A couple of hours before the Paris atrocities, I was queuing to pass through a cumbersome security cordon in Tunis. Since the grisly attacks on the beach at Souss and at the Bardo museum, every hotel and tourist restaurant here has been fitted with airport-style scanners and metal detectors.

“This is a classic example of displacement activity,” I airily told a fellow politician as we bleeped through. I went on to quote Nassim Taleb on how we falsely project the past into the future, failing to grasp that much of what is coming is unforeseeable.