IV. Risk Perception vs. Actual Risk
As philosopher Lars Svendsen points out in his book A Philosophy of Fear, “a paradoxical trait of the culture of fear is that it emerges at a time when by all accounts, we are living more securely than ever before in human history.”1
Today we live longer and more safely than ever before. Auto safety, air travel safety, food and drug safety, longevity, and cancer survival rates are all on the rise. Death from bubonic plaque is unheard of; deaths from gout or scarlet fever are so rare that the terms themselves seem archaic. The last U.S. polio case was in 1979. Whereas the 1918 flu epidemic affected 20 percent of the entire population of the world, and led to about 50 million deaths, the 2014 Ebola virus affected 11 Americans of which two died. Still Ebola caused much fear. People were afraid to travel. In Nigeria, even in the months after it was declared Ebola free, major hotels experienced an occupancy rate drop of about 50 percent. During the SARS epidemic, travel to the Far East waned. After the November 2015 Bataclan attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, travel to Paris dropped and has still not fully recovered.
A CATO Institute study on the risk of immigrants becoming terrorists found that the chance of an American being murdered in a terrorist attack by a refugee is 1 in 3,640,000,000 billion per year.2
In fact, the total of all deaths from terrorist acts on U.S. soil is 71 in the years between 2005 and 2015, an average of seven per year. Compare this to other causes of death.
Another way to put this in perspective is to say your chances of dying by your own hand are 12,222 times greater than being killed in a terrorist act.
Many of our current fears arise out of what we choose to believe, rather than what is actually dangerous. Not only does this fake fear fail to protect us, it is in itself dangerous. Many of these dysfunctional fears today put things at risk that are more important than the things we are afraid of. Unwarranted fear (such as fear of bacteria) leads to decisions that make one more vulnerable rather than less (constant hand-wiping and germ avoidance reduces our immune capacity). Over-protection of our children—padded playgrounds that prevent knee scrapes, not allowing unsupervised play outside—can stunt the resilience that comes from learning from small failures and minor pain. Fears that spread (call them crowd-sourced fears) can lead to panic, which can lead to bad decisions, which can lead to the erosion of trust, social capital, our core values, our democracy and our freedoms. Most importantly they blind us to the fact that there are still some wild beasts around—ones we should be afraid of, but are not.
Indeed, looking at some of the medical side effects of many drugs, the potential harm of over-medication seems to outweigh the symptoms. In many ways, modern fear comes with our general affluence; it is a luxury, as is loss avoidance. You have to have something to lose in the first place to be constantly preoccupied with the fear of loss. While much of the world’s population is still struggling with getting onto the lowest levels of Maslow’s Pyramid, wealthy countries are busy erecting real, virtual and psychological barriers to entry. Ironically, we are the real prisoners of fear.
Box 3
What should we really be afraid of?
The rise of antibiotic resistant microbes
Vector-borne diseases
Nuclear war
Extreme weather events
Cyber risks to our infrastructure
Rising sea levels
Oroville dam type failures
Second hand smoke
Obesity
Lack of coherent policies to deal with mental health
Financial collapse
“Fear itself”
Fascism
Under-education
The Escalation of Fear to Moral Panic
British sociologist Stanley Cohen, who coined the term “moral panic,” says that a moral panic occurs when a “…condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values or interests.”3 Interestingly those who start the panic have been called “moral entrepreneurs.”
Box 4
Eisenhower and the Cold War – A Case Study in Resisting Fear
The Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957 crystalized the fears of nuclear war that had been building since the beginning of the atomic age a dozen years earlier. Tellingly, scientists accept that the atomic age, also corresponds with the opening act of the Anthropocene—a new geologic age where man’s impact on the world left a permanent marker, known as a “golden spike.” The launch, and the failure on December 6, 1957 of the first U.S. attempt to put a satellite into space, presented a conundrum to President Eisenhower. He knew what most Americans did not—that the Soviets were not capable of pre-emptive nuclear attack, though they were working on it. He also knew that they had far fewer long-range bombers and missiles than the United States. But he could not disclose this without putting our intelligence operations at risk. For several years the fear of nuclear attack had been growing, leading to the famous “duck and cover” film which demonstrated the proper posture in a nuclear attack, and the growth in the bomb shelter building industry. Sputnik put new urgency behind the view that the United States had to invest unprecedented amounts of money in the military and in civil defense. Eisenhower, who knew something about war and defense spending, felt strongly that to spend too much money in this way would weaken rather than strengthen the nation.
He believed in what he called the “great equation,” balancing the cost of security against the cost of freedom and felt that losing that balance would lead to a “garrison state.” The debate for the last few years had been about passive defense (shelters) versus active defense (conventional arms and nuclear warheads). Now, with Sputnik, the pressure was on for both, and in November 1957 the secret Gaither Commission report to the National Security Council called for $44 billion in new defense spending over five years (more than the entire defense budget for 1958), to be split between active and passive defense. The report was leaked and a month later the Washington Post’s headline read “Enormous Arms Outlay Is Held Vital for Survival.” The text began: “The still top secret Gaither report portrays a United States in the gravest danger in its history. It pictures the Nation moving in frightening course to the status of a second-class power. It shows an America exposed to an almost immediate threat by the missile-bristling Soviet Union.”
Eisenhower said little, his approval ratings plunged; he was seen as distracted, vague, passive. He did not want to act for the sake of action, knowing that this would cost him politically, and so he resisted the calls for increased military spending, downplayed the “missile gap” and told his aides “to be on guard against ‘useless things’ proposed in the name of national security.”4
Historian Stephen Ambrose wrote “Eisenhower’s calm, common-sense deliberate response to Sputnik may have been his finest gift to the nation, if only because he was the only man who could have given it.”5
Citations
- Lars Svendsen, A Philosopy of Fear, London, Reaktion Books, 2008.
- Alex Nowrasteh, “Terrorism and Immigration: A Risk Analysis,” Cato Institute, Policy Analysis No. 798, September 13, 2016.
- Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1972.
- Evan Thomas, Ike’s Bluff, President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World, New York, Little Brown, 2012.
- Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower, Soldier and President, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1990.