Science Quote by Mary Douglas

“An escalating, violent tit-for-tat may lead to terrorism” reads like a clinical warning, but it’s doing something sharper than risk assessment. Douglas flags retaliation as a social technology: once violence becomes the accepted language of grievance, it starts to reproduce itself, each side borrowing legitimacy from the other’s last strike. “Tit-for-tat” is deliberately domestic and almost trivial in tone, the phrase you’d use for playground feuds or petty office politics. Paired with “violent,” it exposes how easily moral bookkeeping slides from minor reciprocity into blood debt.

The key word is “escalating.” Douglas isn’t claiming terrorism appears out of nowhere; she’s pointing to a feedback loop where actors interpret their own actions as defense and the other’s as aggression. That asymmetry is the engine. When communities build identity around being wronged, retribution turns into a ritual of belonging, and violence becomes a proof of seriousness. At that point, “terrorism” isn’t just a tactic; it’s the endpoint of a normalization process in which extreme actions start to feel like the only remaining currency that buys attention, honor, or leverage.

The sentence also carries Douglas’s anthropological sensibility: threats aren’t merely individual pathologies but products of classification systems - who counts as “us,” what counts as “provocation,” which deaths count as mournable. Strip people of legitimate avenues for redress, and tit-for-tat becomes a grim form of governance. Her restraint - “may lead” - is part of the authority: it refuses melodrama while indicting the political comfort of “just responding.”