Frank Furedi, Christopher Hayes and Megan McArdle consider the nature of fear

Fear has an independent existence

It makes us passive and vulnerable, says Frank Furedi

One of the distinguishing features of fear today is that it appears to have an independent existence. Fear itself, rather than what it responds to, is a distinct problem of our times.
Classically, societies associate fear with a clearly formulated threat: the fear of death, the fear of a specific enemy or the fear of hunger. In such formulations, the threat was defined as the object of such fears. The problem was death, illness or hunger. Today, we frequently represent the act of fearing as a threat itself. A striking illustration of this development is the fear of crime. Today, it is conceptualised as a serious problem that is to some extent distinct from acts of crime.
Fear is now represented as an autonomous cause of illness. If people feel that their health is at risk, then this fear is often seen as a risk to people’s wellbeing. The legal system in the US and the UK has also internalised this trend and there is a discernible tendency on the part of courts to compensate fear, even in the absence of a perceptible physical threat.

Floating risk

Treating fear in this way is associated with a growing tendency to conceptualise risk as an independent variable. Instead of being associated with one area of life, it has more of a freefloating and unpredictable character.
For example, constant claims that this or that hurricane, flood and other natural disasters are symptoms of global warming has the effect of altering perceptions and fears of such events. Fear floats into new territory because, since 9/11, normal hazards can be turned into exceptional threats by associating them with the action of terrorists. As a result we do not simply worry about the hazard posed by a nuclear power station; we also fear that it may turn into a terrorist target. This is less an outcome of an increase in the capabilities of terrorists than in the growth of competitive claims about what to fear.
The emergence of the ‘at risk’ concept ruptures the traditional relationship between individual action and the probability of some hazard. To be at risk is no longer only about what you do or the probability of some hazard impacting on your life – it is also about who you are. It becomes a fixed attribute of the individual, like the size of a person’s feet or hands. This suggests that fear confers identity.
To be at risk assigns to the person a passive and dependent role. Increasingly, someone defined as being at risk is seen to exist in a permanent condition of vulnerability. This stands in sharp contrast to the formidable powers attributed to the everyday challenges that people confront.
 
Frank Furedi is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent
 
Fear misdirected

We fear the wrong things, argues Christopher Hayes

The problem isn’t so much fear per se, though it can be debilitating to the health of a democracy. It’s fear of the wrong things. There are threats out there, either to the nation or its individual citizens, and if those threats are real, relatively likely, and preventable, then it seems prudent to do something about it. The problem is that so much of our fear has been misdirected over the last six years, to disastrous effect.
To take but one example, we launched a massively expensive and deadly war to counter weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, while simultaneously underfunding the existing programs to decommission the stockpiles of nuclear fuel that have now spread through the former Soviet Republics in largely unguarded facilities.

Costs of misplaced fear

In his new book, Overblown: how politicians and the terrorism industry inflate national security threats, and why we believe them, John Mueller points out that inaccurate assessments of risk and misplaced fear have
profound, even deadly, costs.1 And nowhere is this more evident than in our so-called War on Terror. In his book The one percent doctrine, Ron Suskind describes a rubric that Vice President Dick Cheney devised in the first uncertain days after the 9/11 attacks to evaluate threats.2 If there was even a one per cent chance of some massive attack, the government was to act as if it were a certainty, hence the title of the book.
From an actuarial perspective, this is deranged. In computing potential risk you multiply the likelihood of an uncertain event by its potential damage to arrive at an expected cost. If you simply assume that something is certain because it is potentially very damaging or costly, you end up with, well you end up with a 1-2 trillion dollar war waged over weapons of mass destruction that don’t exist.
‘A threat that is real but likely to prove to be of limited scope has been massively, perhaps even fancifully, inflated to produce widespread and unjustified anxiety,’ Mueller writes. ‘This process has then led to wasteful, even self-parodic expenditures and policy overreactions.’

Worthwhile goals

Consider for a moment what risks and threats that money could have been spent on: it could have offset the possible economic disruptions that might ensue from a move towards Kyoto-style reductions in carbon emissions. It could have paid to decommission every single bit of unused nuclear fuel in the world, or for health insurance for the uninsured, or simply ensured every American has access to a flu shot in order to prevent some of the 20,000 deaths every year due to the virus. But then, it’s hard to win an election waging a War on Phlegm.
1. (2006), Free Press
2. (2006), Simon and Schuster

Christopher Hayes is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute

Nothing new

Terror is the near-perpetual state of mankind, laments Megan McArdle
 
Consider this passage from science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein: ‘Brace yourself. In 1900 the cloud on the horizon was no bigger than a man’s hand—but what lay ahead was World War I, the panic following it, the Depression, Fascism, World War II, the Atom Bomb, and Red Russia. Today, the clouds obscure the sky, and the wind that overturns the world is sighing in the distance.’1
Heinlein was writing in 1950, those halcyon days before the Cold War, AIDS, terrorism, and the death of modern morals. They were, apparently, terrified – and, like us, looking back to an earlier, simpler era when everything was still all right. It is probably no accident that in almost everyone’s mind, the peaceful days of plenty are conveniently located in their childhoods, when they didn’t have bills to pay or careers to angst over.

Comparing happiness

Human beings tend to rate their state of mind compared to their immediate past, or how happy their neighbours seem to be, and they expand or contract the scale according to their own life circumstances.
Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist and a major burn victim, has written movingly about his own experiences, noting how hard it is to compare his happiness to that of others: ‘ ... there is no way that I can convince myself that I am as happy as I would have been without the injury. There is not a day in which I do not feel pain, or realise the disadvantages in my situation. Despite this daily awareness, if I had participated in a study on wellbeing and had been asked to rate my daily happiness on a scale from 0 (not at all happy) to 100 (extremely happy), I would have probably provided a high number, probably as high as I would have given if I had not had this injury. Yet, such high ratings of daily happiness would have been high only relative to the top of my privately defined scale, which has been adjusted downward to accommodate the new circumstances and possibilities.’ 2
Thus, while it is possible to show that ratings of happiness are not influenced much based on large life events, it is not clear that we feel that happiness equally strongly.

Look for possibilities

I’d like to deliver an inspirational message about how we should stop looking for things to be afraid of, and start looking for possibilities. So I have a modest proposal.
Everyone should focus on telling Americans that being afraid will give them forehead wrinkles. It’s probably true. And if we’re going to tell everyone to get hysterical about something, it seems only right that we should pick something we can cure with monthly trips to the dermatologist.
1. Robert Heinlein (1993). Expanded Universe New York: Ace Charter, pp 349-350
2. Dan Ariely, Painful Lessons. http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/Papers/mypain.pdf
Megan McArdle writes for The Atlantic Monthly