A sociology professor at Upland Downs University has published a working paper arguing that terrorism saves lives. Gerald Singhe, the researcher in question, compared cities that experienced a significant terror attack with demographically similar municipalities that didn’t. He found lower murder rates, traffic deaths, and suicides in the cities that experienced terror in the year following an attack.

My own wanting had become less pure, less disinterested. Here was this woman who now glowed in my heart, like a smooth icon painted on old cracked boards. Was it leading me astray? I don’t know. This wanting could feel so promising—almost like a transcendence of my grubby life—take for example this car, with stains on the dash and the seats and the ages-old litter on the floor and the whine when I turn right that I’ll have to have checked someday. Why not seek something better? I was driving now. Toward 14 Amber Point.

We had to hear the answers to our questions directly from Sutman himself. Only he could confirm or refute the fear that had grown in us that someone, Sutman or someone just like him, had already worked their way into our hearts and was coloring and manipulating our deepest reserves of feeling, so that we couldn’t know what came from ourselves and what was a transplanted idea.

Donald J. Sutman has an idea that horrifies some who hear it. Others immediately grasp its potential as a weapon in the commercial wars, and it stokes the flames of cupidity in their hearts.