It's a problem of scale. Say 0.0001% (number pulled from my rear pocket for illustration purposes) of the population want to engage in 'recreational terrorism'

It's a problem of scale. Say 0.0001% (number pulled from my rear pocket for illustration purposes) of the population want to engage in 'recreational terrorism' or 'orc-work'. If you have a population in the hundreds of thousands or low millions, there just aren't enough of them to have any direct impact on the big picture. But once you get the population high enough, once the absolute number of evil idiots is high enough to cause real systemic damage, even though they are a tiny percentage of the whole.