The Fear Fixation
The tragic shooting last week at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, in which five people, including three children, were wounded, instantly became yet another example of a nation besotted with murder and mayhem--or so most media reports would have you believe. Coming after the spring massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, the bullet spray in a suburban high school outside Atlanta, the murderous July 4 hate spree in the Midwest by a crazed white supremacist and the killing of 12 people by an irate day trader in Georgia, the crime reinforced the image of America as a nation out of control and spattered with blood, a nation living within a culture of violence.
This is the fear that grips us as tightly as Buford O. Furrow’s fear-induced hatred gripped him in triggering the day-school shooting and the slaying of a postal carrier. White supremacists like Furrow harbor the notion that the country is being overrun by African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Catholics and immigrants. They believe that the balance of power has shifted from the “Aryans” who reputedly founded and built this country to the “mongrels,” as hate literature often calls them, who now exploit it. Supremacists aim for redress by picking off a few here and there as a way, apparently, of instigating others to do the same.
No one with an iota of common sense, much less common decency, finds this fear anything but ludicrous. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if minorities ruled America, they wouldn’t have to fight as hard as they do for social and economic justice. But the fear that the nation is in thrall to violence is a far more respectable position. There is only one problem with it: It has no more basis in fact than the supremacists’ fear of alien hordes.
Yes, America remains one of the most violent societies in the world, and, yes, there have been some high-profile rampages recently, but all statistical evidence points to the indisputable fact that crime, especially violent crime and especially violent crime against whites, has been falling for years and that Americans are less likely to be victimized now than at any time in the last few decades. Even the eruptions of school shootings that have received so much attention obscure the fact that violence in schools has been steadily decreasing. So why do so many Americans seem to want to deny the downswing in violence and prefer instead to believe in an upswing? The answer may just be that many Americans like to be afraid even when the facts don’t warrant it.
This is obviously not the typical explanation. One is more likely to hear that people suffer vague anxieties that they then convert into tangible fears like that of crime or disease or insufficient safety. This enables them to give their malaise a face. Or one may hear that fear gives weight to one’s prejudices so that a belief in rampant black crime or teenage drug use or Jewish control of finance, even when directly contradicted by the facts, allows one to justify one’s biases more than an overt hatred of blacks, teenagers or Jews would.
USC sociologist Barry Glassner, in his new book “The Culture of Fear,” proposes another reason why we seem so enamored with fear even when fear is contradicted by fact. He believes that there are forces in government and industry that have a great deal to gain by making us fearful and that we live, in effect, in a hive of disinformation. In his words, “immense money and power await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes.”
Charities like the American Cancer Society, which depend on fund-raising, have a stake in creating a fear of disease. Companies that profit from security devices have a stake in creating a fear of crime, as do conservative politicians trying to cash in on disgust with softhearted liberals. Flight insurers have a stake in creating a fear of airlines. The media, which subsist on drama, have a stake in fear of all shapes and sizes so that they willingly let themselves be exploited by other fearmongers. Indeed, when it comes to violence, media coverage has increased even as violence itself has decreased, creating the impression of a society gone mad.
Glassner’s case seems irrefutable, but it may not be the whole story. It is not just that people are misled into believing things that are not true. It is that people often stoke their own fears even when they suspect these are irrational, which may be the other half of why we live in a culture of fear at a time when there is actually less to fear.
The truth of the matter is that a lot of people like to be scared, which is not the same thing as saying that they like the things that scare them. One can abhor supremacists, cancer, teenage violence, airline accidents and still embrace the fear these engender. Fear sharpens the edges of life. It heightens the senses. It shakes one from complacency. This is the principle on which amusement-park thrill rides, bungee jumping, haunted houses and horror films are all predicated. They all inspire the joy of fear.
One has only to look at the phenomenal success of “The Blair Witch Project” for support. This low-budget “mockumentary” about three young filmmakers who venture into the Maryland woods to investigate the legend of a witch who was said to have abducted children is the hit of the summer. Some audience members faint. Others simply scream. Whether they faint or scream, though, the whole idea is that they go to the theater hoping to be scared out of their wits.
But there is a proviso. The reason that audiences can indulge and enjoy their terror is that they know they are not really endangered. It is, after all, only a movie. That consciousness, often willfully subliminal so as not to subvert the immediacy of the terror we want to feel, informs the experience of horror-film watching. If you really thought you were threatened, you wouldn’t relish your fear. Half the fun is being scared, the other half knowing you’re perfectly safe.
Of course, the difference between “The Blair Witch Project” and the rampage in Granada Hills, the massacre at Columbine High or the killings in Georgia is that the first is fiction, the rest are real, but that doesn’t mean that the fear of a tsunami of violence is any more justified than the fear of the Blair Witch.
In fact, it may be precisely because we hear the crime rate is dropping and precisely because Americans, or white Americans, at any rate, feel safer, even if the feeling is subliminal, that they can embrace their fear as if they were watching a horror movie. Put another way, the more secure Americans feel, the more they can enjoy their fears.
This is not an idea most Americans are likely to endorse, because it turns their fear into a kind of entertainment, and no one wants to admit that he might actually find a vein of fun in his dread of real-life violence. But this is a society in which entertainment has become a, if not the, prevailing force. By indulging our fears in the face of the best evidence, we live not just in a hive of disinformation but in a vast horror film in which we can shiver with the thrill of terror, secure in the knowledge that whatever is out there will not really affect us.*
