When Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, in 2017, I was about to drive my daughter and some of her friends to a soccer tryout. I remember that the news came moments before we left; once we arrived, I sat on a bench next to the soccer field, scrolling through incredulous and fearful reactions on Twitter. The news was widely considered akin to Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, one of the most odious scandals in American history.

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In 1957, the Soviet Union shocked the world with the launch of its Earth-orbiting Sputnik satellite. The United States, fearful of the security risk and hoping to make the nation more competitive with foreign powers, reacted with dramatic investments in science-and-technology education.

It is tempting to think of political extremists as those who have had their brain flambéed by a steady media diet of oddball podcasters, fringe YouTubers, and “do your own research” conspiracists. Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, was known to hang out in white-supremacist forums.

The line between a normal, functioning society and catastrophic decivilization can be crossed with a single act of mayhem. This is why, for those who have studied violence closely, the brazen murder of a CEO in Midtown Manhattan—and, more important, the brazenness of the cheering reaction to his execution—amounts to a blinking-and-blaring warning signal for a society that has become already too inured to bloodshed and the conditions that exacerbate it.

In the last scene of Terrence Malick’s 1973 film, Badlands, a recently arrested spree killer is sitting handcuffed next to a state trooper. Unperturbed by the prospect of the electric chair, the killer compliments the trooper’s state-issued Stetson. “You’re quite an individual, Kit,” the trooper says.