There are basic interrelated questions that any student of human history must ask. Why is human history filled with so much evil, and why do good people so often do nothing in the face of evil?

Jamie Glazov’s new book, Jihadist Psychopath: How He Is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us,addresses that troubling question.

The answer that he comes up with in Jihadist Psychopath is a collusion that is not born only of simple radicalism, but of the ways in which Islamic political movements play on our own emotional weaknesses.

Jihadist Psychopath is a journey into the dark heart of the Western world using the metaphor of the interplay between the psychopath and his victims. That metaphor pervades Glazov’s text, structuring his understanding of the growing terror death toll and the accompanying sympathy for the terrorists.

Glazov, who has a BA in Political Science and a PhD in History, had already made a study of Islamic terrorists. To prepare for the writing of Jihadist Psychopath, he also made a study of the most fascinating and deadliest element in the criminal life of societies: the psychopath. Human societies are bound together by empathy. Multiculturalism and diversity stretch and expand our sense of empathy to its limits. The psychopath plays on our sense of empathy despite lacking any empathy of his or her own.

That paradox makes the psychopath extremely curious and deadly. Like a cuckoo bird, the psychopath has evolved to exploit a biological loophole, empathy, meant to bind a species together around shared interests, without the biological commitment to those interests, creating a predator that is facile and adept, as Glazov’s title puts it, at “charming, seducing and devouring us”.