[I wrote this in 2001, right after the September 11 attacks]

The monster is fascinating in its ugliness and its brainless stupidity, but its facelessness is what makes it terrible. Our need to identify an enemy to confront is creating a face for the monster; we call it Osama Bin Laden. We all know by now his balmy eyes, thick lips and long beard. But we are deluding ourselves. The monster does not have a face.

We may destroy the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and that would be good for the Afghans, providing they are not killed in the process. We may destroy the schools and teachers that are engraving a deadly fanaticism in young minds, and that would be good for the youth in the poorest areas of Pakistan. We may find and destroy Osama Bin Laden, and that could save many lifes in the future. But we are not going to find the monster.

Our fundamental mistake is to think that there are good and bad persons. This is wrong. Unlike wolves, we are not genetically prepared not to kill individuals of our own species. A wolf would never kill another wolf. This is a hard-coded pattern of behavior, it cannot be overridden, and it is critical for the success of a social animal with the powerful natural weapons of the wolf. The naked apes, in contrast, never evolved hard-coded inhibitions against slaughtering their fellow apes, because their weak natural weapons did not require them. Good behavior in humans is a learned skill, and it can be taught to be radically different things.

Osama Bin Laden is not essentially worse than you or me, and we are no better than the God fearing baker who collected eyeballs of enemies during the first world war, or the Japanese people who committed all sorts of atrocities in Nanking. We just happen to have lived in different circumstances. Take any kid, make him live throughout his childhood and adolescence in a fanatic religious school, where he is taught that if he dies killing Americans he will go straight to heaven, and unless your kid is a hero or a coward you will end up with a religious zealot ready to die killing.

We cannot take the good apart from the bad, because we are all good and bad. We cannot tell them apart from us, because they are living among us, they are like us. They are us, in a very real sense.

We are also inextricably linked in the chains of cause and effect. Osama Bin Laden, who has probably caused the worst pain to the United States of America in its recent history, is protected by the Talibans in Afghanistan, one of the worst regimes on earth, who gained control over most of Afghanistan with the help of the United States. European and American people decided half a century ago to create Israel in the land were the Palestinian people lived, starting the conflict that has fueled the hate of Muslims against Occident during the last decades. Who started it all, who is good and who is evil? We are all rolling together, in a hopelessly mixed mess.