Fear Factory

American solipsism is a funny thing. Each of us tends to believe two contradictory destinies await us: On the one hand, incredible luck and wealth will eventually be ours. On the other hand, violent tragedy is one terrorist strike away. This is the American Dream gone to seed and become a psychosis.

We each believe we are the star of our own made-for-TV movie, which has helped us arrive at a twisted understanding of probability. We know, because we saw it on TV, that someone has to win the lottery, and someone has to be the next victim of violence. Naturally, it may as well be me. This despite all evidence to the contrary.

If we looked earnestly at our own lives, minus the commercial breaks, we might see that life in general is pretty mellow, its pleasures and pains mostly subtle. There is not a great chance that a hijacked plane will land on your house, or that a van will arrive with a gigantic cashier’s check. In fact, there is no meaningful chance at all. There is a whole world out there that operates independently of our own routines, pleasures, and impediments. We sit down for the ten o’clock news, and the TV collapses time and space; we can’t help fearing the worst and expecting the best for ourselves.

Sadly, you will not win the lottery. But on the bright side, neither will you be attacked by a terrorist. Terrorism is not about reality, it is about perception. In other words, it is about media manipulation. Anyone serious about terrorism must recognize that media coverage is not the solution to terror; it is terror’s best tool. What would happen if our newspapers relegated all news of terrorism to the back pages? What if the only people who took notice of terror alerts and webcam beheadings were secret government agencies in a position to do something about them? Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer recently insisted on posting terrorism warnings at Minnesota polling places. She, like any purveyor of terror, wanted you to embrace your fear, no matter how irrational it might be. We haven’t worked out the math, but we’re pretty sure that odds are significantly better that you will be struck by lightning than by a terrorist on November 2. (Statisticians say the annual odds of a lightning strike on an American are 300,000:1.)

If you insist on being motivated by fear, then it may be more realistic to worry about how you would pay the deductible for an emergency appendectomy. Or how you might find the cash for your children’s orthodontics. Or you might agonize about how your full-time job at minimum wage still puts you well under the federal definition of poverty. (Did we mention that you may no longer qualify for overtime, thanks to new federal regulations?)

But if these boogeymen are still not sufficiently scary, and you crave the fear you can get only from the Fox News Channel, you might consider that there are twenty-five thousand homicides committed with guns each year in your homeland. There are thirty thousand suicides each year in your homeland. If your main worry is terrorism, you might consider that we are effectively terrorizing ourselves—and not a kaffiyeh in sight.

Still, we understand that nothing terrorizes like the idea of an enraged Islamic fundamentalist on American soil. So in the interest of fomenting that highly specialized brand of fear, we’ll point out that the War on Terrorism has actually increased the incidence of Islamic terrorism worldwide, not decreased it. This should not be surprising for one simple reason: When anybody takes the trouble to ask, Islamic outliers say their essential complaint is the presence of American “infidels” in Muslim lands. Now consider that your government’s approach to eliminating Islamic terrorists has been to do precisely what angers them most, and what best animates their recruitment efforts: forcibly occupying the world’s most ancient Islamic enclaves.

But seriously. Can these Al Qaeda nut-jobs reach you? No. If you’re going to leave the house with a tinfoil hat on your head and a handgun in your lunchbox, at least be afraid of the right things for the right reasons. And know that if the lightning doesn’t get you, your own gun probably will. At least your bereaved children will have your lottery winnings.—Hans Eisenbeis


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