Overcoming Fear Culture and Fear Itself
Since the 1980s, society at large has bolted frantically from one panic to the next. Fear of crime reduced us to wrecks, but before long we were also howling about deadly diseases, drug abusers, online pedophiles, avian flu, teens gone wild, mad cows, anthrax, immigrants, environmental collapse, and—let us not forget—terrorists.
.. In New York, the top-ranking fear, outstripping even fear of a terrorist attack, is “not being able to maintain the same standard of living in the future.”
.. “Americans born roughly between 1910 and 1940 were a particularly civic and trusting generation,” write Pamela Paxton and Jeremy Adam Smith in the Fall 2008 issue of Greater Good; facing down monumental challenges like the Great Depression and World War II required people to depend on one another, fusing communities together.
.. The individual way we’ve come to experience fear contributes only to isolation and feelings of helplessness. Instead of seeing support or solutions, we add to our grim roster of perceived threats.
.. our brains simply are not wired to process modern life.
.. One such rule of thumb, what Gardner calls the “example rule,” dictates that the easier it is to gin up a memory of something, the more likely it is to be a repeat threat.
.. Flying, however, is vastly safer than driving, and in that one year, traffic fatalities on U.S. roads spiked. An additional 1,595 people lost their lives. At the end of the year, air travel numbers returned to normal, and traffic fatalities resumed their disconcerting but regular rates.
.. Marketers, politicians, and entertainers grasp with precision how brains misfire, and they apply this knowledge to great gain. Fearmongering has worked wonders for everyone from real estate agents hawking gated communities to advocacy groups attempting to recruit members.
.. Television shows seem almost single-mindedly intent on triggering our anxieties—and tend to lay the blame squarely on those fools who were not fearful enough
.. “In conditions when conventional political ideologies fail to inspire, there is a temptation to resort to the politics of fear,” writes Alex Gourevitch in the Winter 2008 edition of the journal n+1. “The hope is that the quest for security, rather than anything higher, can become a unifying political principle in its own right.”
.. “The political calculus always favors the politics of fear,” says Gardner. The rhetoric is so dominant that, until just recently, to simply reject it—to declare that the public’s fears are perhaps partially unfounded, if not at the very least answering to miscalculated priorities—would amount to political suicide.
.. People need not abandon fear altogether.
.. Once people start thinking this way, it’s impossible to stop: Every television program, every advertisement, every stump speech that hangs its hat on scare tactics will be thrown into acute relief.