VI. Feeding Fear and Hysteria

Clearly our own human nature is at play in our fears. Our tendencies to transpose, to engage in confirmation bias and generalizations, make us worry about going to Paris or London even though the chances of being hurt there are no greater than at home. But fears like these can also be deliberately fed and manipulated. Our natural human flaws can be taken advantage of in intentional ways. Underscoring our susceptibility to authority, the now infamous Milgram experiment carried out at Yale in the 1960s, wherein subjects where “tortured” by willing study participants, highlights the dangers of fear, authority and obedience.¹

When fear is fed with enough fuel it can become hysteria—excessive out-of-control fear that can be contagious, and obviously dangerous. A human stampede triggered by a fire in a nightclub is an example of hysteria where the instinct for one’s own survival trumps the instinct to help others—people lose control.

Propaganda can feed fear and convert it to hysteria. The Rwanda genocide, where people of different tribes (Tutsi and Hutu) who were used to living with each other peacefully, were made to turn against each other violently by political agitators. The result was a period of just a little over three months in 1994 when about 800,000 people were killed.²

In fact, history is filled with examples of underlying tensions being manipulated first into widespread fear and then hysterical violence; genocides, mass killings, and massacres. The Armenian genocide in 1915, the Katyn massacres in 1940, the Holocaust, the Bangladesh genocide in 1971, the killing fields in Cambodia, the Bosnian genocide, are well-known instances. And some examples of hysteria-related violence have a surprisingly long arc. The conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles lasted almost 40 years. And like others it had a mix of political, ethnic and sectarian elements, fed by underlying fears. Likewise, the long decades of lynching in the American south had in each instance the earmarks of mass hysteria, fed by underlying attitudes and fears about race and miscegenation. Certainly, the internment of more than 110,000 people of Japanese origin during World War II was a sad example of fear-driven hysteria on a national scale. The intractable Arab-Israeli conflict smacks of these forces as it continues to be fueled by fear and political gain on both sides.

Again, language can be used to feed fear and hysteria. A neighbor can be made to seem like an enemy, a threatening one at that, by changing the language—he or she can become a symbol of all that is wrong—a scapegoat.

It is telling that the word for scapegoat in French is “bouc-emissaire,” an emissary goat, suggesting that the goat is on a mission to represent something it is not; a stand-in for something else, even a vague fear or worry. The scapegoat then is fraught with the imagery and symbolism of blame, resentment, evasion of responsibility, projection, frustration and fear.

Trade-offs in the Face of Terrorism and Other Forms of Violence: “Freedom To” And “Freedom From”

There is an important distinction between “freedom to” and “freedom from;” the freedom to congregate in public places, attend school, ride a train, enjoy a concert or travel in safety are all in an increasingly tense relationship with the freedom from being a soft target of a terrorist attack, or other forms of violence that may be caused by armed individuals who are disgruntled or mentally unstable. As more and more fear of these events creates a push for tighter physical security and public safety, the tension between these two freedoms grows, and not just our everyday values, but our societal norms are at stake. A series of political, societal and business tradeoffs must be made.

As a society and culture, we need to look outside the standard boxes of solutions (more arms to fight more arms; more checkpoints to check more people, more invasive examination of our phone calls and emails, and in general throwing more money than is necessary or useful at the perceived problems) and get smarter about new kinds of security and resilience. We need to educate ourselves in ways to reduce fear by gaining perspective and understanding proportionality (e.g. comparing in percentage terms deaths by terrorist attacks to potential deaths by new disease vectors). We need to enlist the social, entertainment and news media in creative ways to diffuse the most irrational fears. We need to invent and promote new kinds of insurance products, and of course enlist technology in more effective, less costly, less invasive forms of physical security in public places. Above all, as a society we need to catch up to the realities and challenges of a far more complex world than we have been used to.

Guns

In the United States for example, 301,797 lives were claimed by gun violence from 2005 to 2015. In the same period, 71 Americans were killed on U.S. soil in terrorist attacks. Paradoxically, we seem to be as a society more accepting of gun violence than terrorist attacks. Proportionality and perspective have not been enlisted enough in thinking about these different forms of violence.

In the wave of “low-grade” terror attacks in Europe, the axe attack on a passenger train in Germany, an attack on a passenger train in Switzerland, while appalling in their violence, it was the comparative difficulty in obtaining firearms that led to a low overall casualty count. While the difficulty in obtaining firearms in Europe has triggered the use of alternative weapons of mass violence, such as the truck used in Nice during Bastille Day celebrations or the vehicle in the Berlin Christmas Market incident, or the Westminster attack in London in March of 2017, there is no question public safety is enhanced due to gun control measures. When active shooter events, which will be difficult but not impossible to contain, no longer trigger a gun buying spree, the United States will be on the right track.

As for terrorist attacks, contrary to what most people believe, both in the United States and Europe these incidents are largely homegrown and not part of a concerted terror export strategy from ISIS or its sympathizers, reminding us that hateful ideologies and hate in general are not always imports from elsewhere. The majority of perpetrators of Europe’s wave of terrorist incidents, which began with the January 7, 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris and have increased in audacity, frequency, and geographic scope ever since, are in fact European nationals. Similar attacks in the United States, have been carried out by U.S. citizens. And in almost all the cases, the attackers range from individuals who felt marginalized, to those who are plainly unstable, to those who have identified with a cause they believe to be that of ISIS, and often a cause they have not fully understood.

Arguably, Germany’s public safety challenges with migrants have as much to do with the fact that Germany has been overwhelmed with asylum seekers. Germany remained steadfast to its humanitarian commitments, while other EU countries erected barriers to entry heavily straining the more than 30-year-old Schengen Agreement, which allows for more open borders for people, goods and services across Europe. Comparatively fewer migrants or refugees have arrived in Belgium and yet it has been the scene of some of the most appalling attacks in continental Europe, including the March 22, 2016 suicide bombings on the Brussels airport—carried out in a well-coordinated manner by a sleeper cell largely comprised of EU nationals. Many of these attacks may be inspired by ISIS and its deft use of social media which aggrandize barbaric acts, yet the public safety challenges in Europe remain largely a domestic affair. Greater coordination and a true pan-European approach must replace retrenchment and nationalistic sentiments, which are sweeping across the continent. If history is any guide, xenophobic political movements have posed greater threats to public safety than anything we are seeing today and we should not wager that their modern variants will be any less dangerous if they rise to power.

Virtual Privacy and Physical Security

On both sides of the Atlantic, officials and the public are finding it harder than ever to find equilibrium between the right to privacy and security, which are increasingly at odds as more cases emerge challenging conventional wisdom. Here too we cannot blithely accept an incursion in either direction. Instead we need sensible anticipatory policies to modernize existing laws, many of which predate the current era of ubiquitous smart devices capable of registering every movement of both the innocent and criminal. Apple’s stance against the FBI over Syed Farook’s locked iPhone garnered more news coverage than the San Bernardino attack itself, which claimed 14 lives.³

This case brought the dilemma of modern privacy versus security to light and demonstrated Apple’s stubborn adherence to its business model, even at the risk of eroding shareholder value. Yet it is hard to say whether the right process or outcomes prevailed in this case, as privacy and security are not clear tradeoffs, but linked together precisely because of new technologies. If the location of a ticking bomb were hidden in a locked iPhone, the public, Apple, and the FBI would surely feel a great sense of urgency about forcibly unlocking the device in question. How to navigate the intersection of digital security and physical security remains largely unresolved and will require new and at times uncomfortable approaches to public-private collaboration.

Physical Security as Competitive Advantage

So-called “soft targets” like pedestrians on a bridge near Parliament, exist in no small measure because other more desirable targets (Parliament itself) have been hardened. While the concept is unpalatable, investing in physical security for obvious targets is not only prudent, it is a source of competitive advantage for businesses and other organizations. But again, the question of proportionality needs to be raised. The physical, emotional, and economic toll from many recent violent events have bankrupted many organizations and communities. Sandy Hook Elementary School re-emerging from the ashes for example, took an unprecedented investment from all of the stakeholders in Newtown, Conn. The mass shooting on Virginia Tech’s campus, cost nearly $50 million, not to mention the incalculable emotional and physical toll levied on the victims and their families.⁴ Some events trigger a heavy indirect toll on cities, communities and businesses.

A citywide shutdown of Brussels during the 10-day manhunt for the plotters of the Bataclan massacre in Paris, levied a heavy indirect economic toll on the city—the risk to the GDP of the veritable capital of Europe. In December 2015, Los Angeles cancelled classes for approximately 1 million students in an unprecedented shutdown of its school system following a bomb threat, which later turned out to be a hoax.⁵ The same threat was issued against New York City’s schools, though in that case the comparatively hardened New York security officials called the bluff of those who made the threat. The direct and indirect costs of these events, when uninsured, are borne by businesses, public funds and ultimately taxpayers.

Sadly, until there is broader political and public will to more sensibly deal with safety and security through policy, private sector firms will continue playing a vital role, giving rise to the Security-Industrial Complex. Again, the first line of defense in any public safety and physical security strategy is a public that is capable of understanding today’s complex environment, including being able to put things in perspective, beginning with our own fears.