When Franklin D. Roosevelt took the stage and delivered his first inaugural address, he beheld legions of frightened Americans. The year was 1933. A quarter of the nation was unemployed.As he bellowed those now-famous words—the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—Roosevelt couldn’t have fathomed the face of his country a mere 85+ years later. For there’s no doubt that “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance” seizes the citizenry more tightly today than ever before.
One explanation for the incapacitating nature of contemporary fear is that our brains simply are not wired to process modern life. In his 2008 book The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t—and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger, journalist Daniel Gardner unfolds the ways we fail to assess risk properly, as well as the sobering consequences.
Our subconscious mind issues lightning-fast judgments about danger based on principles that evolved during our cave-dwelling days. Psychologists refer to this as the 'fight or flight' mechanism: the gut instinct served us well when it steered us clear of places where humans often met with hungry predators. Today, though, the nightly news stocks our subconscious with frightening images of plane crashes, superbugs, and child abductions; faced with related decisions, our guts make the decidedly wrong calls.
Take for example the 12 months after 9/11, during which, researchers now know, an understandably large number of people heeded their guts and avoided flying. Fear itself put millions of additional people in cars. Flying, however, is vastly safer than driving, and in that one year, traffic fatalities on U.S. roads spiked. An additional 1,595 people lost their lives. At the end of the year, air travel numbers returned to normal, and traffic fatalities resumed their disconcerting but regular rates.
Our brains are poorly equipped to weigh risks that don’t result in immediate negative consequences, Psychology Today observed last February. One more cigarette, one more fast-food meal: What’s the harm? Marketers, politicians, and entertainers grasp with precision how brains misfire, and they apply this knowledge to great gain. Fearmongering has worked wonders for everyone from real estate agents hawking gated communities to advocacy groups attempting to recruit members.
A "fnord" is pop-culture term used to describe something in the news media that subconsciously generates a feeling of uneasiness and confusion, preventing rationality, and creating fear. The term originally comes from 'conspiracy theorists' who claim we are surrounded by 'fnords' every day and that the governments of the world are using them to control us. Can you see the 'fnords?!'
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