"There is nothing to fear but fear itself."
-FDR
In a day and age when idiotic tweets go viral while science struggles to persuade people that carbon dioxide increases global temperatures, it's worth thinking carefully about how eHumans evaluate and calculate risk, and how such calculations affect our landscape of fear and, ultimately, politics.
There are some things worth fearing as Americans in the 21st century. For example, medical emergencies - anything from a bad flu or a concussion to cancer or a car accident can empty our bank accounts, foreclose our homes and devastate the lives of the ones we love. It's healthy to be slightly afraid of a subway train or a speeding car, as such fear can keep you alert and, with luck, alive. In some places of the world (and even our country), it's also worth our while to fear violent crimes, as such fear can prevent you from walking down the dark alley or broadcasting careless displays of wealth that provide unreasonable temptation. If you're black or brown in the U.S., it's worth your while to fear police officers who have a demonstrable track record of discrimination, abuse and violence towards African Americans. If you plan on living for the next 50 years, or if you're invested in the well-being of people who will see the 22nd century, it's worth fearing climate change as a threat to our long-term prosperity, as disruptions to weather can lower crop yields and water supplies, and the disruptions caused by famine can easily invite two of the other four Horsemen of the apocalypse (war over food, pestilence from poor nutrition or institutional breakdown). These are a subset of reasonable fears, but they are reasonable because they are founded in reality and even conservative estimates of their likelihood, given the extreme costs should they occur, make them considerable risks to our livelihoods.
For all of these reasonable fears, there are reasonable reactions ranging from the personal to the political. We can't mitigate every health risk, but driving safely (sober, defensive, and focused) and adopting a healthy lifestyle (stop cigarettes, drink in moderation, eat healthy) along with advocating for changes to health insurance (a self-sustaining, non-profit public option would provide a minimum threshold of coverage against which private insurers must compete) can all help mitigate risks of catastrophic health crises. Violence, poverty, police brutality, racist incarceration, and climate change likewise have a range of personal precautionary measures and political changes which can alleviate the problems. From after school programs and educational/attainment support focused on poor areas of the world to oversight of police departments, mental health support for officers to ensure racism and abusive ideologies don't take root or fester in their minds, and prison reform can tackle some of the reasonable fears in this day and age. For every dangerous situation, there is an appropriate response which involves an appropriate level of fear - if you are stranded on a cliff or evacuating from a flood, it's wise to always be afraid of falling to your death but not so afraid that you lose the ability to perform effectively, make sound judgements and adapt to new information.
For every reasonable fear, there are swarms of unreasonable fears that stir folk into a frenzy, ranging from fears of Mexicans taking jobs and fears of frivolous lawsuits to fears of Arabs on airplanes (let alone fear of airplanes) and fears of demographic displacement in the U.S. With the world at our fingertips on the internet, fears have a way of festering like never before. We hear of a single traumatic event (a Mexican immigrant committing a violent crime, a family at risk of losing everything they own over a lawsuit from someone who slipped on their sidewalk, a handful of Arabs who flew a plane into a building, or a black nationalist calling someone "white devil" and celebrating the changing demographics of the U.S.), and then we take to the internet to seek out similar events, or inadvertently find similar events based on similarly tagged news articles, youtube videos, and other media. When we scroll through Facebook or Twitter, we pass by the most mundane posts of someone's boring dinner or someone else's esoteric praise of a dumb movie but then we stop and shout at the most offensive or threatening post we find. We exacerbate the perception of threats in our lives, and those threats are distorting our capacity to have an Enlightenment-conceived representative government in which voters are rational actors.
The phenomenon of people reacting to threats in the medium du jour, and such threats eliciting a fear response that changes their political calculations, is as old as politics itself and even in the seemingly novel era of the internet it is being skillfully exploited by the Russian intelligence agency to sow discord and stir people into an irrational frenzy such that they lose sight of more rational personal, political, and geopolitical aims. Fear, however, is not a bipartisan emotion - fear can make someone self-identify as conservative, and self-identified conservatives are more likely to fear a given stimulus, possibly due to their enlarged amygdala - the part of the brain in charge of fear - and in fact self-identified conservatives are more likely to focus on and react to aversive stimuli. Conversely, liberals tended to have enlarged anterior cingulate cortexes, a region of the brain in charge of error detection, attention, and controlling emotional responses, and are more drawn to pleasing stimuli. Everything about this blog post is an effort to control or modulate our emotional responses - you're here updating your anterior cingulate cortex when reminding yourself of "unreasonable fears" and how to identify them, whereas flocks of conservatives are, at this vary moment, drawn to an aversive article, say a viral tweet about flag-burning black people at a Democrat's rally. It's especially important to remember that people are rarely "always conservative" or "always liberal", but rather you can change their political attitudes by changing their levels of fear - if you tell someone to imagine a genie protecting them from harm, they will express less conservative attitudes.
The reason I'm pulling together all of this is to articulate a bigger point which I believe underlies our inability to overcome a political divide. Liberals often wonder "why aren't conservatives listening to my points? I have provided ample evidence in support of my position, and all they say in reply is 'Mexicans are rapists, build that wall!'." The reason conservatives aren't listening is because they are afraid and telling someone facts when they are acutely afraid will not calm them down. If you are on an airplane and afraid of every bump and person with a turban, having someone you've previously disagreed with give you a dry argument of statistics on "things more likely than airplanes to kill you" will not calm you down. The reason liberals don't understand conservatives is because, for a variety of reasons ranging from amygdalas and anterior cingulate cortexes to not consuming Fox News' constant stream of aversive stimuli, we don't fear the way conservatives fear. Like seeing someone afraid of a spider, we should have compassion for them as they are suffering. Americans who lean conservative are being parasitized by a political party whose power is rooted in keeping their constituents afraid - afraid of Mexicans taking their jobs, afraid of Arabs killing their kids, and afraid of black & brown people overrunning their country and oppressing white people - however irrational those fears may be.
Conversely, conservatives often wonder why liberals fail to grasp their points. Why aren't liberals giving credit to conservative intellectuals? While conservatism is in an identity crisis today, making modal arguments about "conservatism" difficult, broadly speaking we'll say that conservatives want balanced budgets, smaller government (except larger military), and increased liberty, including the liberty to hate or self-assemble into groups which exclude others. Conservatives also claim to prioritize states' rights (although, ironically, the Republican party arguing for allowing differences among states insists on conformity to the party-line of states' representatives at the national level). Conservatives (at least pre-Trump) fear expansive federal power, the corrosion of their norms by people they are forced to tolerate (Mexicans, Blacks, and gays), and geopolitical enemies. Why are liberals not give merit to conservative intellectuals like Scalia? Broadly speaking, I'd say it's because conservative intellectuals arguments largely rest upon a fear of things that liberals are not afraid of (e.g. Scalia is afraid that gay marriage will be a slippery slope to bestiality). Liberals fear some things: liberals are more afraid of discrimination and regional oppression (re: the South) than bureaucracies. Liberals are frequently more afraid of enemies-from-within (re: civil war, Jim Crow, corporate polluters, military-industrial complexes, Donald Trump) than geopolitical foes (Communists, Saddam, and, pre-Trump, Putin). Conservatives' campaigns to strike fear - fear of Nancy Pelosi, fear of immigrant rapists, fear of government overreach, fear of deep-states - are perceived as unreasonable/irrational fears by liberals. If someone were deathly afraid of puppies, watching them spew advertisements about murderous puppies would be comical (if the puppies were being systematically oppressed by puppy-fearing Republicans, such advertisements reinforce the oppressive nature of the puppy-fearers). Liberals and conservatives are afraid of vastly different things, and they react to fear in very different ways. Recognizing that we fear vastly different things, and that we have different reactions to fear itself, is an important first step towards communicating across the political divide and normalizing relations among Americans with different political inclinations. After all, who's to say which fears are rational? We all have some things we fear more than we should, and the only folk who can talk us down from irrational fears are those who are, currently, unafraid.
Personally, I care less about whether my fellow constituent self-identifies as liberal/conservative than I care about whether/not my fellow constituent is acting rationally and open to nuanced conversations about how to solve societal problems and make our world a better place. I encourage you to feel the same. By recognizing the landscape of fear, we can devise tactics for advocacy, interpersonal interaction and political outreach that are effective at calming those who are afraid and returning to more rational discourse. Cambridge Analytica constructed psychographic profiles of Americans to find out how to feed them a diet of alarming and aversive stimuli and make them vote for Trump - we should study and implement ways to alleviate fear. Note, Russian bots also co-opted Black Lives Matter to amplify the fears of Blacks and liberals worried about cops killing Blacks - fear is bipartisan, and it is exploitable (although, I would argue, as of 2018 it is more grossly exploited for Republican votes). Donald Trump said our country is a disaster, overrun by crime and exploited by trading partners, and that political correctness is going to ruin your life, successfully inspiring fear by focusing on (or sometimes completely inventing from lies) highly negative and aversive stimuli. Hillary Clinton responded by providing detailed health insurance plans, nuanced historical perspectives on the importance of allies and international trade, and calling Trump supporters "deplorable" thereby validating their fears that they would be shunned out of their country for their "politically incorrect" beliefs.
Only by removing the air of fear can we suffocate the flames of authoritarianism, nationalism and xenophobia currently raging through our country. Americans are being deliberately bombarded by aversive stimuli about "Mexican killers and rapists", "enemies of the people", and "political correctness", in an effort to make them chronically afraid and permanently eager to vote for Trump or other strongmen (and to get us more fearful of each-other than, say, Russia and China, our chief geopolitical foes). Calling people who are afraid "deplorable" won't work, and saying they are "morally wrong" won't convince them - it will likely have the opposite effect of coming off as a threat which fuels their paranoia of liberals and makes them more afraid. Likewise, if liberals are fearful of white oppression, trolling them with white-power signs at the supreme court hearing of a man who advocated racial profiling in the post-9/11 security boom is not going to help. The best thing we can do to recover our country in the age of Trump is understand and defuse this fear.
Let me illuminate the subtle landscape of fear I've experienced. As a white man, I've been afraid of accidentally committing a career-ending micgoraggression after hearing about such incidents online. Such fear greatly impacted my perceptions of social justice movements on campus. I initially (knee-jerk) perceived the social justice wave as an unforgiving threat, and such fear made it difficult to trust that I would be okay or given a fair trial. To be honest, I'm still somewhat afraid of the shifting goalposts which can lead to a white man getting fired, especially given my extremely rough socialization in poor public schools, an improper socialization which I'm continually trying to overwrite. I had bullies train me to be an aggressive, racist and sexist male starting at the age of 6, and such childhood socialization leaves scars that I'd like to overcome and not become life-sentences for the internet jail of deplorable men. When colleagues at Princeton reacted to my reservations about institutional changes punishing microaggressions, I was called racist and sexist, and such attacks, which took no effort to understand that the reason I was afraid was because I wanted space of forgiveness for the process of my self-improvement, made me fearful of even discussing the topic. If someone is afraid, telling them they can't voice their fears will not help them address (or overcome) their irrational fears. I've vacillated between whether/not I should include this paragraph on my own experiences in this blog (or whether/not I should have a blog at all) because of a fear of unsympathetic reactions, but my own psychological journey is precisely why I believe fear is at the heart of our current political situation. It makes me wonder: how many people (especially white men without a college education) have been afraid of slipping up, were bullied out of discussions they haven't been socialized the emotional intelligence to handle, were silenced after being branded as racist, sexist, or deplorable, and now respond by silently voting for Trump? While women and minorities are indisputably oppressed and I whole-heartedly encourage their identity advocacy and will always fight for political solutions to help them, the online community is succeeding in firing people for actions, sometimes as little as tweets, that many people fear they could make in a slip-up. I hypothesize that such stories of unforgiving treatment are aversive stimuli which are making large bodies of white people, especially white men, inclined to vote conservative due to irrational fears of demographic displacement.
Thankfully, there are ways to alleviate another person's fear (hint: it does not involve telling them they're bad people or bombarding them with facts). Above all, help them feel safe. Help them focus on the positive things in their lives. Progressively desensitize them to the things they're afraid of. Talk to them in a calm voice and start off listening and telling them you understand, that you're there for them. Tell them it's okay. Don't abandon them, become irritated or judgmental. How did I finally tame my fear of being fired for a slip-up? My wife, a Ph.D. in political science who heard the full story of my rough upbringing and knows how desperately I'm trying to correct the poor socialization I received, promised she would defend me if I ever made a mistake. I needed to be lovingly reassured that I am not threatened - compassion and reassurance succeeded where moral and intellectual arguments failed. I firmly believe we can douse the anti-political-correctness embers underlying the rise of authoritarianism by compassionately reassuring our friends, co-workers, and others that they are safe as long as they are kind, apologetic when wrong, redemptive when harmful, and open to correcting improper socialization of their youth.
In this article, I'm somewhat biased in asking liberals to overcome their fears of conservative oppression and be the better people. I realize this is asking a lot from liberals fearful of the racism, threats of violence and bombastic Fox-News-fueled irrationality, and aggressive "drill-baby-drill" attacks on the environment. However, liberals tend to have an enlarged anterior cingulate cortex and thus liberals may (*may*) have the greater capacity, and thus responsibility, for controlling their fear. If liberals were taller, I'd say they should help people reach items on the top shelf; since they appear to have smaller amygdalas and larger anterior cingulate cortexes, I encourage them to overcome fear together. If we first manage our own fear of hate, we can begin to have compassion for conservatives in our country who are being psychologically manipulated by their own party and stirred into the unhealthy, fearful frenzy. Our conservatives neighbors are being bombarded with aversive stimuli by Fox News, Trump and Russian bots which make them fearful, and therefore desperately loyal, supporters of authoritarians. In the Age of Authoritarianism, the fear of fear is a reasonable one. We can mitigate the risk of fear by changing argumentative and political tactics. Instead of "fighting" conservatives, we should be fighting their fears, worrying less about logical arguments and more about psychological ones.
