  We should develop support for those who want behave in a way that is consistent with our objectives.  They don't have to fight our enemies, but we need to discourage those on the sidelines from supporting them.  We have to encourage those who object to the behavior of our enemies, describe what is objectionable, and expose the logic.  We have to help those who are actively fighting.

We seem to be treating our friends and enemies the same, when our enemies are a very small part of a large population of good guys.  An equal effort to support our friends and isolate our enemies would seem to work better than what we are doing now.