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As philosopher Lars Svendsen points out in his book A Philosophy of Fear, “a paradoxical trait of the culture of fear is that it emerges at a time when by all accounts, we are living more securely than ever before in human history.”¹

Today we live longer and more safely than ever before. Auto safety, air travel safety, food and drug safety, longevity, and cancer survival rates are all on the rise. Death from bubonic plaque is unheard of; deaths from gout or scarlet fever are so rare that the terms themselves seem archaic. The last U.S. polio case was in 1979. Whereas the 1918 flu epidemic affected 20 percent of the entire population of the world, and led to about 50 million deaths, the 2014 Ebola virus affected 11 Americans of which two died. Still Ebola caused much fear. People were afraid to travel. In Nigeria, even in the months after it was declared Ebola free, major hotels experienced an occupancy rate drop of about 50 percent. During the SARS epidemic, travel to the Far East waned. After the November 2015 Bataclan attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, travel to Paris dropped and has still not fully recovered.

A CATO Institute study on the risk of immigrants becoming terrorists found that the chance of an American being murdered in a terrorist attack by a refugee is 1 in 3,640,000,000 billion per year.²

In fact, the total of all deaths from terrorist acts on U.S. soil is 71 in the years between 2005 and 2015, an average of seven per year. Compare this to other causes of death.

Another way to put this in perspective is to say your chances of dying by your own hand are 12,222 times greater than being killed in a terrorist act.

Many of our current fears arise out of what we choose to believe, rather than what is actually dangerous. Not only does this fake fear fail to protect us, it is in itself dangerous. Many of these dysfunctional fears today put things at risk that are more important than the things we are afraid of. Unwarranted fear (such as fear of bacteria) leads to decisions that make one more vulnerable rather than less (constant hand-wiping and germ avoidance reduces our immune capacity). Over-protection of our children—padded playgrounds that prevent knee scrapes, not allowing unsupervised play outside—can stunt the resilience that comes from learning from small failures and minor pain. Fears that spread (call them crowd-sourced fears) can lead to panic, which can lead to bad decisions, which can lead to the erosion of trust, social capital, our core values, our democracy and our freedoms. Most importantly they blind us to the fact that there are still some wild beasts around—ones we should be afraid of, but are not.

Indeed, looking at some of the medical side effects of many drugs, the potential harm of over-medication seems to outweigh the symptoms. In many ways, modern fear comes with our general affluence; it is a luxury, as is loss avoidance. You have to have something to lose in the first place to be constantly preoccupied with the fear of loss. While much of the world’s population is still struggling with getting onto the lowest levels of Maslow’s Pyramid, wealthy countries are busy erecting real, virtual and psychological barriers to entry. Ironically, we are the real prisoners of fear.

The Escalation of Fear to Moral Panic

British sociologist Stanley Cohen, who coined the term “moral panic,” says that a moral panic occurs when a “…condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values or interests.”³ Interestingly those who start the panic have been called “moral entrepreneurs.”