This is the safest time in human history. So why are we all so afraid?
.. According to Lewis & Clark College president Barry Glassner, one of the country’s leading sociologists and author of The Culture of Fear, “Most Americans are living in the safest place at the safest time in human history.”
.. Around the globe, household wealth, longevity and education are on the rise, while violent crime and extreme poverty are down. In the U.S., life expectancy is higher than ever, our air is the cleanest it’s been in a decade, and despite a slight uptick last year, violent crime has been trending down since 1991.
.. “we are living in the most fearmongering time in human history. And the main reason for this is that there’s a lot of power and money available to individuals and organizations who can perpetuate these fears.”
.. For mass media, insurance companies, Big Pharma, advocacy groups, lawyers, politicians and so many more, your fear is worth billions. And fortunately for them, your fear is also very easy to manipulate.
.. If it senses danger, then the neurons start firing, signaling the central amygdala to activate a defense response in the body.
.. Fear, then, according to LeDoux, is actually experienced in the conscious mind – the cerebral cortex – where we assemble the experience and then label it as an emotion
.. “What we’re talking about is anxiety, not fear,” LeDoux says. Where fear is a response to a present threat, anxiety is a more complex and highly manipulable response to something one anticipates might be a threat in the future. ”
.. anxiety is, in LeDoux’s words, “an experience of uncertainty.”
.. And that uncertainty is the exact lever that politicians regularly use to try to influence your behavior.
.. What’s occurring in this meet-up group right now is what social psychologists call the “law of group polarization,” which states that if like-minded people are concerned about an issue, their views will become more extreme after discussing it together
.. If there is a crack in human psychology into which demagogues wriggle, it is by offering psychological relief for the anxiety created by uncertainty. Because when people are unsure – or made to feel unsure – and not in control of the safety of their finances, families, possessions, community or future, their natural inclination is to grasp for certainty.
.. This is where a good scapegoat comes in. “That’s something Trump creates very well: There’s us – real Americans – then there are Muslims and immigrants,” Bader says. “Fascist governments have risen in times of economic change because they offer simple answers to complicated personal questions. And one of the most popular ways people can have certainty is by pointing to a villain to blame things on.”
.. The crucial combination of uncertainty with perception of an escalating threat has led historically, according to Bader and other researchers, to an increased desire for authoritarianism. “A conspiracy theory,” he continues, “brings order to a disordered universe. It’s saying that the problems aren’t random, but they’re being controlled by a villainous group.”
.. “political conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism and conservative shift were generally associated with the following: chronically elevated levels of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, desire for revenge and militarism, cynicism and decreased use of humor.”
.. To manage this existential anxiety, we embrace a cultural worldview that provides us with order, meaning, importance and, ultimately, self-esteem.
.. Meanwhile, the existence of other people with beliefs and values that differ from our own can subtly undermine the protection this worldview provides. So, according to the theory, when these beliefs are threatened, we will go to great lengths to preserve and defend them.
.. when people are reminded of their mortality, whether through questions about what happens after death or bringing up tragedies like 9/11, they can become more prejudiced and more aggressive toward people with different worldviews.
.. And after being asked questions about their own death, liberals fed conservatives twice as much “painfully hot salsa” as they did to fellow liberals, and vice versa.
.. Pyszczynski’s colleague Sheldon Solomon found that college students, after being asked to reflect on their own deaths, were more likely to support Trump, regardless of their political affiliation.
.. “As human beings, when listening alone for long periods of time, we are susceptible to being swayed by a confident voice speaking authoritatively, especially if it’s the only thing you consume,” she says. “So they would say things that provoked my dad to anger and indignation, and once that got going, he’d stop thinking rationally.”
.. “The more we see dramatized and traumatic events, the more common we believe them to be,”
.. In an era in which so many news programs, radio shows and websites look like news and sound like news but are actually just theater sets for partisan advocacy groups and commentators, anyone can create a digital ring of fire around his or her belief system that doesn’t allow other information to enter.
.. “These sorts of associations form pretty easily but are hard to undo,” says Huberman of Stanford. “Campaign strategists and certain media are taking the opportunity to engage us in a form of strategic neurobiological warfare. They know that it’s very easy to take a symbol or a face and link it to a specific negative outcome, and eventually it moves from the conceptual areas of the brain to the stria terminalis to the amygdala.”
.. “We rarely found the race of the officer to be a factor: Everybody shoots black people,” Correll observes. “It looks like a cultural-stereotype thing, as opposed to an in-group/out-group thing. If you stop and look around, you will see these patterns everywhere. In newspapers, they’ll show pictures more often if the subject is black and mention race more often if the subject is black. So your brain starts to think that black people commit crimes.”
.. “We rarely found the race of the officer to be a factor: Everybody shoots black people,” Correll observes. “It looks like a cultural-stereotype thing, as opposed to an in-group/out-group thing. If you stop and look around, you will see these patterns everywhere. In newspapers, they’ll show pictures more often if the subject is black and mention race more often if the subject is black. So your brain starts to think that black people commit crimes.”
.. “learn to have a degree of acceptance around uncertainty and ambiguity, learn to feel comfortable with change, and seek to understand things you may be afraid of rather than withdrawing from them.”
Why People Fall for Charismatic Leaders
A new book explores how fear, uncertainty, and group psychology lead people to believe leaders who say false things.
.. You write that cults often draw people of above-average intelligence. Why is that?.. a lot of the people who hold some of these beliefs including being easily easily persuaded by charismatic leaders or pulled into cults are actually very intelligent... I think what happens with people who fall into cults and also conspiracy theories, it has more to do with feelings of powerlessness, and especially if you’re very very stressed, you can really be much more susceptible to these ideas. In that way, it’s not as much about your intelligence as it is about your circumstances and feeling like you’ve lost control in some way... the two most strong predictions of who supports Trump were not having a college degree and people who feel voiceless and powerless. So that voiceless and powerless trait looks like it aligns with both supporting Trump and being prone to believing in conspiracy theories... One of the big things for him is that he’s positioned himself as an outsider and being on the fringes. That actually helps him build up his charisma and his identity as a charismatic leader because it creates a very strong sense of him being able to come in and create a totally different order and a revolution. But it also allows him to create a very strong us-versus-them narrative.. once you create a sense of a “them,” you reinforce a strong “us.” And when you reinforce a very strong “us,” a lot of group psychology will sort of kick up. There’s a lot of conformity, there’s a lot of not questioning things because other people seem to be going along with it. It’s harder for individuals who are part of groups to make independent judgments and decisions... Being less specific makes it harder to disagree with them?.. I once heard a speech by Wayne LaPierre, the director of the NRA. And you could insert almost any cause into that speech, because he almost never actually used the word gun... You probably heard if you listened to the VP debate when the moderator said to Pence, “but you know the most recent incidents were all done by American citizens, how do you account for that?” and he ducked that question and went right back to very loaded emotional words — “tragedies occurring to families.”So what he does is deflect attention away from the data onto these base emotions, and then they tell you, “we’re the only ones who can save you.”.. But I would say that Hillary Clinton and also Tim Kaine … both of them have a tendency to try to bring up facts. Tim Kaine especially [at the debate] kept doing that, and you can see how to another scientist like me, that’s extremely refreshing. On the other hand, it comes across as being very flat, and people constantly complain that neither of them is convincing or persuasive or energetic or attractive in the way they talk. And you could see that [in the most recent debate], and that is a difficulty that scientists have in how to get their message across in a way that persuades people while still being true... The point is, those fears that these charismatic leaders arouse are often committed to permanent indelible memory, and they become extremely hard to dislodge, and they are easy to evoke simply by making people scared again. So all that Trump has to do is say “these immigrants are going to kill you,” and his entire message about immigration becomes immediately recalled... It requires a lot more effort to use the reasoning part of the brain. The default is to use the faster parts of the brain. So if you’re in a state of stress or there are too many facts coming at you or too much information, the default mode is to say, “I can’t handle all that stuff, it’s too much, or it’s too frightening, or it’s too complicated. I’m gonna default to the more rapid acting part of the brain, and make immediate decisions.”.. It requires a lot more effort to use the reasoning part of the brain. The default is to use the faster parts of the brain. So if you’re in a state of stress or there are too many facts coming at you or too much information, the default mode is to say, “I can’t handle all that stuff, it’s too much, or it’s too frightening, or it’s too complicated. I’m gonna default to the more rapid acting part of the brain, and make immediate decisions.”.. One of the things you find with the conspiracy theory is that they’re actually very, very fluid. If you’re actually able to disprove one of their tenets, they don’t say, “Oh, guess we were wrong.” They immediately move to another reason to support their original fear... How likely is it really that the groups of people who have been identified as the ones conspiring would really be able to all come together and do this? Someone like Andrew Wakefield’s argument is that every single scientist in every single government agency and the pharmaceutical industry, they’re all together in this conspiracy against him. That just feels very unlikely... [Dealing with someone who believes a conspiracy theory,] you can take their arguments and sort of present them in a very unemotional way, and a very bland way, over and over and over, and just repeat weakened versions of the argument in a flat manner. And that has actually been shown to be somewhat effective in getting people out of the grasp of a charismatic leader or a conspiracy theory... The other thing is, you can engage people on the level of, what are your values? What do you really want? For vaccines, it’s, “I want my child to be safe.” When you get them to rehearse their values, you actually can see a reduction in their willingness to believe crazy ideas… “This is dangerous,” say, “Compared to what?”
Justin Trudeau’s Message to U.N.: ‘We’re Canada and We’re Here to Help’
Two hallmarks of Mr. Trudeau’s government since it took power 10 months ago have been admitting Syrian refugees and promising action on climate change.
While he raised both of those issues in his speech on Tuesday, Mr. Trudeau also used the occasion to underscore another two of his favorite themes: optimism and internationalism.
.. Instead, he used much of his time to challenge other politicians for, in his view, exploiting anxiety.
“Fear has never created a single job or fed a single family,” Mr. Trudeau said. “People want their problems solved, not exploited.”
Donald Trump and the Politics of Fear
Trump’s candidacy relies on the power of fear. It could be the only way for him to win.
.. Overall crime rates may be down, but a sense of disorder is constant.
.. His acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention similarly made clear the extent to which his message revolves around fear. “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” Trump thundered. “Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country. Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally; some have even been its victims.”
.. But he also, in a more unusual maneuver, summons fear in the abstract: There’s something going on, folks.
.. When back-to-back terror attacks hit Paris in November and San Bernardino in December, he pointed to them as proof that his warnings about Muslims were justified, and voters flocked to him ..
.. Trump’s standing in the polls rose about 7 percentage points in the aftermath of the attacks
.. Trump supporters, recent polling has shown, are disproportionately fearful. They fear crime and terror far more than other Americans; they are also disproportionately wary of foreign influence and social change. (They are not, however, any more likely than other Americans to express economic anxiety.)
.. It is a feedback loop: He stirs up people’s latent fears, then offers himself as the only solution.
.. fear is a handy tool. “Fear is easy,” Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican ad maker, told me recently. “Fear is the simplest emotion to tweak in a campaign ad. You associate your opponent with terror, with fear, with crime, with causing pain and uncertainty.”
.. A majority of Americans now worry that they or their families will be victims of terrorism, up from a third less than two years ago
.. Nearly two-thirds worry about being victims of violent crime. Another poll, by Gallup, found that concern about crime and violence is at its highest level in 15 years.
.. “the psychological management of uncertainty and fear” to be strongly and consistently correlated with politically conservative attitudes.
.. the characteristic most predictive of a person’s political leanings is his or her tolerance for ambiguity. “The more intolerant of ambiguity you are—the more you seek control over your surroundings, certainty, clear answers to things—the more you tend toward conservative preferences,” ..
.. he would bring order and control to a chaotic world.
.. I really thought this was a rational policy disagreement that was headed toward a logical compromise,” Sharry told me recently. “Now, I see it as deeply cultural. It’s racially charged, it’s tribalism, it’s us-vs.-them. It’s a referendum on the face of globalization,.. The fearful mind sees immigrants as an invasion force, refugees as terrorists, rising crime as a threat to one’s family, drugs as a threat to one’s children, and social change as a threat to one’s way of life... “Trump speaks to our id, something latent in all of us to different degrees. This is not a political campaign. It’s an identity campaign.”
.. From colonial times to the early 19th century, the pervasive, virulent fear was of Catholics, who were seen as inferior, unassimilable, and in thrall to a foreign dictator (the Pope).
.. The mass immigration of Irish Catholics in the 1830s and 1840s ratcheted up the panic and convulsed American politics, with the Whig Party collapsing and the anti-Catholic nativist Know-Nothing Party briefly becoming America’s second-largest political party.
.. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, is now campaigning on a fear-based appeal of her own—the fear of Trump.
.. as President he would escalate the likelihood of catastrophic violent conflict from without and within, posing a serious threat to the future of the United States,” her team wrote in a memo outlining their findings. This message, they noted, was far more effective than emphasizing Trump’s “misogyny” or depicting his economic record as bad for working people.
.. “Every time Clinton says, ‘Trump is dangerous,’ what people are hearing is, ‘The world is dangerous, it’s dangerous, it’s dangerous,’” she told me. “It just plays into the message of chaos.” And the more chaotic the world feels, the more people may look to Trump for comfort.