The terrible spectre of extremist violence and the so-called 'Talibanisation' we are facing today has to do with psychology as much as it has with economics and politics.

It is as if the figurative demons of hate and fascistic whiplash repressed deep within our unconsciousness have suddenly leaped out and become a horrifying reality.

Laying latent in us have been awkward fantasies about gallant military take-overs and bloody revolutions based on rotating myths of bravado and a worldview that has no room for any grey areas and is simplistically divided between black and white; good and evil, right and wrong.

Such a state of mind has given birth to a cringing strain of neurosis in the society in which a hollow and delusional sense of religious chauvinism, patriotism and ideological self-indulgence comes attached with a persecution complex and an obsessive-compulsive need to deny ones failures.

Though most of us are only willing to exhibit our quivering religious/sectarian and 'patriotic' biases in the shape of the usual knee-jerk rhetoric on the internet, TV and in newspaper articles, it won't be all that wrong to suggest that most of what is harmlessly spilled out as patriotic rants in cyber space or the media, has now found its physical expression.