A Culture of Fear
Young people don’t have a good understanding of mortality. When I was younger, I took risks, never believing that something bad could happen to me. But now I am afraid. I’m afraid for my dark-skinned family members. I’m afraid for the safety of myself and other women. I worry for our LGBTQ community members, global warming, terrorism and pedophiles. And now I’m afraid for the police. There are so many things to be afraid of. I have become ensnared in a culture of fear.
Is our nation more violent than when I was a child? Is our country out of control? Yes, America is more violent than when I was born. Violent crime rose dramatically between 1960 and 1991. However, between 1991 and 2013, violent crime actually fell by 51 percent. And yet I do not feel safer. It is not safe enough.
Security expert, Bruce Schneier says security is two different things. It is a feeling and it is a reality. You can feel secure even if you’re not, and you can be secure even if you don’t feel it. We make daily decisions about degrees of safety. Should I fight, take flight or freeze? It is critical to our survival to make good judgments about risk. But Schneier states that we are notoriously bad at these judgments. “We respond to our feelings about security, and not the reality.” He goes on to say that the media plays on our fears. If you hear of a threat often enough, you overestimate its likelihood of occurring. We can have false sense of threat, and a false sense of security. Agenda, marketing and politics try to influence us to have one opinion over another, or ignore data and trust our feelings over facts. Check out his TedTalk “The Security Mirage.”
We all experience confirmation bias in which we accept data that confirms our beliefs and reject data that contradict our beliefs to a larger degree than we’d like to think. Evidence has to be very compelling before we’ll shift our beliefs.
Sociologist, Barry Glassner, wrote a book The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. He studied pseudo-fears as found in the news media and found that some groups stand to benefit from promoting fear. He states that we need to distinguish between mythical dangers and inflated fears. The goal is to match people’s feeling of security with the reality. We need to change public policy in ways that improve security.
Whom and what we fear, and how we express our fear, is critical. Researcher, Charlie Stephens wrote “The things that make us afraid can be dealt with. Some of them are opportunities, others are threats, and a good deal of them are complex issues and events that require brave souls to challenge them head on. This being said, we can all use a little inspiration to give us light in the face of darkness.”
Here’s what I know: feeling secure and creating safety is very complicated. The serenity prayer comes to mind “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”