[Rainbow-imc] Culture of Fear to Culture of Happiness

[Dwight Hines]

Barry Glassner, in "The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of
the Wrong Things", (Basic Books, 1999, New York), does an excellent
job identifying some problems with the media, our own gullibilities,
and some good clues on how to not be a part of a culture of fear.

A major problem with people in the United States is that they too
often fear phenomena or other people that are not a likely threat.  To
fear flesh eating bacteria, or an epidemic of crack babies, or believe
that airplanes are an unsafe way to travel, are not realistic fears.  
Yet, it could be we've come a long, long way since we feared,
rightfully, the dark and the quick.   It could be that the people who
have fears, statistically unfounded fears, are an indispensable part
of our community early warning system, a system that is close to but
not equivalent to the boy who cried wolf, but one that has evolved
over the eons to insure the survivability of the group.

It could be that those who are fearful gain attention and power over
those who are not so fearful because if you knew what they knew, you'd
be afraid, too.   These information asymmetries that were used by
those who were priests, or of the family selected by gods to rule,
were important in maintaining an order and stability that many
cultures still don't have today. Yet, the information asymmetries,
even for local jurisdictions — as shown by repeated surveys on
attempts to obtain government records by the media — are prevalent in
many states in the United States, and at different levels of the
federal government.  By withholding information that would allow
verification of the facts, those with the information often avoid
being questioned on what they do and what is the cause of real events
and what are realistic fears.

The idea that a sensible explanation of terrible events, unpredicted
terrible events, after they occur is not acceptable by most learned
people today because it is considered post hoc thinking — a type of
thinking that is always correct after the fact — is a loss to our
comfort structure.  We want to see that there is some cause, some
predictability, in the events and people that impact on our lives. 
It's not acceptable that bad things happen to good people and it's not
acceptable that we don't have explanations for scary events.  Being
fearful, not paralyzed with fright, may be an evolutionary answer to
solving or avoiding problems in our minds so if they do occur, we will
be ready with alternatives.  If the bad events don't occur, we've at
least exercised our minds.   Indeed, it could be argued that the same
cognitive mechanisms that fear motivates to build un-needed weapons or
create unnecessary ameliorative programs are the same cognitive
mechanisms that are used for all creative ideas.  Thus, the grain
reaper was invented after McCormick analogized grain to be like hair:
You can cut hair with clippers so you will be able to cut grain with
clippers, seems obvious today but we could argue that the creation was
made easier by his fears that were not based on probabilities of the
real threats occurring.  In other words, non linear thinking,
analogical thinking, be it from fears or from simple ignorance, has
great survival value.

Glassner avoids discussing the possible positive aspects of fear, and
asks why people "embrace improbable pronouncements", things like
mysterious illnesses (flesh-eating bacteria); preposterous claims
(internet addiction, crack babies, vaccination deaths), and leads us
to focus on the media and only a little bit on ourselves.   Thus,
Glassner's clues to when you are dealing with a "fear monger" are
definite:
1) "Statements of alarm by the newscasters";
2) "Glorification of wannabe experts";
3) "Use of poignant anecdotes in place of scientific evidence";
4) "Depictions of entire categories of people as innately dangerous".  P. 208.
Although Glassner wrote his book in 1999, the material he covers
applies directly to events of today.   "Bird flu", "Meth foster
children",  "internet addiction", and it's a long list.

Glassner admits that these clues do not account for the scare of "War
of the Worlds" radio broadcast in 1938, nor for the fears that
"perverts are taking over cyberspace, uzi-toting employees taking over
the workplace, heroin dealers taking over middle-class suburbia, and
so forth."  P. 208.  Glassner interprets these fears as being due to a
sort of displaced response about real concerns.  So, instead of being
realistically afraid of the public education system, or about the
number of people kept in prison, we have irrational substitutes for
our deep cultural anxieties.  It sounds good, these clues to when you
are dealing with fear mongers and I think he may be correct in these
clues.   Glassner also does us a favor in debunking a number of
'fears' that never achieved their promise and you have to wonder if
the current fear mongering over 'bird-flu' is not another example that
will not become reality, unless viciously encouraged to become a
certain reality by twisted people who have nothing but a cause to die
for.   If these fear are displaced responses, there are some
predictions that can be made, predictions that are testable, like
those who are most fearful are those who will have concerns that are
real but must be avoided.  Thus, the obese mother with three small
children, unable to control her children as they spread out in
different directions in a parking lot, avoids fearing her early death
due to her weight, and avoids fearing automobiles hitting her children
by simply filling her mind with fears of sex perverts and flesh eating
bacteria.  The key here is that the mom's fears are not corresponding
to probable reality and, thus, she continues to engage in behaviors
that are destructive to her and to her children.

It may be that a simple cognitive explanation accounts for the culture
of fear.  The media publicize events or people and the more they are
publicized, the more frequent those events or people are in our
semantic hierarchies.  The availability heuristic — the importance of
a threat is related to how readily it comes to mind — means basically
that the hierarchy of fears is determined by frequency of exposure to
the specific threats.  P. 133.   If exposure (news reporting) is
correlated with probability of the problem actually happening, then
the hierarchy, or availability of a heuristic is valid.  We hope that
a good education shows a person what are realistic fears and what are
not and how to tell the difference.  Glassner does not discuss in
detail how we can dismantle the culture of fear, other than to state
education is an area that needs help and that we can triumph over
fear. P. 240

Glassner's discussion of metaphoric illnesses — multiple chemical
sensitivity, Gulf War Syndrome, effect of unwed mothers on quality of
mothering, black males, vaccinations, and more, is a good expansion of
what Susan Sonntag wrote in her little book, "Illness As Metaphor"
(1979).  Sonntag's book was a welcome answer to those who would blame
the victims, be they tubercular or cancer, for having a disease.   It
is important to note that since Glassner's and Sonntag's books, the
stomach ulcer, so long thought to be the ultimate executive disorder
that was caused by the individual who developed the ulcer, has been
shown to be caused by a bacterial infection.  When the research on
ulcers being caused by bacteria was first presented, the researchers
were laughed at and then ignored.  This year, 2005, they won the Nobel
Prize for their research.   The power of the metaphors are shown by
how those who believe in them respond to suggestions that they are
metaphorical and not biological.   That the supporters of a
metaphorical disease view dissenters as the enemy and that their
positions are not amenable to scientific refutation means that self
fulfilling prophecies occur.  The impact of the reports that unwed
mothers raise problem children shows a "Scare campaign can become
self-fulfilling, producing precisely the negative outcomes that the
doomsayers warn about."  P. 94. The resulting stereotyping of the
children by police officers, teachers and, most importantly, the
children themselves is as terrible as any other rumor that leads to
the creation of a problem because of misinformation.   Glassner's work
on breast implants needs to be required reading for news media
professionals because he notes that the advocates of metaphorical
illnesses 'seldom apologize', they 'try to suppress' information that
does not support their metaphor, and they actually intimidate and
prevent research that shows the metaphor is incorrect. P. 172.

I still find it odd, even perplexing that there is so much fundamental
misunderstanding of human behavior that people, educated people, can
not understand why there are so many black men in prison or jail.  
Even with all the research that is now available on profiling of
blacks for simple behaviors, like driving, there seems to be an
extremely strong resistance to considering obvious causes, such as
self-fulfilling prophecies.  These prophecies begin their work at an
early age, way before school attendance and, like profiling, are
ignored by those involved because it is an integral part of their
culture.   Fears keep us from seeing the obvious.  Fears keep us from
creative solutions to real problems.

I am uncomfortable with Glassner when he writes that metaphoric
illness fear persists if it "taps into current cultural anxieties" and
has "media-savy advocates".  I think we are always, as human beings,
going to have cultural anxieties, and determining what taps into them,
even if we know what they are, is a weaker position to hold than those
who advocate a fearful illness.  Think of the possible cultural
anxieties today: bird flu, China, Korea, terrorists, pornography, bad
schools, global warming, obesity, health care, status, aging,  poor
moral fiber.  The realities of an overweight, greatly overweight
mother with young children riding in a van without seat belts, while
she's talking on her cell phone — these are the killers and they are
not ignored by the media and activist groups, but the intensities of
the coverage of these tragedies are mild compared to a single child
being exposed to pornography on the internet.  Yet, if you announced a
community meeting to fight internet pornography in your local library,
most likely there would be a number of people who would attend, even
on a work night.  If you announced a meeting to increase seat belt use
or to decrease driving while using cell phones, few people would
attend.  What keeps this from being humorous is the terrible damage
that is done to children and adults who are not wearing seatbelts. 
Yet, when you see and hear the news on the television, there is no
sense of urgency in the voices or demeanor of the journalists that we
have to determine how to prevent these disasters.  When it involves
automobiles and pain and injury, the journalists often seem reconciled
to sadness.

Glassner believes the money to solve these real problems can be found
in the money wasted on bad solutions, like prisons, or money wasted on
mythical hazards (road rage), or money wasted on "programs to protect
young people from dangers few of them ever face", or "compensation to
make air travel safe, which is already the safest", or money lost
because different social programs are not properly evaluated ("DARE",
"just say no", "Take Back the Night", "Women Against Rape - WAR".) 
Glassner believes, and he is correct in this belief, that the fear
mongers hurt our optimism.   He see the United States as rich and
strong and the current problems as not being as serious as ones we
have solved in the past.

Overall, Glassner has written a good book that needs to be read by
journalists, private citizens, government planners, as well as Oprah. 
If Oprah recommended this book on her program, it would help her see
what she is often a part of and how she can become a lasting positive
force in our culture.

The major problem with Glassner, and it is major, is that he has not
presented his arguments in formats that allow for empirical or
experimental testing.   He ignores the very paradigm of scientific
research that he claims to admire and we have lost valuable time in
blocking and eradicating fear mongers and their induced fears. 
Because much of the data collection apparatus necessary to break
irrational fears is already in place in police and fire and economic
departments, objective and credible analyses can be conducted on
routine bases.  It's important that we not be deaf to fear mongers, we
want them to alert us and tell us their fears, just as we want people
to listen to our fears.  What we don't want is the fear mongers to be
as effective, or as unreality based, in Talladega, Alabama, as they
are in St. Augustine, Florida.    Creating a system that will
alleviate everyone's fears, all the time, is not going to be possible
and is probably not desirable.  We want a system that listens and
evaluates and does so quickly so there is time for appropriate
responses.  We are a long way from having such systems in place now,
anywhere.   Yet, we know that there are places, specific towns and
specific institutions and organizations that have a healthy resistance
to fear mongers and their fears.

A second problem, and this is not a minor problem, is that there are
problems that have been noted with groups and crowds (Charles MacKay.
"Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds", 1841,
http://www.litrix.com/madraven/madne001.htm;  James Surowiecki. "The
Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How
Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations".
 New York: Doubleday, 2004 — Draft review, Josh Chafetz, "It's The
Aggregation, Stupid!",  23 Yale L. & Pol'y Rev. 577, Spring, 2005,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=755785);  Gustave
Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind 8-9 (2d ed. 1968.) and
mobs (Cass R. Sunstein, "Deliberative Trouble? Why Groups Go to
Extremes", 110 Yale L. J. 71, 96, 102-03 (2000); Jared Diamond, "Why
Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?",
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge114.html;  Erik Ritter von
Kuehnelt-Leddihn, "The Menace of the Herd" (under the pseudonym of
"Francis S. Campell"), The Bruce Publishing Co., Milwaukee, 1943;
Robert Menschel "Markets, Mobs & Mayhem: A Modern Look at the Madness
of Crowds", 2002, John Wiley; Tainter, Joseph A. (1990). "The Collapse
of Complex Societies", Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)), that
have serious implications for civil liberties and for what most people
consider to be a major reason for being in a society — happiness (
Seligman, S. "Authentic Happiness", 2002, Simon & Schuster, New York;
Bagaric, Mirko & McConvill, James "Goodbye Justice, Hello Happiness:
Welcoming Positive Psychology to the Law",  Deakin Law Review, April,
2005, http://www.deakinlawreview.org/archive/10/1/data/1.pdf).   I
will be focusing more on happiness in a culture in the future because
it's going to be more enjoyable to do so than to focus on fear.

For me, Glassner needed to make specific how to know if you are
talking to an expert and what types of information you need to
evaluate the reasonableness of fear that you have for yourself and
your family.  At the least, each person who is concerned about
specific issues should be able to:

1) Find an expert, ask him or her how much variability there is across
jurisdictions on prevalence and incidence of offenders and how much
variability there is in re-offending;

2) Find out if there is a "Gheel" county or district that has very few
problems, relative to other counties or geographical units.  In other
words, are there some things folks are doing that are reasonable and
that make for a safer community, without pandering to the fear
mongerers and scaring everyone to death, without good reason?  What
specifically are these relative happy communities doing and how are
they measuring how well they are accomplishing their goals?

3) Are there any correlates with the prevalence, etc, of offenders or
re-offenders with other variables, such as openness of official
records?  It seems to me that a jurisdiction that is not open with
their records are not only setting a bad tone, but they probably don't
know where the registered offenders are, much less where the
unregistered ones are.  Note that the access is not to records deemed
confidential or sealed.  There is a mentality or culture of closed
records that helps create and maintain a milieu that's conducive to
all types of criminal activities.

4) Obtain some data on subjective perceptions of citizens in a
community about the relative importance of sex crimes, for example, as
opposed to non-sex crimes?  Is one sex crime equivalent to about, say,
10 car thefts in perceived danger or awfulness?  In other words, part
of your asking the right questions, questions that can be formulated
to be tested scientifically, is to realize that humans do not perceive
threats and fears on a linear scale.   Other offenses that are fear
invoking concern black males or transmissible diseases and need to be
asked with the same non-linear perspective.

5)  If a community has a history, with residual effects still present,
of power discrepancies between specific groups (race or sex or age or
ethnic background or handicap or status), it more likely to have sex
offender and re-offender acts than communities without a history of
power asymmetries.  Thus, it is also not surprising that a culture of
fear is to be found in those communities that have an imbalance in
groups that are sent to prison.

It's been six years since Glassner wrote "The Culture of Fear".  It is
time that people use part of what he wrote to begin to do some simple
things to work toward a culture of happiness.


Dwight Hines
October 24, 2005
St. Augustine, Florida USA