The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [1]
INTRODUCTION TO THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
A decade has passed since the publication of The Culture of Fear,during which time the term culture of fear has become part of our national lexicon, referenced regularly in academia, the mainstream media, and the blogosphere. Scholarly journals publish papers with titles like “The Culture of Fear and the Politics of Education,” while popular magazines like Newsweek print essays about “The (Play) Dating Game: Our Culture of Fear Means That We Can No Longer Count on Spontaneity to Bring Children Together.” Events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the subsequent “war on terror,” school shootings, vaccine scares, and the election of Barack Obama have given new relevance to many of the concepts I introduced in these pages. We saw numerous instances of individuals and organizations using fear to manipulate the population. They succeeded in large part because, as the book explains, after 30 years of nightly news full of dubious threats, we are fertile soil for fear mongers.1
Despite landmark events such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the economic downturn that began in 2008, the culture of fear I outlined in this book continues largely as I portrayed it. Pregnant teenagers, monster moms, Internet predators, and suburban thugs still stalk the airwaves. We still shake our heads over the latest mass shooting while failing to limit access to guns to people who shouldn’t have them. We fret over the kidnapping of a single toddler while millions of children live in poverty and attend crumbling schools. Atypical tragedies grab our attention while widespread problems go unaddressed.
Politicians, journalists, advocacy groups, and marketers continue to blow dangers out of proportion for votes, ratings, donations, and prof its. Fear mongering for personal, political, and corporate gain continues unabated. Indeed, many of the specific scares I addressed have resurfaced, sometimes in the very same form as earlier, sometimes in new clothes. I will discuss these, as well as significant ways in which our culture of fear has changed, in a major new final chapter.
Throughout the opening of this century, Americans have remained inordinately fearful of unlikely dangers. Even so, at least in some regards, there have been changes in our culture of fear. Most notably, foreign terrorists replaced domestic bogeymen as the principal figures in fear mongering by politicians and in much of the media. However, the very same scare tactics I discuss in the pages that follow—misdirection, presenting victims as experts, and treating isolated incidents as trends—have been applied with great success in the newer fear narrative. In the months immediately following 9/11, for example, the attacks elevated to newsworthiness minor airline mishaps and phony bomb threats that previously would not have made headlines, and created an exaggerated sense of individual risk.
What Is the Price of Fear—and Who Pays?
Nothing has done a better job of exploiting our anxieties than the phrase the war on terror, which the Bush administration used incessantly from late 2001 until they left office in early 2009. As former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski noted in the Washington Post in 2007, “The little secret here is that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a ‘war on terror’ did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue.”2
The culture of fear predates 9/11 by at least a generation, but Brzezinski accurately described what happens when fear overtakes