One of the ways of pushing people to extremes in a divided society is by persuading them theirs is a hopeless case; fate and the world are against them; the other crowd is winning.
This is why "Croppies lie down" and calls to last-ditch stands in defence of the Union are among the most potent slogans in Northern Ireland.
And since the extremes are more newsworthy than the rest, messages of hopelessness and doom are echoed, augmented and given extra punch with every headline until they become what they were meant to be in the first place: battle-cries to the faithful.
But, in spite of provocative statements and wilder reports, conditions in Northern Ireland are not hopeless. Monica McWilliams was right when she said yesterday that things had been worse.
Indeed, it's because there is hope that some political leaders are determined to exacerbate and exploit the Drumcree confrontation and the heightened atmosphere surrounding it.
Several Orange leaders have said that, since they'd lost the struggle against the Belfast Agreement, they were now prepared to work in and with the Northern Ireland Assembly - naturally and properly in their own pro-Union interests.
If they are willing to work in the Assembly, Joel Patton of the Spirit of Drumcree is not.
And Ian Paisley and Robert McCartney share Mr Patton's irritation with those who haven't joined their attack on power-sharing, politics and David Trimble.
Brian Faulkner's name is invoked, as prayer or curse, as Dr Paisley, Mr McCartney and their supporters try to re-create the conditions in which the power-sharing executive collapsed in 1974.
But things have changed since 1974 - not enough, but in important ways. The Belfast Agreement won popular support in two full-scale political campaigns; the Sunningdale Agreement did not.
Mr Paisley and the paramilitaries of the Ulster Workers' Council together had some soft targets in their sights: a proposed Council of Ireland, the Republic's constitutional claim on the North, a weak British government.
These targets have gone. Most, if not all, of the loyalist paramilitaries do not find Dr Paisley influential. And the IRA, which bombed out of existence whatever the UWC left standing in 1974, is largely inactive.
Mr Trimble and Mr Mallon are pledged to politics and it's up to those who claim to be equally engaged, in Sinn Fein, the Ulster Democratic Party or the Progressive Unionists, to support them by repeatedly insisting on the primacy of politics.
It's also important - especially for those who believe you don't have to be nationalist or unionist to find a place in politics - that the ironies and contradictions in the conflicting arguments should be underlined.
An Orange leader the other day cited the activities of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1960s in defence of the right to march in protest. He might have found an example nearer home.
Almost 30 years ago, one of the significant debates in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was about the wisdom of marching through territory where the marchers were unwelcome.
The debate was liveliest at the end of 1968, shortly after the occupation of Armagh by Ian Paisley's supporters in opposition to a civil rights march and meeting.
Some said it was unwise to march where the residents were likely to resent the marchers and resist their passage. They were unwilling to risk trouble where it could be avoided.
But members of People's Democracy took the view that, if trouble was inevitable, at least it would demonstrate the sectarian nature of the North; and that in itself would help the civil rights campaign.
The debate was unresolved when, shortly after Christmas, a small band of PD members and friends set out to march from Belfast to Derry. The ambush they met on the way has made Burntollet synonymous with intolerance.
Whether the broken bones - or the provocation - were worthwhile depends on your point of view. I doubt if they were.
Now, though, the Orangemen say what the PD members said then, though the order speaks, not of equality and the future, but of civil and religious liberty and the past.
And the Garvaghy Road residents say now what the opponents of the civil rights marchers said then, in the moments when they weren't occupied, as one of my colleagues observed, leaving no stone unthrown.
But the relative innocence of the 1960s, when the worst we had to fear was from men throwing stones across ditches or using pick-axe handles as batons, has been replaced by the deadly shadows of the paramilitaries.
For Dublin audiences the most penetrating insight into the threat which preoccupied Northern Ireland this week may not have been in the press, on radio or television but at the Peacock Theatre.
The critics said Gary Mitchell's As The Beast Sleeps was compelling, powerful, mesmerising, uncompromising, close to flawless. It was also as up to date as the morning's news.
It tells how time hangs heavy on paramilitary hands when their usual violent business is meant to stop while politics resumes.
It bristles with edginess and menace, as a generation that has grown up with guns and masks and baseball bats is asked to talk to people it has been taught to hate.
BUT expecting them to talk to the enemy is to ask a lot of people whose first - and maybe bigger - problem is how to talk to each other.
In Mitchell's play, the air is thick with fear and suspicion; the fear induced by change and the suspicion switching from the enemy to those who were once close, trusted and unquestioned: friends, allies, spokesmen.
Step outside the Peacock where, I'm sorry to report, the run ends tonight, and you'll find yourself in the real world of fear, suspicion and, in these parts, the confusion which, understandably, the theatre audience seemed to feel.
Gary Mitchell's purpose is theatrical. Despite his subject - another play, In a Little World of Our Own, is also about loyalist paramilitaries - he seems determined to steer clear of politics.
But there are more ways than one of delving into events in Northern Ireland. When reportage and comment are not enough, more creative methods must be tried. Call it the modh indireach.
The virtue of this indirect approach was recognised by Rodney Rice lately when he let Saturday View listeners enjoy Tim McGarry's sideswipes at politics, as in the splendid BBC series Give My Head Peace.
And, in another triumph for scepticism and independence, the University of Ulster awarded an honorary doctorate to my colleague and fellow curmudgeon, Martyn Turner. As we say in Clare, I always knew he had it in him.