Escaping Fear’s Deadly Grip
Fear is a natural response to perceived danger that is necessary for survival and too much fear is killing us. Fear is so dangerous because the threat does not have to be real or something you directly experienced to make you afraid. Anyone who has watched the movie Jaws undoubtedly scanned the wave tops for dorsal fins the next time they got in the ocean to swim. Yet, more than 2 to 3 times as many people in the US are killed by vending machines falling on them per year than are killed by sharks. I am guessing it would not have been a Stephen Spielberg best-picture-nominated summer blockbuster if we sat in suspense (dah-dum, dah-dum, dah-dum) watching a teenager bang his fist on the glass of the monstrous machine to save his stuck Snicker’s bar from the menacing spear of the metal spiral. Then, in a fit of frustrated rage he kicks the machine, it wobbles back and forth, it tumbles over on top of him, and splat — end scene. I am never buying a bag of chips in a waiting room ever again.
While this comparison of deadly vending machine “attacks” versus deadly shark attacks may seem ridiculous, it is no different than what we are experiencing every day. People are increasingly afraid of things that pose relatively low threat to them, while at the same time minimizing the bigger, more likely dangers we face. In one of my previous jobs, we conducted threat vulnerability assessments of potential terrorist targets. You learned to unemotionally and objectively quantify danger in terms of its magnitude and probability of occurring. You cannot stop or mitigate every threat, so you focus on those at the intersection of being highly catastrophic with a high chance of happening. There was often a third dimension we considered which was our ability to lessen the threat without degrading or disrupting the mission of the location. In other words, you could make a rifle range much safer if you did not allow ammunition or rifles, but that would completely defeat the purpose of having a rifle range to teach marksmanship. So, the solutions needed to be practical and enable, not inhibit, a safe, smooth, and successful operation.
When I apply this framework and approach to what we seem to be increasingly afraid of these days, numerous “sharks vs. vending machines” situations surface where the amount of fear does not match the actual threat. In the US, citizen crime is more frequent and violent than immigrant crime. Post-9/11, domestic terrorism — especially right-wing extremism — has been more frequent and deadly than foreign terrorism. While mass shootings are shocking and tragic, and absolutely should not be happening in our schools, they are rare relative to suicides involving a gun which account for the majority of US firearm related deaths. Similarly, individual stories of violent crime receive outsized attention while we continue to face a growing drug overdose epidemic — especially from fentanyl — that has led to significantly more deaths. At the same time, when we underestimate a threat or take it too lightly, that can have deadly consequences as well. Let us never forget that the US had one of the highest death rates per capita of any developed country during the Covid-19 pandemic. Countries like South Korea, Japan, and Germany did more robust testing, contact tracing, and public health measures that could have prevented tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US. Sadly, we used fear to convince people not to get vaccinated, which cost us even more lives.
Fear can be triggered by repeated exposure to scary stories and visceral images. Some of those memes and posts you are sharing — without validating their veracity — are adding to our collective fear. Television, social media platforms, and deep fake content make it way too easy for public influencers to fearmonger and keep us in a constant state of anxiety. This hijacks our brain’s ability to think rationally about the evidence or even believe what we are seeing and hearing with our own eyes and ears. “Well X or Y keeps repeating it, so it must be true” is a dangerous trap to fall in. When fear is triggered repeatedly, the brain’s emotional center, the amygdala, expands, while the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for logical thinking and decision-making, shrinks. This means that the more a person experiences fear, the easier it becomes to trigger the fear response again. Over time, this diminishes the ability to think calmly and logically, causing people to overreact to perceived threats, regardless of whether those threats are real or substantiated by evidence.
Who benefits from spreading fear — especially fear of others? Those who seek to take power from us, control us, and make money off of it. It is an approach as old as time. Fear sells. Hitler manufactured fear of the Jews and other non-Christian and non-white people. U.S. Confederates and Segregationists manufactured fear of black people and other non-white immigrants. Now we are seeing this racist fearmongering raise its ugly head again in our domestic politics or maybe it is just more visible now. Politicians are using fear of immigrants, fear of foreign terrorism, and fear of violent crimes to raise money and scare people into voting a certain way. The facts tell a different story about the real threats in America and to Americans —we have a domestic terrorism problem, a suicide problem, and a drug overdose epidemic, not to mention all the diseases from our sedentary and unhealthy lifestyles.
Perhaps the worse kind of fear is not the fear of others, but the fear of personal responsibility. The fear of being accountable for your own success. If I had to face my own mistakes, vices, and inadequacies, then I would have to change, grow, and improve. That sounds like a lot of work. It is so much easier to blame my woes on others. It is a convenient distraction and an easy diversion. If I can just externalize everything in my life, then I don’t have to take responsibility for any outcomes. While some grievances may be justified, how often do they start with — “here is what I am personally doing to make this situation better”? Fear of success is lazy. Blaming your failures all on others is cowardly. When we give in to fear, we avoid that which we are afraid of, making us more isolated and separated from others who may help us. When we lean into our fears and experience things firsthand for ourselves, we often learn there really isn’t anything to be afraid of. The only way beyond fear is through it.
