We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we’d never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

Ronson argues for an investigative stance toward extremism that prioritizes comprehension over caricature. He suggests that “knowing” extremists requires tracing the social and psychological processes that shape them, but he explicitly rejects a simplistic, sentimental origin story (“nothing about their childhoods”). Instead, he emphasizes a “symbiotic relationship” between extremists and the broader public: attention, outrage, media incentives, and cultural polarization can feed radical movements even as society condemns them. The quote frames extremism not as an alien pathology but as something partly co-produced by the ecosystems—political, media, and social—in which “we” all participate.