The Manchester Arena attack is the appalling price we pay for the freedom of European democracy

Ariana Grande tweeted that she had no words, and spoke for us all. There can be no words, at least no adequate words, in the hours after horror on this unfathomable scale. When the limitations of language are exposed, there is no choice but to state the obvious, or that which appears so. This is a purpose of cliché. It fills a vacuum. It plays for time until the head clears.

Ordinarily, many of us recoil from the word “evil”, suspecting it, like its anagrammatic cousin “vile”, as a lazy tabloid epithet for behaviour that demands great effort to begin to understand. But there is no comprehending this. When Andy Burnham, Manchester’s new mayor, said “this was an evil act”, and even when Donald Trump referred to the suicide bomber and any accomplices as “evil losers”, there was no recoiling. Whether it is evidence of evil or madness feels an utterly pointless distinction to draw with an act of such utter pointlessness. Who could care today where the line between wickedness and insanity, if anywhere, should be drawn?

When little girls wearing giant cat’s ears are blown apart, there is little room for anything other than mourning the dead and grieving for the living. While a sobbing mother on a radio programme begs for help in finding a daughter whose mobile is ringing unanswered, there is no space for anything but nauseous incredulity. The nausea will not fade, but the disbelief will.

We have long known that something like this was coming, if nothing exactly like this. We must learn (or relearn, 21 years after Dunblane) that there are people among us who think nothing of slaughtering children, and others who celebrate the slaughter as an act of heroism. We must acknowledge that there are those to whom no violence is too perverted, no target too transparently innocent.

We will never understand it, and it would be futile to try. There is nothing rational here. Conventional terrorism has an aim beyond the creation of terror. It means to change a political situation to the terrorist’s advantage. In this, there is no reason or ambition beyond the primitive urge to cause pain. This is nihilism at its purest, and there is no reasoning or engaging with that. We must accept, belatedly, that this is the status quo. What happened in Manchester last night is no more an aberration than what happened in Nice last year or in Westminster in March. This is a permanent facet of life in a European democracy. There will be no end to suicidal guerilla warfare.

This leaves a stark choice: are we prepared, however reluctantly, to alter fundamentally how we live? Or are we not? Are we willing to spend hours queuing to get into gigs, cinemas, shopping centres, even urban pubs, while a line of people is exhaustively searched? Will we tolerate being cross-examined and having personal details stored on a database whenever we buy a few bottles of bleach and a couple of dozen nails from B&Q?

Will we put up with a vast expansion of the racial profiling already visible at airports, where the queue for passport control slows whenever a dark-skinned person reaches the front, to other venues? Are we going to collude in a descent towards the kind of semi-benign, demi-fascist state with a fearsomely intrusive techno-surveillance apparatus that might just prevent the destruction of more little girls wearing giant ears? If not, somehow we must learn to live with it.

That is not to say that we harden ourselves to the shock and grief. To some things we would never wish to become inured even if we could. But if we consider our liberties sacred, we have to accept that what happened in Manchester is the appalling price to be paid for retaining them.

At this moment, while some mothers and fathers frantically scour hotels and hospitals for their children, and others prepare to bury theirs, that choice looks less clear cut than it did 24 hours ago. Already, the social media confederacy of dunces is dipping its depraved little fingers into the Third Reich’s lucky dip, and pulling out the scapegoats.

One could respond that atrocities will not happen often. As immense a tragedy as each and every death is, numerically there will be very few. By a factor far greater than 10, more people will die on the roads this year than at the hands of suicidally nihilistic terrorism, and no one argues for the banning of cars. But however talented and committed they are, security services in a relatively free country need luck to prevent attacks, and luck is a finite quantity.

At this hour, it would be glib to cleave to the cliché that the terrorists can ultimately succeed only by changing our way of life beyond recognition. Some lives have been changed beyond imagining. Others have been ended. Yet the day is coming when the decision must be made. I hope, despite the persistence of the nausea, that when the head clears we make the brave one. But the courage to live with pain may prove as finite a quality as luck, and closer with each new atrocity to running out.