V. Inside the Fearful Mind

Cavemen had enough to do just contending with the mysteries of the sun and the moon, thunder storms, wind, wild beasts, which plants to eat and which to avoid, sickness and sudden death. We in the twenty-first century have so much more to deal with. The last few decades have seen an exponential growth both in information and the variety of paths that information and ideas can take. To keep all these stimuli from driving us crazy, we have an existential need to make sense of the seeming chaos of so many outside stimuli. The fastest and most efficient way to reduce the noise around us is to take mental short-cuts:

Generalization

When it comes to danger, it is efficient to generalize. Rather than take the time and the energy to learn the characteristics of 200 varieties of snakes, it is more efficient to fear all snakes. Recently a woman of South Asian descent, who happened to have been born in Indiana, was verbally abused on the NYC subway as an Arab and told to “go back to Lebanon.” The United States is home to millions of people whose origins, or those of their parents or grandparents, are in every country of the world. It is easy to generalize and see any single one of them as an “other,” as someone who ought to go back to “Lebanon.” Indeed, the plight of the Sikh community in the U.S. since 9/11 underscores the combustible mix of fear and generalizations, as every turban-wearing person with a beard must be a threat according to popular culture.¹

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to listen only to information that corroborates what we already believe is an efficient short-cut. To look at all points of view carefully would mean sorting through a lot more information, and use up more of our time and energy. Since we want comfort, and want it fast, we take the confirmation bias short-cut.

Confirmation bias has its analog in the way many people live in relatively homogeneous small towns or villages, or the way some people choose to live in gated communities. But mutual isolation makes it easier to imagine others as different, or even as enemies. In effect isolation reinforces confirmation bias. It makes short-cuts easier. If you have never met an Arab immigrant it is easier to believe he poses a threat. What you do not know is easier to fear than what you do know. Sociologist Richard Sennett, writing about life in big cities refers to the “diffusion of hostility” that comes from proximity to others unlike ourselves:

“In these dense, diverse communities, the process of making multiple contacts for survival burst the boundaries of thinking couched in homogeneous small-group terms.”²

Conflating Cause and Effect Gives us Agency

There is an old joke about the man who kept ripping up newspapers and throwing the shreds out the window of a bus. When asked why, he explained that this was to keep the elephants away. “But there are no elephants,” cried the other passengers. “See,” he said, “it works.” Believing that an act like this works is a short-cut to agency; it satisfies our need to have control over a perceived danger. We dislike feeling helpless. Americans especially like to take action to protect themselves, to “do something.” In the twenty-first century we have much higher expectations than ever about human agency—we believe that we can “do something” about virtually every problem or danger; in part because technology has made so many advances, it seems like nothing is impossible. The irony is that as our expectation of agency has grown, so have our fears. The safer we are the more things we find to be afraid of, and the more we believe we can fend off these dangers.

Richard Reid, the failed “shoe bomber” tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami on December 22, 2001 and ever since the traveling public willingly subject themselves to removing their shoes, belts, jackets and other attire en masse. Although falling tree branches or slippery sidewalks pose a greater public danger, we are willing to subject ourselves to great inconvenience and spend billions of dollars for the perception of increased safety. Similarly, “solving” last year’s risk, only serves to amplify new ones. The German Wings tragedy of March 2015 underscores how hardened cockpit doors made airlines safer from unwanted cockpit entry, but amplified the risk of suicidal pilots commandeering a plane by locking their co-pilots out.

Sticking With the First Thing That Responds to our Concern

When people arrive at a particular way of looking at a troublesome situation, and therefore think they know how to deal with it, the tendency to stick with this solution and look no further, is very strong.

Language Shortcuts

We know that language matters, but we tend not to think of the subtle ways in which words and phrases can amplify our fears. Take the seemingly innocent shorthand term “9/11.” Virtually everyone refers to the events of September 11, 2001 this way. Yet December 7, 1941, which was a genuine act of war by one nation on another, has never been referred to as “12/7.” What is the difference? By saying “9/11” we tend to take the event out of context and make it perpetual—it becomes less a single event and instead something (terrorism) that is likely to keep on happening.

In contrast, in 1995, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building is remembered as the “Timothy McVeigh bombing,” and not as the “Oklahoma City Terrorism Incident,” even though that is what it was.

In early February 2017, there was a headline on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that read “Machete-wielding Attacker Puts Paris on Edge.” In another time, a man wielding a knife in Paris would not make even the back pages of a U.S. newspaper, and would no more put Paris “on edge” than a robber with a gun would put the entire city of New York on edge. Indeed, when a bobcat went missing from the Washington, D.C. National Zoo, we saw no headline like “Predatory wild animal loose on D.C.’s streets.” Had the incident been reported that way it would certainly have put the city “on edge.” But the context of previous Paris attacks and the overall terrorism fear made the machete wielding man at the Louvre an “attacker,” and because of the potential terrorist act subtext, it made headlines. This self-feeding news cycle has certainly contributed to collective fears and paranoia, while at the same time serving as a ratings booster for the news media.

Surely the “machete wielding attacker” headline grabs attention, increases readership and makes more money. It is reasonable to be somewhat cynical about the role a 24-hour news cycle, general media and entertainment plays in fanning fears. There are entire shows—nay week-long programing—devoted to mostly innocuous ocean predators. Discovery Channel’s Shark Week enjoyed 2.5 million viewers in 2015. Surely, more people die at the hands (and mouths) of household pets than from shark attacks, but week-long programming titled “When Fido Attacks” would contravene the popular myth of man’s best friend.

Putting the Past in Terms of the Present

Take the example of the “War in Yemen.” Both the press and the public tend to see what is happening in Yemen as an example of Islamic State incursion; an interplay of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the struggle between Sunni and Shia, between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Few see it for what it is, a continuation of intertribal rivalry for power going back at least a century or more, a situation that was kept relatively quiet during the four decades of Ali Abdullah Saleh’s rule. Once he was deposed, the lid came off the old tensions. This is what happened in Libya post Qaddafi, and in Iraq post Saddam Hussein. To see the “War in Yemen” as part of the Islamist threat is efficient. It is a short-cut to take what is happening in Yemen and fit it in with the present “crowd-sourced” view of the Islamist Middle East as the major source of disarray in the world today. Short-cuts like this save us the time and energy it would take to understand the specifics of Yemen’s or any other country’s particular history, or to consider that what is happening in the Middle East is not a single or monolithic phenomenon.

Using the Familiar to Frame the Unfamiliar

If something comes along that is unfamiliar, the first thing we do is search for familiar images, associations, and metaphors in order to frame the situation. A white person walking down a street in Harlem does not see anything strange in seeing black men walking along, some of whom may have dreadlocks. But when one or more of those black men is walking on a street in a white neighborhood, they are “out-of-place,” the familiar becomes unfamiliar and thus something is “wrong.”

Similarly, a man speaking Arabic to his partner in a restaurant might not be noticed. The same man alone, speaking Arabic on his cell phone on a plane before it takes off, may in that context make some passengers fearful. They transposed their knowledge of events they read about in the media to this new situation, and began to worry that this too was a potential terrorist event on a plane.