Terrorism, Society's Self-Condemnation

I found this essay by Jean Baudrillard via Mark Woods. Here's an interesting excerpt:

The worst thing that can happen to global power is not for it to be attacked or destroyed but for it to be humiliated. Global power was humiliated on 11 September because the terrorists inflicted an injury that could not be inflicted on them in return. Reprisals are only physical retaliations, whereas global power had suffered a symbolic defeat. War can only respond to the terrorists' physical aggression, not to the challenge they represent. Their defiance can only be addressed by vengefully humiliating the "others" (but surely not by crushing them with bombs or by locking them up like dogs in detention cells in Guantanamo Bay).

...Terrorism depends not only on the obvious despair of the humiliated, but on the invisible despair of globalisation's beneficiaries. It depends on our subjugation to the technology integral to our lives, and to the crushing effects of virtual reality. We are in thrall to networks and programmes, and this dependence defines our species, homo sapiens gone global. This feeling of invisible despair -- our own despair -- is irreversible because it is the result of the total fulfilment of our desires.

If terrorism is really the result of a state of profusion without any hope of payback or obligation to sacrifice, of the forced resolution of conflicts, then eradicating it as if it were an affliction imposed from the outside could only be illusory. Terrorism, in its absurdity and meaninglessness, is society's verdict on -- and condemnation of -- itself.