Ours is a culture steeped in anxiety and fear. Real or imagined, danger lurks around every corner. Terrorists fly airplanes into buildings, blow up subway stations, send suspicious white powders by mail. Violent, armed gangs roam the streets of our cities – and, increasingly, our suburbs and small towns. Perverts stroll our parks and schoolyards, hoping to lure children to their fall from innocence. Global warming threatens to disrupt weather patterns, redraw coastlines, and displace millions. The worldwide financial crash has revealed the shaky foundation underpinning our sense of security and prosperity. Carjackers and road rage make driving a risky proposition. The depletion of oil supplies threatens to make it prohibitively expensive to travel, heat and cool our homes, and manufacture and ship goods. Online, scammers chip away at our defenses, trying to con us out of our hard-earned cash; hackers surreptitiously assault our computer systems with viruses, worms, and Trojan horses; and pornographers threaten to expose our children to unspeakable depravities. Earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, tsunamis – natural disasters of Biblical proportions threaten to decimate entire cities. Thieves intercept our Internet activity and rummage through our trash, looking for information they can use to assume our identity. Because of AIDS, we consider sex as dangerous as Russian roulette. Tow-headed kids go to school armed to the teeth, ready to take out as many classmates as possible before being shot dead in a hail of bullets. Thanks to would-be plagues like SARS, bird flu, and swine flu, just breathing the wrong air can be a death sentence. And so on.
No small amount of fear flowed through American society when I was a kid. There was plenty to worry about back then – drug pushers, muggers, sharks (thank you, Mr. Spielberg), inflation, nuclear proliferation, poisoned Tylenol, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Son of Sam. But the situation is different today; what was a steady stream of threats to our well-being has become a torrent of potential terror, and we’re more scared than ever as a result.
Why is this the case? What’s changed? For one thing, the world is smaller than it used to be. In the 1970s, the major television networks were often the only game in town, and they aired only an hour or two of news each day; today, multiple cable channels make the news available to viewers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Globalization has made it increasingly more likely that people do business with – and quite possibly, travel to meet – people in far-flung locations. And with the internet, it’s far easier for people to consume news from a variety of sources, and communicate with a variety of other people, around the globe. A generation ago, it was possible to hear so little about disasters in remote places that they barely registered on our consciousness. Today, if there’s a disaster anywhere in the world, we’re almost certain to hear about it – on TV, online, or from people we know with a direct connection to the situation.
For another, there’s the trend toward “bowling alone” in our culture; we’re much more mobile than we used to be, geographically – much more likely to pick up and move across the country or around the globe, far from friends and family – and as a result there’s been a breakdown in social cohesion. Without traditional support networks – the extended family, the tight-knit community – we’re left naked and alone to deal with our bogeymen.
The scares follow one upon the next, much more rapidly than ever, amplified by journalists, politicians, and PR hacks in turn. Nothing gets our attention like a good jolt of fear, after all, as Dick Cheney and Nancy Grace alike know full well. Meanwhile, we’re increasingly isolated from friends, neighbors, and family – increasingly likely to have to cope alone.
Quite understandably, fear blossoms.
Unfortunately, society tends to react to fear in ways that are or border on the dysfunctional. For instance, we attempt to assert control over our those aspects of our environment that are controllable; whether or not our efforts make us less vulnerable to harm, this at least gives us the sense that we’re taking charge of the situation. And so we move to gated communities, avoid making our kids PB&J sandwiches when there are reports of tainted peanut butter, and stand in long lines to have our shoes x-rayed before we can board our plane. We prescribe our children Ritalin; drive them to play dates rather than saying, “Just be home for dinner”; and accompany them trick-or-treating. We spend $x billion per year on private security services, and another $y billion on vitamins and supplements. We issue air-quality alerts, sunburn indexes, and color-coded guesses as to the current likelihood of terrorist attack. Or we move even more aggressively to control our environment, for example, by arresting protesters, conducting political witch hunts, or joining the modern-day Minuteman movement, arming ourselves to the teeth, and heading to the Mexican border to protect the homeland. These efforts range from being only marginally effective at keeping us safe to being pointless, wrongly directed, or even dangerous.
On the other hand, there are those aspects of our environment that remain outside our control. In these cases, denial tends to be the response of choice for American society. Yes, smoking is deadly – but there’s no reason for me to quit. Yes, obesity is killing more and more Americans every year – but there’s no reason for me to stop going to McDonald’s. Yes, odds are good that a massive earthquake will hit California in my lifetime, or a monster hurricane will blow across southern Florida – but that’s no reason I shouldn’t build a house atop the San Andreas Fault or on the beach in Key West.
From my experience with panic, it’s clear to me that these responses don’t work. Not in the long term. Asserting control and denying there’s anything wrong may help ease our fears for the moment, but neither is at effective in identifying and eliminating the real threats to our wellbeing.
When I first started having panic attacks, I exerted control wherever possible in my life. Fearing there was something wrong with my heart, I stopped drinking coffee and eating red meat and underwent a variety of elaborate cardiac tests. Fearing that panic was a harbinger of death, I avoided places where I tended to panic (the office, the subway…). Meanwhile, of course, I was in serious denial about what was really going on – convincing myself that my fear was caused by the places I went and the substances I ingested, and not by something wrong with the way my brain worked or the way I thought about the world. It was only when I turned to face it head on that I started to understand panic and begin the work of creating a life less haunted by fear. Only then could I stop living alternately in the past and the future – in wistful memories of who I was before panic, in yearnings for a suddenly panic-free future – and get on with life in the here and now.
My guess is that society would be smart to take the same approach in dealing with its fears.
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