For a long time I've had a post rattling around in my head about fear. I've had no luck writing the thing. But this great post by Alex, about a Cato Institute paper called "A False Sense of Insecurity" (PDF), finally spurred me to make the attempt. Bear with me.
What harms people in the U.S.?
Mainly heart disease and cancer, along with several other health ailments, accidents (mostly automobile), and suicide.
Homicide used to be among the top 15 killers, but it dropped off that list in 2003. Military attack on home soil hasn't happened since WWII. And terrorism? From the Cato paper:
Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.
There's more to threat assessment than body count, but ... peanuts?
It seems the main threat to the Americans comes not from other people but from ourselves: smoking, eating poorly, getting no exercise, polluting our air and water, and driving around in 2-ton personal vehicles.
And yet. What do we spend money on? Defending ourselves against other people. Almost half the U.S. federal budget is devoted to military expenditures. (Of course, the lion's share of DoD money is not "defending" us from anything. But put that aside.) Bush's military budget request for 2007 is over $460 billion. That's about 46 times the total U.N. budget, seven times larger than the military spending of China (the next biggest spender), and bigger than the military spending of the next 14 nations combined.
The Iraq war may yet run us over $1 trillion.
We Americans spend a grossly disproportionate amount on threats from other people rather than the things that, objectively speaking, most endanger our health and well-being. But harm is harm; death is death. I don't see why those who suffer and die from diseases of civilization are any less to be lamented than those killed by terrorists.
Americans also spend a grossly disproportionate amount of time thinking about threats from other people. Parents live in terror of "stranger danger" and child abduction, while stuffing their children with fatty, salty food, allowing them to sit in front of video games for eight hours a day, exposing them to environmental toxins, and driving them around in cars that mangle and kill thousands of them every year.
Fear of crime has risen in tandem with punitive criminal sentences for years, even though violent crime has declined for over a decade.
It sometimes seems that the healthier, wealthier, and safer we get, the more we fear other people. Why?
The biochemical system homo sapiens uses for threat assessment evolved over many thousands of years of brutal animal life on the savanna, at a time when living to 30 qualified you as a senior citizen. Immediate danger to person or tribe elicits a torrent of hormones from our adrenal glands; we are gripped by a fight-or-flight response.
As a way of avoiding danger on the savanna, it's handy. As a way of assessing the dangers of 21st century human society -- the worst of which are slow, imperceptible, and accumulative -- it sucks. Really sucks.
The toxic American political milieu thrives on this maladaptation. That as much as anything explains why contemporary environmentalism is difficult (dead, whatever). More on that next post.
Comments
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kmp Posted 6:42 am
21 Aug 2006
I'm not a person who carries around a lot of fear. I would have said once that I have the common, every day fears that most people have.... except nearly everyone I know worries about, well, everything, much more than I do.
I have a girlfriend who I affectionately refer to as a "bundle of fear with hair." Although this is a joke, a gentle rib, there is truth to the statement. She interprets life in a way that is completely foreign to me. She is afraid of heights. OK, I can understand that one. She is afraid of her plane crashing. OK, I'll buy that. But she is also afraid of her car breaking down on the highway... it's a fairly new car, in good condition, never broken down before... but this is a persistent fear. As to why it would be so horrible to break down on the highway? Because she might get stuck in the center lane, and then her hazard lights might not work, or people might not see them, and traffic will be whizzing by, and someone will hit her and kill her. Uh huh. Seems unlikely to me, but.... A salesman seems genuinely nice to her, so she wonders why. Is he ripping her off? Should she not be paying so much? A gentleman opens a door for her at a restaraunt... she worries. Does she have to talk to him now? What if he buys her a drink? What if he wants to sleep with her? What if he follows her out to her car and rapes her?
It goes on and on. As much as I try to apply logic to any of these scenarios, and she will laugh it off and say she knows she is being "silly," I know the fear persists. It colors everything she does, every decision she makes.
I have another girlfriend. She has a beautiful, healthy, happy and playful 6-month old daughter. All the things you can potentially worry about while pregnant are now behind her. Yet she is having nightmares every night. About what, you ask? Someone kidnapping her daughter. I ask, "Why would someone kidnap her? You are neither rich nor famous... people generally kidnap for some benefit (i.e. ransom). Why would they take her?" "Because she is so beautiful - people come up to me on the street just to tell me how beautiful she is. It makes me really nervous."
What kind of world are we living in when a simple polite gesture (holding a door, complimenting a baby) is cause for such anxiety? All I know is that I reason and reason with my friends, but I simply fail to see the world as they do. I am continuously surprised by the ways in which they can manufacture fear out of the wispiest of strands.
So, what can be done? Surely our media carries much of the blame with it's selective reporting of the day's latest bad news. But can they really be blamed, when that is what sells? And how to tell your friends to completely avoid the media? Surely, as well, our government takes advantage, and pushes it's own agenda by fueling our national obsession with fear. But, why? Why should they even want to? And why should it be so profitable to fear-monger? Truly, I am at a loss.
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David Roberts Posted 7:47 am
21 Aug 2006
Our basic sense of whether we're fundamentally safe in the world is formed very, very early in life -- the first few years. A baby that's not held enough, or senses fear and anxiety in a parent, or experiences trauma, or whatever, can have their brain circuits wired in a way that makes the excretion of adrenaline (and other danger-indicating hormones) much more frequent and hair-trigger. Those people have a much harder time feeling safe, and it's got nothing at all to do with rational assessment of risk.
That's why I think universal post-partum medical care and counseling would be the single most effective progressive policy. When kids are healthy and well-adjusted, they are able to think about others outside themselves. When they're not, they're dominated by their ego and protecting it.
www.grist.org
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SMLowry Posted 9:37 am
21 Aug 2006
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bookerly Posted 12:00 pm
21 Aug 2006
Are most people really so governed by fear? I don't think that most of the people I know are. Neither here in China, or in America. And I disagree that we come by fear as a way of life naturally through evolution. There are alternate views (grin).
The military spending is not about protecting us from our enemies, it is about controlling and dominating the world. People aren't joking when they talk about the new American Empire.
If that is fear, then every one arrested for theft should claim they were acting out of fear.
Ummm, maybe some people are afraid because they don't get out enough? Are the specific examples folks are citing people who spend too much time on the internet, in their homes, in front of tvs? If you go out and actually interact with the world, your fears may subside.
I especially agree with SMLowry that fear is used by others to control us. It always has been.
patrick
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redjenny Posted 3:34 am
22 Aug 2006
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kmp Posted 5:24 am
22 Aug 2006
I suspect David has a good point and that our aptitude, as it were, for fearfulness is related to very early childhood experiences. I've always likened my friends' increased fear-factor to my own hyper-alert immune system; I am allergic to pretty much anything new & foreign to my system, until such time as my system gets used to it. [Hence, on any vacation I am packing plenty of Claritin, Benadryl, Benadryl gel, you get the picture]. My friends often marvel at how my body will instantly erupt in hives because the air is carrying different particles in, say, Sedona, AZ or Lisbon or Frankfurt. My response is usually that my histamine system is simply hyper-aware, or in a constant state of up-regulation. Perhaps it is the same with fear and fearful people have constantly up-regulated adrenergic receptors.
At any rate, I do believe that there is a "nature vs nurture" argument here as well. Some people may be more likely to be affected by fear (perhaps they possess an up-regulated adrenergic system) however fear can also be a learned response. My mother was never a particularly fearful person, in fact many may have called her fearless, but as she ages, she worries more and more about big things and small. Daily worries about remembering to buy the right coffee are right on the shelf with global warming. Why is it that our elderly have a tendency to become fearful? I don't know that I believe it is purely biological.
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sunflower Posted 5:36 am
22 Aug 2006
My brain is shrinking.
Also, an autopsy survey was done on adrenal glands, those lumps that sit on top of the kidneys that control fear. Adrenal glands are much larger in the U.S. than in other countries. O' Canada.
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johnrplatt Posted 9:24 am
29 Aug 2006
But it can backfire. A recent study showed that the media uses such a "we're doomed" tone in its stories about global warming (not to mention everything else) that the average person feels the problem is so much larger than anything they would be able to do to combat it. And so they take no action.
Environmentalists need to concentrate on the success stories and on enabling people to take action. Fear can still be a motivator, but there is a better one --- hope.
http://extinctionblog.typepad.com
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