Parenting & Family Quote by Alan Dean Foster

Foster’s provocation lands because it refuses the comforting myth that terror belongs to an alien psychology. By saying it “wasn’t difficult at all” to get inside a terrorist’s mind, he punctures the prestige we sometimes grant violence-as-enigma. The line is almost offensively plain: the raw materials are already in us, rehearsed early, dressed up as play, and socially rewarded when packaged as entertainment.

The subtext is less “everyone is secretly a terrorist” than “the narrative engine is familiar.” Revenge fantasies are a universal script: grievance, humiliation, righteous payback, applause. Foster’s jab at “popular video games” isn’t a simplistic blame-the-console take so much as a cultural mirror. Games, movies, and genre fiction routinely hand us the same moral math: hurt me, and violence becomes not only permissible but heroic. The pleasure is in clarity. No messy institutions, no due process, no ambiguity about collateral damage. Press the button, solve the story.

Context matters: Foster is a career science fiction writer, steeped in speculative worlds where conflict is often explained by incentives and storytelling logic rather than mystical evil. He’s arguing that terror is legible because it’s narratively conventional. That’s the unsettling implication: societies don’t just “fail” into violence; they train for it through the stories they repeat, the fantasies they normalize, and the emotional shortcuts they teach kids long before anyone hands them an ideology.