II. Afraid? Of What?

What are we afraid of exactly? Global mortality and morbidity rates are at their lowest rates in history.¹ This is true the world over, but particularly so for affluent countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and other wealthy nations. Paradoxically, fear increasingly looks like a malady of affluence, for the better off we are in terms of overall health and safety, the more susceptible we are to worrying about our health and safety. Materially, we are also obsessed with loss aversion, home burglary, identity theft, cyber risk and other scourges that can affect our assets. Indeed, millions of people are medically treating their fears with prescription drugs, whose side effects often create new ailments.² It seems we have a hard time accepting the progress we have made. But, as we discuss in this report, it is also possible that our modern state of fear is a joint product of our own often irrational tendencies, reinforced and manipulated by the security industrial complex for political and financial gain.

We will show how both fear and risk have evolved to put us in our present state. We will look at the broad spectrum of fear from its positive function as a survival tool, to the opposite end where fear becomes a paralyzing and destructive panic. Finally, we will show how for both business and government fear and risk can at once be a problem and an opportunity. For example, leading life insurance firms are contending with a very real business risk, which produces a shortfall in cash reserves, known as longevity risk.³ Longevity risk occurs when those pesky life insurance customers outlive the actuarial models on which premium reserves are calculated. People living longer—albeit in fear of their own mortality and morbidity—is a business problem for the global insurance industry. For the rising security-industrial complex, which does a brisk business keeping us “safe,” the myriad fears we face, or believe we face, create business opportunities.