As Stalin, who knew something about the business of mortality, supposedly said, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” Statistics stay silent in us. Terrorism kills, but the biggest killer remains the environment, responsible for close to 13 million deaths annually. But terrorism causes outrage, which makes us overestimate the likelihood of a potential terrorist attack—and react more violently to one when it happens. We feel the sting of man-made damage far more than that caused by nature.
Related: Nullsequential