Overcoming Fear Culture and Fear Itself

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“There isn’t a single fear that defines our era,” says sociologist Frank Furedi, author of Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation and Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right. “What we have is a more promiscuous, pluralistic form of fearing. The very important implication to this is that while my parents feared together, you and I have a more isolated, private experience. We fear on our own.”

A recent report from the World Social Summit underscores the degree to which fear has become a personal matter. Published in September 2008, “Fear in the Mega-Cities” surveys citizens of 10 urban hubs around the globe, among them London, Mumbai, and Beijing. Highly individual fears like physical or mental suffering and death top the list of anxieties, followed by preoccupations with being left out or falling behind, especially economically.

“Collective fears, in comparison, seem not to be excessively important,” write the report’s authors. In New York, the top-ranking fear, outstripping even fear of a terrorist attack, is “not being able to maintain the same standard of living in the future.”

In the past, common fears bound communities together. They were a source of shared identity and engendered camaraderie and trust. “Americans born roughly between 1910 and 1940 were a particularly civic and trusting generation,” write Pamela Paxton and Jeremy Adam Smith in the Fall 2008 issue of Greater Good; facing down monumental challenges like the Great Depression and World War II required people to depend on one another, fusing communities together.

The individual way we’ve come to experience fear contributes only to isolation and feelings of helplessness. Instead of seeing support or solutions, we add to our grim roster of perceived threats.

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. One such rule of thumb, what Gardner calls the “example rule,” dictates that the easier it is to gin up a memory of something, the more likely it is to be a repeat threat. This 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.

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