FEAR, And The Fear Of Terrorism

Submitted by tonyplant on August 9, 2006 - 12:47.

It’s a cliche in positive psychology that FEAR is an acronym: depending on your preference it is either False Experience Appearing Real or False Experience Accepted as Real.

Happiness teacher and writer Robert Holden says that a lot of his work consists of showing people that they are already happy. When working with people it is not unusual to discover that if people look through their present circumstances, there is much for which they are grateful, and much that contributes to a sense of happiness.

Participants in my Happystance workshops can be initially reluctant to join in some of the group exercises: they frequently say that they can not visualise and have no power of imagination. Yet, in my experience, most of those people are experts at being frightened by something that hasn’t happened yet. They are afraid of something that may happen in the future: they can imagine this event of set of circumstances in full technicolour gore, and may even be capable of experiencing some of the accompanying emotions in advance.

“They need to do better than what is going on to make a dent in the fear that is affecting a million people.”- ANDY APAID, a businessman in Port-au-Prince, on the United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti.

I read the above quotation some time ago in the New York Times. And I had it in mind when I met a few people this morning who all reported themselves as unhappy. After we had worked together for a while it became apparent that none of them was unhappy because of their current circumstances. The unhappiness lay in their expectation of future unhappiness, and they brought that emotion into their present, although it doesn’t belong there, and there is no guarantee that a future event will occur that will justify their present emotional state. It is well established that negative emotions have an adverse impact on people’s immune systems and can undermine their health and wellbeing. Fear of an adverse event in the future can undermine an individual’s ability to cope with it.

For the carers in this morning’s workshop, much of this unhappiness could be attributed to uncertainty about future security and well-being. For some of the people, this uncertainty might be diminished by being able to place confidence in support from the local council, the state or the NHS. Yet a lot of the current news stories about cash-strapped Primary Care Trusts, shortfalls in council budgets and intended reductions in Incapacity Benefit and other benefits are contributing to uncertainty. Many of the carers should be unaffected by these changes, but they have apprehensions that have immediate emotional and physical consequences for them.

Carers need reassurance and confidence in their ability to continue to care. The statutory bodies who deal with them should be doing a better job of making a dent in the FEAR that affects them.

However, there are several theories of social control that suggest that social order is the product of FEAR. There have been several books and television programmes that suggest that we are being taught to fear terrorism and are scapegoating our social discontents onto particular social groups (such as migrant workers).

In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Friedman argues that the financial and social anxieties created by living in a stagnant economy lead people to look for explanations and answers in intolerance and fear. Furedi provides his own explanation for this behaviour. He claims that the phenomenon is responsible for the widespread internalisation of conspiracy theories: "[t]oday, acts of misfortune are frequently associated with intentional malevolent behavior".

Michael Crichton recently gave a lecture on Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century. He gives a remarkable account of the mis-information surrounding the impact of Chernobyl. He summarises some of the statistics of estimated deaths and health-related problems and goes on to discuss how wrong they have proved to be. Crichton quotes a UN report from 2005 that says the largest public health problem created by the incident at Chernobyl is the:

damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information…[manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state.

In Crichton’s opinion:

the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder, for a minute, exactly what that implies. We demand strict controls on radiation because it is such a health hazard. But Chernobyl suggests that false information can be a health hazard as damaging as radiation. I am not saying radiation is not a threat. I am not saying Chernobyl was not a genuinely serious event.

But thousands of Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as they did.

In a similar vein, Prof. John Mueller, has published Six Rather Unusual Propositions about Terrorism (pdf). He has put together an extensive and comprehensive argument that we have mislead into overestimating the risks that we face from terrorism. Mueller has collected and analysed quality data about the quanitifiable risks of terrorism that bear no relation to the FEAR of individuals who have been absorbing the media perspective. Mueller argues that terrorism is less of a threat than the political consequences of irrational FEAR.

According to Mueller, or all of the column inches expended on anthrax, biological agents and suchlike, the actual risk is miniscule. Although particularly abhorrent, headline-grabbing and dramatic, there are few deaths as the result of direct terrorism. Despite the popular story lines in various televison series (24 comes to mind) poison gas and dirty bombs are not dramatically powerful field weapons.

If, as some purported experts repeatedly claim, chemical and biological attacks are so easy and attractive to terrorists, it is impressive that none have so far been used in Israel.

When we recall the everyday number of traffic-related deaths, tobacco-related deaths, malaria-related deaths, terrorism kills a comparatively small number of people. Even in hotspots such as Israel, Mueller reports that somebody is 4x more likely to die in a traffic accident than in a terrorist incident. The figures are even more striking for the USA: people are more likely to be struck by lightning than killed in a terrorist incident.

Mueller makes the frequently argued point that terrorism depends on the creation of a climate of fear and terrorism. The politicians who seem to be alerting us to the dangers of an unpredictable and unstable world benefit from the social control that they gain by creating a fear of terrorism amongst their populace and electorate.

Much of the current alarm is generated from the knowledge that many of today's terrorists simply want to kill, and kill more or less randomly, for revenge or as an act of what they take to be The shock and tragedy of September 11 does demand a focused and dedicated program to confront international terrorism and to attempt to prevent a repeat. But it seems sensible to suggest that part of this reaction should include an effort by politicians, officials, and the media to inform the public reasonably and realistically about the terrorist context instead of playing into the hands of terrorists by frightening the public. What is needed, as one statistician suggests, is some sort of convincing, coherent, informed, and nuanced answer to a central question: "How worried should I be?" Instead, the message the nation has received so far is, as a Homeland Security official put (or caricatured) it, "Be scared; be very, very scared -- but go on with your lives." Such messages have led many people to develop what Leif Wenar of the University of Sheffield has aptly labeled "a false sense of insecurity."

Mueller quotes Friedman on the dissemination of a myth of "all-knowing, all-seeing terrorists": by telling the public that it is our responsibility to be vigilant against terrorist threats, tere is a questionable gain in preparedness at the cost of paranoia.

I recognised the phenomenon when I read Dr. Sanity’s tongue-in-cheek account of command hallucinations and the creation of FEAR. We need a Happystance to resist these strong command hallucinations and to provide us with personal and social resilience in the face of all the dire news that confronts us on a regular basis.

It is easy to assign a demon role to the demands of television and the public’s desire for information. It’s incompatible with our social and intellectual values that there should be a draconian censorship policy that would restrict publication, broadcast and dissemination of speculation. We need public discussions of important issues and so we need access to views from interested parties. But there are times when I would like some of the assumptions and data underlying the speculation (which is sometimes presented as if it is fact) to be made more explicit.

Most of all, I would like some smart economist to write a book on The Moral Consequences of FEAR or The Economic Costs of Blighting Lives Through Mis-information.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project

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