Venture, if you will for a moment, into the mind of a suicide bomber.
Yes, they are brainwashed, yes, they may well be deranged, but there is a reason they are doing what they do. Somewhere in their though processes is an element of rationality. They have a reason.
To suggest it is simply and exclusively the result of following the harsher teachings of Islam is naive.
Nearly 1000 years ago a Greek military strategist named Themistius warned a Norman mercenary who governed Sicily that a new type of war was imminent, a war about God. He suggested the Caliphate would seek to unite the many Muslim factions who fought for land and money into one force by urging them to fight together under the banner of Islam.
He was dismissed as a fool, but the crusades were testament to his foresight.
And what we have today is the legacy of this.
It is impossible not to feel sadness and anger when events such as Manchester occur, but each time they do, in reality that sadness and that anger is a little bit less, not because we are becoming inured to such acts, but because we increasingly realise there appear to be no answers, no apparent resolutions that will just make it all go away.
There will be no answer until we understand the question, if indeed a definable question exists.
It's reasonable to suppose that factors including religious fundamentalism, acts of quasi-military revenge, and even arcane economic interests play a part in that question. But there is more to it than that.
So in fact we have two questions: why is this happening, and how do we stop it.
If we continue to ignore the first, so we will continue to remain clueless as to the second.
At some point, if such attacks continue, it is probable that we will attempt to answer the second by harsh and ill-considered actions, acts of desperation brought about by our seeming impotence to protect our own people on their own soil.
Watch a nest of ants at work. Their society is ordered and efficient, and yet should you pour boiling water on their nest, they lose all rationality and structure. This then is humanity today. An indefinable enemy has created chaos in our world, and we do not know which way to turn. And our leaders fiddle while Rome burns.
In our quest for resolution of this nightmare, it is important to observe the impotence of our so-called leaders.
They are masters of platitudes, of inactivity and of hopelessness. Leaders in name only. And if ever there was a time we needed real leaders, it is now.
These are challenging times. Our climate and our environment increasingly reject our presence. Our world teeters on the brink of debt-driven economic collapse, and each day we engage in conflict across the globe: and for what?
And after two thousand years of so-called civilisation, we still do not speak the same language, for goodness sake.
Just as life for each family is challenging, so it is for humanity as a whole. To survive and to thrive, the goal of every human, yet we still cannot achieve common purpose, preferring instead to do so at the expense of others, driven by materialism, selfishness and greed.
Although nature offers no definitive explanation of genesis, we humans cling to the concepts of beginning and end, best characterised by birth and death.
We are of finite minds, and so it is likely we shall be a finite species: perhaps what we see before us is simply a natural diagnosis of our own impending extinction.
It will not be a virus, or a nuclear bomb which brings about our end, but simply our own stupidity.
We have had thousands of years to learn this lesson, and yet we have learned nothing. So maybe we should accept it. We are in decline, because we never understood the question of why we are here.
Jerry Flay is a freelance writer based in Hawke's Bay.
