Parenting & Family Quote by Jon Ronson

Ronson’s most disarming move is to reframe “extremists” as a relationship problem, not a species apart. The line starts with a humanitarian-sounding mandate - understand them - then quietly dodges the cliché explanation people reach for: the childhood trauma origin story. That omission is strategic. He’s rejecting the comforting idea that extremism is simply the product of damaged individuals, a pathology we can diagnose from a safe distance. Instead, he’s pointing the camera back at the audience.

“Symbiotic” is the tell. It implies mutual dependence: extremists feed on outrage, attention, and polarization, while “we” feed on the clarity they provide - the pleasure of having a villain, the moral adrenaline of dunking on the worst people alive, the tidy narrative where our side is sane by definition. Ronson’s journalism often lives in that uneasy middle space, where empathy becomes a tool not for absolution but for precision. If you can see the incentives and feedback loops, you can see how radicalization becomes less a private descent and more a public ecosystem.

The subtext is a warning about contamination: the more we treat extremists as monstrous content, the more we help manufacture them. It’s also a quiet critique of media culture (including his own industry), which profits from spectacle while pretending it’s only documenting it. Understanding, here, isn’t moral surrender; it’s the first step in breaking a loop that flatters everyone except the truth.