Positive Liberty

This month’s Cato Unbound is about how to craft sound public messages about terrorism. Obviously terrorists want us to panic, and obviously we should resist this impulse, both because it’s what the terrorists want and because panic is for chumps.

But willpower alone may not be enough, and the human tendency toward panic is both all too active and pretty weirdly skewed. As lead essayist William Burns notes,

Terrorism is about making everyone within a community feel afraid and uncertain. It is about heightened vulnerability. It seeks to disrupt society with fear and dispel any sense of safety (Hall, Norwood, Ursano, Fullerton, & Levinson, 2002). In the long term, it hopes to exact costs that go far beyond the immediate victims or damaged property and into the fiber of our social and political fabric. Perceived danger may far exceed any reasonable statistical risk of being harmed, and this may cause us to consider trading important personal freedoms for a measure of personal security. Terrorism differs from other types of disasters in two fundamental ways. First there is the cunning intentionality and level of malevolence which define terrorist acts. Chilling is the realization of how ill equipped we are, practically and emotionally, to confront this level of desperation. Second, with terrorism we can find no natural closure, no way to sound the “all clear.” Our sense of alarm persists much longer than in other types of disasters regardless of their scale. This has prompted some authors to refer to terrorism as a “new species of trouble” (Slovic, 2002). Responding to this challenge will require insight, resolve, and a willingness of diverse groups with unique perspectives to work together. Learning to communicate about the risk of terrorism requires that we first examine its currency, fear.

The distinction is fine, but important: Terrorism is a new species of trouble because it induces a particular reaction within us, not because terrorism qua terrorism threatens to undo our society. Curb our own tendency to panic, and all that’s left is a bunch of third-rate warlords with a repellent ideology, or perhaps just some damned lucky mass murderers. They’re awful, yes, but they’re nothing we haven’t handled before.

Now, I can’t say I’m totally immune to panic, but I hear that I skew a bit cynical. I often find myself thinking that there’s a whole panic industry out there, and I wonder why others don’t realize the same thing. Although not in any sense aligned with the terrorists, much of the anti-terrorism apparatus seems to me dedicated to sowing panic all the same, and they end up reinforcing one another, just as the writers of computer viruses and of anti-virus software seem both to feed a common impulse in the consumer.

Consider this article, for instance. Chances are it’s based on a press release by an enthusiastic and dedicated researcher who’s just managed to find a sexy angle for his work, and who is probably thrilled to see it mentioned in the pop media:

Jeffrey Lockwood, professor of entomology at Wyoming University and author of Six-legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War, said such Rift Valley Fever or other diseases could be transported into a country by a terrorist with a suitcase.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think a small terrorist cell could very easily develop an insect-based weapon.”

He said it would “probably be much easier” than developing a nuclear or chemical weapon, arguing: “The raw material is in the back yard.”

He continued: “It would be a relatively easy and simple process.

“A few hundred dollars and a plane ticket and you could have a pretty good stab at it.”

Not included in the story is any corroboration of the likelihood of success. For all we know, it could be just one guy out there promoting his book. Or it could be a six-legged Armageddon. Given the ratio of observed book promotions to observed Armageddons, how does the smart money bet?

Trackback URI |