The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [14]
This was far from the only time feminist spokeswomen have mongered fears about sinister breeds of men who exist in nowhere near the high numbers they allege. Another example occurred a few years ago when teen pregnancy was much in the news. Feminists helped popularize the frightful but erroneous statistic that two out of three teen mothers had been seduced and abandoned by adult men. The true figure is more like one in ten, but some feminists continued to cultivate the scare well after the bogus stat had been definitively debunked.46
Within public discourse fears proliferate through a process of exchange. It is from crosscurrents of scares and counterscares that the culture of fear swells ever larger. Even as feminists disparage large classes of men, they themselves are a staple of fear mongering by conservatives. To hear conservatives tell it, feminists are not only “anti-child and anti-family” (Arianna Huffington) but through women’s studies programs on college campuses they have fomented an “anti-science and anti-reason movement” (Christina Hoff Sommers).47
Conservatives also like to spread fears about liberals, who respond in kind. Among other pet scares, they accuse liberals of creating “children without consciences” by keeping prayer out of schools—to which liberals rejoin with warnings that right-wing extremists intend to turn youngsters into Christian soldiers.48
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he claimed, “In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.” Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: “People react to fear, not love. They don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.” That principle, which guided the late president’s political strategy throughout his career, is the sine qua non of contemporary political campaigning. Marketers of products and services ranging from car alarms to TV news programs have taken it to heart as well.49
The short answer to why Americans harbor so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes. This book provides the longer answer by identifying the actual vendors of our fears, their marketing methods, and incentives the rest of us must buy into.
I
DUBIOUS DANGERS ON ROADWAYS AND CAMPUSES
How Fears Are Sold
Start with silly scares, the kind that would be laughable were they not advanced with utter seriousness by influential organizations, politicians, and news media. Promoted by the same means as other fears—and often to the same ends—they afford a comfortable entry point into the fear mongers’ bag of tricks. It becomes easier to recognize how we are bamboozled about serious concerns, having seen the same techniques at work in the promotion of frivolous dangers.
Scenarios Substitute for Facts
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it,” said the ultimate master of terror, Alfred Hitchcock. Fear mongers regularly put his wisdom to use by depicting would-be perils as imminent disasters. “They’re all around you, everywhere you drive, waiting to explode,” exclaimed an announcer at the beginning of ABC’s newsmagazine “20/20” in 1996, devoted to what he called ”a growing American danger—road rage.” Hugh Downs, the program’s coanchor, continued the ruse. Eliciting viewers’ everyday experiences, he recast them as portentous. “How many times have you been bullied on the road, honked at or tailed, cursed at by another driver? Maybe you’ve done this yourself. Well, tonight, you will see again where this kind of aggression can lead,” said Downs, insinuating that viewers had already anticipated what Tom Jarriel, the reporter whose story he then introduced, was about to detail.1
A seemingly innocuous beep of the car horn can lead, Jarriel said, to “anger so explosive it pushes people over the edge: fist fights, even shootings, between perfect strangers.” Out in the real world, people honk their horns all