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Teaching Fear
Reverend Brian J. Kiely, Unitarian Church of
Edmonton, January 18, 2004
It’s funny how often the turning points in one’s life
arrive at the commonest moments. They don’t come when life’s
movie soundtrack is swelling to a crescendo, or at some dramatic
moment leading into a word from our sponsors. Rather they usually
arrive almost offhandedly, through the back door, on tiptoe. Sometimes
they aren’t even noticed right away, but are only recognized
weeks, months, even years later in moments of reflection.
My first came when I was eight. I used to be afraid a lot as a kid.
I was afraid to take risks and was shy around people. I don’t
know if I was taught to be afraid or not. My Mom was the cautious
type, but by contrast my Dad wasn’t. Maybe I picked it up from
Mom, or maybe it was just me. I don’t know. Whatever it was,
I tended to hold back. I was cautious making friends, avoided confrontations
for fear of someone standing up to me, and was scared to death of
most pets, especially dogs.
Now as it happened, the other boys in my neighborhood were jocks.
We seldom played board games or imaginary games. For them, and therefore
for me, trying to fit in, it was all sports. All day on the weekends
and every afternoon we gathered at Wayne’s house and played
ball hockey, football and baseball in one great never-ending game.
And of course, most of us also joined the park leagues, starting
out in the house leagues where there were no try-outs and everybody
played. That was fine for a couple of years, until I turned eight.
At that age there was a city baseball team that played other parks.
My pals all tried out. I didn’t. I was too scared. I was afraid
to fail. I was afraid to take a risk. Most of them made the team
and I played for one lonely summer on a house league squad where
I knew no one. And then one evening I went to watch my buddies play.
Sitting in the stands feeling even more ashamed than if I had tried
out and failed, I found myself making a vow that never again would
I let fear of failure stop me from trying something new.
Now an eight year old’s private promise didn’t seem
like much back then, even to me. I had no idea if I would have the
courage to follow through. As it turns out, I did. It might just
be the one vow I have kept the most faithfully. It wasn’t easy.
I was still afraid, especially the next year when I tried out for
that same team, but I did it anyway. Slowly I taught myself that
taking a chance didn’t mean I would fail. I learned that fears
are often baseless, or at the very least over-exaggerated in our
minds. I discovered that risk more often led to reward than failure.
I have been improving on that lesson ever since. And by the way,
I made the team as a reserve player.
As I have matured, I have come to understand that fear can paralyze
us, especially in our ability to think and reason. Instead of opening
horizons of possibility, it shuts down our vision and makes us look
at the ground. Fear is supposed to help us keep safe, by alerting
us to potential danger, but if we live perpetually under its shadow,
we may actually increase danger.
You see fear allows only a limited set of responses. That means we
may overlook important possibilities that can lead to peace, safety
and growth.
Psychotherapist Carol Norris notes that adults feeling extreme fear
begin to think like children, reducing situations to ‘you bad,
me good’. “They move from a healthy balance of operating
from all areas of the brain (including the rational neocortex) to
operating primarily from the limbic system (the primitive brain and
the intermediate brain), which, among other things, is responsible
for self-preservation.
“The limbic system is where fear and its physiological responses
(like goose bumps and the adrenal rush) are born and they help us
to mobilize and defend ourselves against the woolly mammoth or the
sabre-toothed tiger. This is also where the mechanisms of aggression
are developed.
“And during such fearful times, as the ole’ neocortex
is overridden by the limbic system, we find ourselves with fear-based,
reactive, jingoistic, and seemingly intractable pro-war reactions.”
In other words when we feel confused and afraid, we have a natural
biological tendency to stop thinking and either lash out or run for
cover. We become tribal, trusting fewer and fewer people and we quickly
reduce the people who are different from us to some kind of ‘other’.
If we consider a broad selection of war propaganda from the last
century we can see a tendency to demonize and dehumanize the ‘other’ once
they have been turned into the ‘enemy’. It’s easier
to kill an inhuman enemy. Why just look at how no theatergoer minds
when the good guys kill all those nasty and brutish Orcs in Lord
of the Rings. They are non-human evil, therefore we can make war
without compunction or moral pause.
But the most frightening thing of all is not that we have this inbred
urge to tribalize and do this dehumanizing to the ‘other’,
but rather that there are those among us able to exploit those fears.
Did you know, for example, that advanced advertising courses teach
about the use of fear in advertising? There have been scholarly articles
written about the effectiveness of fear as a marketing tool: how
much is appropriate and how much is too much. In other words, they
have tried to pinpoint when exactly does an ad -- or a speech or
a news release -- become so frightening that it loses its effectiveness.
The morality of fear based PR is not discussed nearly as much as
its mechanics and effectiveness.
Now probably some of you are thinking that right about here I am
about to jump on George W. Bush. Well, that’s coming, but not
just yet. It’s easy to point a figure at the White House because
they have been the best and most effective teachers of fear in recent
years. But they aren’t the only ones. Both ends of the political
spectrum use fear tactics, and its only fair to begin closer to home.
The best Canadian example of fear based ads, right now are the anti-smoking
spots prominently featured in movie theatres and to a lesser extent
on TV. The TV ad features a longtime restaurant worker who, while
a non-smoker, is still dying of a ‘smoker’s tumor’ because
of second hand smoke in the workplace. In the theatres this ad is
intermixed with clips of the late Barb Tarbox telling her anti-smoking
story. The very powerful message, which most would agree is a good
one, plays on our fear of death. A similar kind of campaign has been
used to persuade drinking drivers to change their ways. In both cases,
the ads attempt to change things that are, in my opinion, actually
real and present dangers for us.
Not so with the work of the Klein government. It too has made made
excellent use of fear-based politics for years. The Conservatives
have done such an effective job over the decades that they pretty
much only have to say the word ‘Ottawa’ to start Albertans
cringing in fear and circling the wagons. In health care they demonized
those challenging their drive towards privatization by labeling them ‘left
wing nuts’, implying a dangerous instability in those who would
disagree with government policy. In other words they demonize and
dehumanize the opposition. They cast themselves as the great defenders
of the province, the parental figures who will keep us all safe from
those who would pirate our resources whether it be through the long
dead but never forgotten National Energy program or the Kyoto protocol
or reasonable charges for RCMP services. For the Tories, the ‘Alberta
advantage’ must be guarded like a virgin’s virtue.
Of course the ‘Alberta advantage’ might be a fictional
creation anyway. This week the Alberta Federation of Labour released
a new study. They claim that in real terms and considering inflation,
wages have fallen badly behind the economic growth rate. Most Alberta
workers are poorer than a decade ago -- and in a thriving economy!
Mr. Klein is in India and has not commented.
And then, of course, there is Mr. Bush. He came to power because
of fear-based politics, but once 9-11 occurred things really kicked
into high gear. His team began to promote what Democratic Presidential
candidate Rep. Dennis Kuchinich termed the ‘national insecurity
strategy’, and it’s been working.
In the months before the Iraq war Herb Chao Gunther of the Public
Media Center in San Francisco noted that Americans had been, “slapped
silly by the dizzying effects of larger-than-life issues, especially
9/11.” He added, “They don’t feel confident in
making complex decisions. They have a tendency to look for the ‘tough
cop on the beat’ to take care of them. It is difficult getting
mindshare when fear, panic and withdrawl are on people’s minds.”
As a side note I read that one other response to the 9-11 fear was
the rejuvenation of the ratings of the feel good program ‘Friends’.
In fear, people turn to the safety of the familiar, the known and
the comfortable. There is little room for the new idea, the fresh
strategy.
The growth of this flowering sense of fear has been well watered
and fertilized by a news media that more often than not follows the
TV news dictum of ‘If it bleeds, it leads’. They have
jumped all over every dire prediction of Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld
and Ashcroft without much research into actual facts. And when an
actual incident does occur, they have run and rerun the tapes of
the disaster until they have worn out.
But even that is not enough fear for the media. I am constantly
amazed at how many promos for TV news feature ‘latest health
warning’ or ‘these people will scam you’ or some
other item meant to strike fear in your heart. And while not as obvious,
much the same can be found in print media. They want us to be afraid
of SARS, asteroid strikes, identity theft, terrorism and so on --
it’s a long list. At they end of the day, the media are active
participants in teaching fear, not only in the way they carry the
messages of fear mongering governments like Mr. Bush’s and
Mr. Klein’s, but in their own desire to boost ratings and circulation
with their very own scare-you-silly stories.
And when we are so afraid that we stop thinking -- that’s
when things get really dangerous. We tend to make poor decisions
based on fear. More importantly, we may be distracted from something
more real and nearby that can truly harm us.
Let me give you a for instance. In Canada there have been no terrorist
related deaths, unless you count the few who happened to be in New
York at the wrong time. In North America there have been slightly
more than 2,800 terrorist related deaths since 9/11, nearly all of
them on 9/11. Given that there are some 330 million people in North
America, that means that fewer than 1 in 100,000 North Americans
died in the last three years as a result of terrorist acts. It is
a teeny, tiny number. The risk is virtually non-existent.
By contrast in Alberta in 2002, there were 372 traffic deaths in
a population of 2.92 million. That works out as 7 in 10,000. This
means you were seven times more likely to die in a car accident in
Canada than an American was to die from terrorism. And yet hundreds
of millions - billions - have been spent to defend against the fear
of terrorist acts - in the US especially, but also in Canada. And
how much is spent on road safety? But the final number I will throw
out is best. The greatest proportional risk to North American lives
has been to that part of the population fighting terrorism in Iraq-
a country with no weapons of mass destruction and that has not been
an exporter of terror, at least not yet. To date 497 American soldiers
have died out of about 170,000 on the ground, making them 36 times
more liable to die of a terrorist act than any citizen on American
soil. And of course that doesn’t begin to count what happened
to innocent Iraqis.
This war, even if it was fought for the reason Mr. Bush claims,
is still a grotesque overreaction to wildly exaggerated fears. It
has caused far more destruction than it ever could have prevented.
And that is the problem with playing upon people’s fears.
To play with them unnecessarily can stop people from thinking straight.
That leads to ill-considered decisions and almost inevitably to bad
results. Like that little boy in the bleachers watching his friends
play baseball, fear takes people out of the game. When we do that
we weaken the pool of talent, ideas and insight that could be better
spent solving problems. Instead of scaring their people, our leaders
should be engaging them. Instead of manipulating them, they should
be putting us to constructive work. To play on fears is unwise and
debilitating. To play on them deliberately for self-serving reasons
is immoral.
My long ago baseball lesson has over time taught me this: The world
is not nearly as frightening as my mother taught me it was. Nothing
really bad ever happened to her. Nothing really bad has ever happened
to me. I don’t personally know anyone who was murdered, died
in a car accident, has been hit by lightning or has been abducted
by a stranger. That doesn’t mean I deny that such things happen – I
know they do. But I also know that the likelihood of them happening
to me are very remote and that it is irrational to spend all my time
worrying about them or all my money trying to defend against some
oddball thing that maybe, one day, just might happen. Call me a wild
eyed optimist, but I would prefer to spend most of my time enjoying
what life has to offer rather than worrying about what might be taken
away from me. If and when something happens, then I’ll let
that prehistoric limbic brain take over for a while, but for now,
I think I will take my chances and choose to live with my whole head
and my whole heart.
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