Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

This is the safest time in human history. So why are we all so afraid?

Jen Senko believes that her father was brainwashed. As Senko, a New York filmmaker, tells it, her father was a "nonpolitical Democrat." But then he transferred to a new job that required a long commute and began listening to conservative radio host Bob Grant during the drive. Eventually, he was holing himself up for three hours every day in the family kitchen, mainlining Rush Limbaugh and, during commercials, Fox News.

"It reminded me of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers," Senko says. "He used to love talking to different people to try to learn their language, but then he became angry about illegal immigrants coming to the country, that they were taking jobs from Americans, and that English was becoming the secondary language."

Senko is not alone. A California schoolteacher says her marriage fell apart after her husband started watching Fox News and yelling about government plots to take away his guns and freedom. On the left, my friend Phoebe has had to physically remove her mom, who she describes as a "Sam Seder news junkie," from family functions for raging against relatives about the "dark place" this country is going to.

"All of these emotions, especially fear, whip people up into a state of alarm and they become angry and almost evangelical about what they believe," says Senko. "It's like a disease infecting millions of people around the country."

If this election cycle is a mirror, then it is reflecting a society choked with fear. It's not just threats of terrorism, economic collapse, cyberwarfare and government corruption – each of which some 70 percent of our citizenry is afraid of, according to the Chapman University Survey on American Fears. It's the stakes of the election itself, with Hillary Clinton at last month's debate conjuring images of an angry Donald Trump with his finger on the nuclear codes, while Trump warned "we're not going to have a country" if things don't change.

Meanwhile, the electorate is commensurately terrified of its potential leaders. According to a September Associated Press poll, 56 percent of Americans said they'd be afraid if Trump won the election, while 43 percent said they'd be afraid if Clinton won – with 18 percent of respondents saying they're afraid of either candidate winning.

Trump's rhetoric has only served to fan the flames: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." "It's only getting worse." "You walk down the street, you get shot." Build a wall. Ban the Muslims. Obama founded ISIS. Hillary is the devil. Death, destruction, violence, poverty, weakness. And I alone can make America safe again.

But just how unsafe is America today?

According to Lewis & Clark College president Barry Glassner, one of the country's leading sociologists and author of The Culture of Fear, "Most Americans are living in the safest place at the safest time in human history."

Around the globe, household wealth, longevity and education are on the rise, while violent crime and extreme poverty are down. In the U.S., life expectancy is higher than ever, our air is the cleanest it's been in a decade, and despite a slight uptick last year, violent crime has been trending down since 1991. As reported inThe Atlantic, 2015 was "the best year in history for the average human being."

So how is it possible to be living in the safest time in human history, yet at the exact same time to be so scared?

Because, according to Glassner, "we are living in the most fearmongering time in human history. And the main reason for this is that there's a lot of power and money available to individuals and organizations who can perpetuate these fears."

For mass media, insurance companies, Big Pharma, advocacy groups, lawyers, politicians and so many more, your fear is worth billions. And fortunately for them, your fear is also very easy to manipulate. We're wired to respond to it above everything else. If we miss an opportunity for abundance, life goes on; if we miss an important fear cue, it doesn't.

"The more we learn about the brain, the more we learn it's not something that's supposed to make you happy all the time," says Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neurobiology professor who runs a lab studying fear. "It's mostly a stress-reactive machine. Its primary job is to keep us alive, which is why it's so easy to flip people into fear all the time."

In other words, our biology and psychology are as flawed and susceptible to corruption as the systems and politicians we're so afraid of. In particular, when it comes to assessing future risks, there is a litany of cognitive distortions and emotional overreactions that we fall prey to.

Many believe the amygdala, a tiny, almond-shaped region deep in each hemisphere of the brain, is the home of our emotional responses, specifically fear. The author Daniel Goleman has coined the term "amygdala hijacking" to describe what inflammatory rhetoric and imagery are designed to do: trigger the emotional brain before the logical brain has a chance to stop it. This is what both the right and the left believe their opponent's media are doing to people.

So in order to resist being manipulated by those who spread fear for personal, political and corporate gain, it's necessary to understand it. And the first thing to understand is that although the emotion may look like fear, sound like fear and smell like fear, neuroscientists argue that it is actually something quite different.

"We start recieving notifications as soon as these disasters happen," one sociologist says. "There's a false sense of involvement that we didn't have 150 years ago." Mary Altaffer/AP

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux is slender, soft-spoken and well-mannered, with a seemingly extensive supply of patience, which is no doubt exactly what it takes to study Bible-paper-thin cross sections of rat brain for more than three decades.

I have spent the day with LeDoux at his lab at New York University's Center for Neural Science looking at human and animal brains – specifically, a tiny triangle of nuclei that sits on the amygdala, which is now popularly thought of as the fear center, thanks in part to LeDoux's research. The problem: Despite what countless psychologists, journalists and teachers assert, fear doesn't occur in the amygdala, according to LeDoux.

LeDoux never meant for his work to be interpreted this way. It was, he admits now, an imprecise use of words. A more accurate way to put it would be "threat detection and response."

Here's how it works: The triangle of neurons on the amygdala, known as the lateral amygdala, parses through stimuli coming in from the outside world, looking for, among other things, threats. If it senses danger, then the neurons start firing, signaling the central amygdala to activate a defense response in the body. This whole process is an unconscious physiological response (perspiration, increased heart rate, shortness of breath) and behavioral reaction (freeze, fight or flight), not an emotion.

"We need to recognize that emotions are not innate hard-wired states as presented in Inside Out," LeDoux says. "Emotions are very complicated: They morph and change, and go back and forth, and you can have as many emotions as you can conceptualize."

Fear, then, according to LeDoux, is actually experienced in the conscious mind – the cerebral cortex – where we assemble the experience and then label it as an emotion, or at least categorize it with other experiences that feel similar. It's what we call it when, for example, the amygdala's emergency-response system is activated by a cobra raising its head to strike or, elsewhere in the brain, the hypothalamus recognizes that the body is in danger of dehydration.

Make sense?

Good, because most of this has nothing to do with what's happening politically in this country.

"What we're talking about is anxiety, not fear," LeDoux says. Where fear is a response to a present threat, anxiety is a more complex and highly manipulable response to something one anticipates might be a threat in the future. "It is a worry about something that hasn't happened and may never happen," says LeDoux.

So if someone opens fire at a concert you're attending, you experience fear. But if you're at a concert and you're worried that a shooting attack could occur there, that's anxiety.

The biological difference, says LeDoux, is the worry and nervousness that we label as anxiety originate not in the amygdala, but predominantly in a small area of the stria terminalis – the pathway connecting the amygdala to the hypothalamus – known as the bed nucleus. It is this area that researchers believe is hyperactivated during generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and social anxiety.

This may seem like a small distinction. But in actuality, it is everything. Because where fear is about a danger that seems certain, anxiety is, in LeDoux's words, "an experience of uncertainty."

And that uncertainty is the exact lever that politicians regularly use to try to influence your behavior. According to last year's Chapman University Survey of American Fears, a highly cited study in which 1,500 respondents were surveyed about 88 different fears, Americans are most afraid of corruption of government officials, followed by cyberterrorism, corporate tracking of personal information, and terrorist attacks. These would all be anxieties, according to LeDoux. And the chief anxiety, about one's own government, helps explain the attraction to Trump as a political outsider.

But even more telling is what the Chapman survey says is the number-one way in which Americans respond to their anxieties: voting.

"So you've come to us from the den of the devil," a crime writer named Elaine says, by way of a greeting, meaning this magazine.

I am in a waterfront Redondo Beach, California, apartment, at a meet-up group of Trump supporters. It is clear that no one here is in fear. They are drinking beer and wine, eating finger foods and watching CNN on mute. But they do have a lot of media-fueled anxieties. And as they share them, the mood in the room intensifies, the side conversations halt, the group huddles together and their voices grow strident.

"We have Syrian refugees coming in by the thousands, unvetted," says Chris, who works in corporate sales.

Debra, who's in nursing school, reels off a short list of murders by immigrants. "I worry for me, and worse for my daughter with two children," she concludes. "I feel like we're on the edge of doom. We're destroying ourselves."

"The country is under attack," says a retired soap-opera actress who requested that even her first name not be used. "There are unspoken agendas. I feel I'm getting pulled along in something that's leading somewhere that I don't want to go."

"It's the end of Western civilization," confirms Elaine, the crime writer. "When we get this sexual-libertine bent to a society, it is always the last gasp before destruction. I'm a proud fag hag from way back, but these transgender bathrooms are not about transgender people at all. They are about giving license to sexual perverts. It is child abuse."

What's occurring in this meet-up group right now is what social psychologists call the "law of group polarization," which states that if like-minded people are concerned about an issue, their views will become more extreme after discussing it together. Theoretically, most people here, and in similar meet-ups around the country, will leave the room not just with stronger opinions but with less empathy for those with contrary views.

Accompanying me at the meet-up is Christopher Bader, one of the architects of the Chapman survey. "The longer we delve into fears, the more I see fears as responses to uncertainty," he says afterward. If there is a crack in human psychology into which demagogues wriggle, it is by offering psychological relief for the anxiety created by uncertainty. Because when people are unsure – or made to feel unsure – and not in control of the safety of their finances, families, possessions, community or future, their natural inclination is to grasp for certainty.

This is where a good scapegoat comes in. "That's something Trump creates very well: There's us – real Americans – then there are Muslims and immigrants," Bader says. "Fascist governments have risen in times of economic change because they offer simple answers to complicated personal questions. And one of the most popular ways people can have certainty is by pointing to a villain to blame things on."

The crucial combination of uncertainty with perception of an escalating threat has led historically, according to Bader and other researchers, to an increased desire for authoritarianism. "A conspiracy theory," he continues, "brings order to a disordered universe. It's saying that the problems aren't random, but they're being controlled by a villainous group."

It's big banks. It's ISIS. It's the environmentalists. It's the NRA. It's Wall Street. It's the patriarchy. It's the feminists. It's the right. It's the left. It's the Illuminati. Choose a single enemy and simplify your life – but know that it won't make you any happier.

Psychologists George Bonanno and John Jost studied 9/11 survivors and witnesses. They discovered that those exposed to the attack became more politically conservative, embracing ideologies that "provide relatively simple yet cognitively rigid solutions (e.g., good versus evil, black versus white, us versus them, leader versus follower) to problems of security and threat."

But, despite this, the political shift didn't improve their overall state of mind. "On the contrary," Bonanno and Jost concluded, "political conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism and conservative shift were generally associated with the following: chronically elevated levels of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, desire for revenge and militarism, cynicism and decreased use of humor."

Delving deeper, Jost and his students recently went through more than 100 studies by researchers all over the world, involving more than 350,000 participants, and found similar results. "People who perceive the world as a more dangerous place in terms of crime, disease and terrorism are more likely to be conservative," says Jost. "And exposure to a terrorist attack – whether it is in the U.S., England, Spain, Germany or Israel – is a significant predictor of a conservative shift." In other words, it's not just America: It's Brexit, with its slogan of "Take back control of our borders." And it's the ascendency of anti-immigrant politicians around the Western world, from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to Austrian presidential candidate Norbert Hofer to French National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who compared Muslims praying in the street to the Nazi occupation.

Several of Jost's conclusions are consistent with a concept that is key to understanding the factionalism, tribalism and nationalism of today: "terror management theory." One of the most important ideas in social psychology of the past three decades, it is predicated on the notion that as adult human beings, we have a desire to live, yet we know that – at a time and by a cause unknown to us – we are going to die.

To manage this existential anxiety, we embrace a cultural worldview that provides us with order, meaning, importance and, ultimately, self-esteem. The effectiveness of this strategy depends on the agreement of others who share our beliefs. Meanwhile, the existence of other people with beliefs and values that differ from our own can subtly undermine the protection this worldview provides. So, according to the theory, when these beliefs are threatened, we will go to great lengths to preserve and defend them.

University of Colorado psychology professor Tom Pyszczynski, one of the three researchers who came up with terror management theory in 1986 and co-author of The Worm at the Core: The Role of Death in Life, believes that this concept explains the right-wing extremism in this election cycle. "I suggest that one of the things frightening them is the de-whitening of America," Pyszczynski continues. "I don't think people are afraid of illegal immigrants committing crimes against them – but they're bothered by certain kinds of immigrants diluting the whiteness of the country and the American identity that people get their sense of security from. The idea of 'taking our country back' after having a black president is a prime example of that."

One of the related tenets of terror management theory is that when people are reminded of their mortality, whether through questions about what happens after death or bringing up tragedies like 9/11, they can become more prejudiced and more aggressive toward people with different worldviews.

In a 1998 study, for example, Pyszczynski and his colleagues devised a clever means of measuring aggression: seeing how much hot sauce participants were willing to feed others who expressed a clear distaste for spicy food. And after being asked questions about their own death, liberals fed conservatives twice as much "painfully hot salsa" as they did to fellow liberals, and vice versa. In some cases, they gave one another the maximum amount of hot sauce possible in the experiment. When the groups weren't asked about death, this effect didn't occur.