A World Driven By Fear

The cost of living in a world designed to make you feel under threat.

This week, I received a mailer that appears to be a “Texas Trans & LGBTQ Student Resource Guide.” It’s addressed to the students of our family. My parents got one too, so did millions of others. It’s designed to look like a brochure for students who might be trans, talking about “what if I want to be emancipated.” And concluding with “Even if your family doesn’t accept you as you are, groups like these are ready to become your found family.”

It’s not real. The organization is a fake shell company based out of Wyoming. It’s all made up. The address it came from isn’t a real place. By all indications it was sent out for one reason: To stoke fear. It’s aimed directly at a parent’s deepest fear, that their child will choose someone else. That they’ll select the “found family.”

This post isn’t about politics. It’s about what happens when so much of what reaches us is designed to make us feel threatened?

Fear dominates our society. It’s right there in all of the political ads. It’s there on the news and as you scroll on Instagram. You can see it our current pull towards safetyism, where 66% of American 13-year olds aren’t allowed to leave their street. It’s there in our neighborhoods, where every Nextdoor post turns an unfamiliar person into a potential threat.

There’s a good reason that fear dominates our society. It works. We're wired to take the bait, to throw all our attention resources to the proverbial snake in the grass. Research shows:

• In a study of nearly 3 million posts from politicians and news outlets, each word about the opposing party raised the odds of a share by 67%

• In randomized tests of more than 100,000 headlines, each negative word raised click-through rates by about 2.3%

• Across 17 countries, negative news stories produced stronger stress responses than positive ones.

The architecture of the internet, with algorithms that reward outrage and incentives that encourage snap judgments, sends a powerful message: the world is a binary place of good versus evil, us versus them.

The pamphlets represents a much larger shift in society, one that is at the root of so many of our issues. We’ve tipped the balance. From a society that always had some fear, but was counterbalanced by enough hope hope, to one overwhelmed with fear and outrage. But the balance between hope and outrage has shifted so much, that the former no longer really exists. And the end result, is we get stuck in survival mode.

Mean World Syndrome

In the 1970s, professor of communication George Gerbner coined the term mean world syndrome. Gerbner found that we tend to see the world as more dangerous and threatening than it is and that it was related to the overabundance of violence on TV.

When we are inundated with a message that the world is threatening, we start to believe it. A 2008 study found that media exposure explains why Americans, in particular, often see the rest of the world as dangerous. Other research shows a link between the amount of crime reported on the news and the degree of fear people have over crime. It’s not just worry. News consumption is related to avoidance behavior as a way to deal with the fear of violent crime. It’s not just traditional media that plays a role. A recent analysis found that social media consumption is linked to an increased fear of street violence.

This effect isn’t limited to crime. A study following the Boston Marathon bombing found that individuals who had watched six or more hours per day of coverage of the bombing reported more acute stress than people who were at the bombing. Our perception is reality. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, you aren’t immune to a heightened fear or threat response driven by information consumption.

Today we carry Gerbner's TV in our pocket, with a neighborhood app that pings every time someone's Ring camera catches a stranger on a porch. And, let’s just say, that running the world on fear, has some dire consequences.

A Society that Plays Not to Lose

In 2022, researchers looked at over a hundred years of threats. They analyzed newspapers for how they used language that played up a threat or danger, and then tracked what moved along with it.

They found that increases in threat were associated with:

• Tighter social norms and more collectivist values.

• Stronger approval of sitting presidents.

• More ethnocentrism.

• Lower stock prices.

• Less innovation, measured by patents.

As Stanford psychologist Michele Gelfand, one of the researchers, put it: “Threat talk, whether real or imagined, has predictable consequences. It tightens cultural groups and makes them more ‘group oriented’… it relates to lower stock-price performance and lower innovation.”

In essence, societies became more rigid. We move into a kind of society-wide protective mode. Or put another way, a fearful society plays not to lose. To use a sports term, we “choke” on a societal level.

We’ve known this on an individual level. Think about an athlete or similar performer. When stress or pressure takes over, they’re more likely to avoid instead of approach the challenge. Be selfish instead of selfless. Get stuck too narrow, unable to see the forest for the trees. And discount the future in order to survive in the present.

Living in threat mode, makes us want to survive what’s right in front of us, the future or anyone else be damned. We marshal our defenses. As stress researcher Bruce McEwen put it, “When people feel uncertain and threatened, because of a changing internal or external environment, their brains enter a hypervigilant status to decrease uncertainty as fast as possible.” In other words, whenever we are faced with fear, our brain goes on a hunt to figure out how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. How do we minimize the risk?

Why would politicians, or the larger machine we’ve created, want to invoke fear? Because it pushes us to a quick action to eliminate the feeling. For the mailer, it’s going to vote, so you can feel like you did something to stop it. On social media, it’s to post, retweet, or respond with righteous indignation. Again, to make it feel like we are doing something. We hit that retweet button to feel something even though it’s a cheap action that makes no difference. It’s what keeps us on the platform, so that the tech company can make money.

Facebook own researcher warned in a 2018 internal memo, “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.”

It also ties us to our group identity. Research suggests that when our environment screams danger, we look for a place to belong. That basic human need that signals that we’re safe and understood. It’s why conspiracy theories flourish during times of uncertainty. In a series of studies out of Princeton University in 2017, psychologists found that social exclusion leads to conspiratorial thinking. We’re willing to believe the absurd, as long as it provides us with a space to feel connected and validated.

It’s really bad on an individual level. But if we’ve got a society that is fueled by fear and outrage, that pushes us all into survival mode, where we play not to lose, the end result is predictable. Less creativity and innovation, more divisiveness, less collaboration, and an increasing mindset of the ends justify the means, or “win at all costs,” because if the boogeyman on the other side takes over, we’re doomed…

Fear can be a short-term motivator. It can push us to vote, to lash out in anger online to deal with that feeling. But eventually, when we have a constant alarm demanding a response, with nothing seeming to change, we move from outrage to apathy. Eventually, we seem to give up.

Learned Helplessness vs. Hopefullness

You’ve probably heard of learned helplessness. An idea that originated with Martin Seligman and Steven Maier’s work where they found that when dogs were conditioned with a shock that they couldn’t avoid, that even when you gave them a way out by simply by hopping over a barrier, they wouldn’t. The dogs had learned that pain and suffering were outside of their control. They had no power over what was happening to them, so their only point of recourse was to sit there and take it…even if there was an easy solution right on the other side of a small fence.

In 2008, Steven Maier utilized modern neuroscience to expand his seminal work. This time he used rats in similar experiments to see what was going on in their brain when they were helpless. He realized he had to make a subtle but key adjustment to his original theory.

When Maier peered inside rat’s brains put through the challenge, he noticed a distinct difference between the rats who cowered and were stuck, and those who took action to escape the threat. For the cowering rats, the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) area in the brain lit up and stayed activated. For their counterparts who could stop the shocks, the rats also experienced an initial stress response, but an area in their prefrontal cortex soon lit up, shutting down the DRN’s primitive stress response.

Maier took it a step further, stimulating the prefrontal cortex in the rats that had an overactive stress (DRN) response thanks to their uncontrollable shocks. All of a sudden, the rats transformed, no longer displaying any characteristics associated with learned helplessness. The alarm had been shut off, quieted down. As Maier told the American Psychological Association, “It’s like the forebrain is saying, ‘Cool it, brain stem, we have the situation under control.’”

He realized that the animals in the experiment weren’t learning to be helpless. That was their default state under severe threat. What they were actually learning was hopefulness. That under stress, they had the ability to quiet down that inner alarm just enough so that they could act. That, yes, the stress response was still there, but that they could handle the fear, and stay in control enough to find a solution to their current situation.

The original theory "got it backward. Passivity in response to shock is not learned. It is the default, unlearned response to prolonged aversive events." We have to train hope.

Small Steps Forward

So what happens to a society that marinates in fear, that doesn’t give a path toward hope? We do the same thing that the rats and dogs do. We accept the norm, standing there, thinking “what’s the point,” and do whatever helps us manage the next 5 seconds of pain, instead of looking around the room for the fence we can easily jump.

A fear and outrage based society doesn’t just push us to survival and protection, it never trains that hopeful muscle up. Even though, a sense of hope predicts performance. Whether we’re talking about running a race, or doing well in school, when we look at having the agency to act plus potential pathways towards a goal, it predicts everything from persistence in sport to grades in college. Yet, we seem hell bent on stoking fear instead of hope.

If you’re looking around and wondering why it feels like our values and morals have been thrown by the wayside, where everything is framed as “win at all costs,” where we are constantly split into us vs. them, a lot of it comes down to the fear and outrage machine we’ve allowed to take over our society.

To get unstuck, Maier’s rats needed proof that their actions still mattered. We build hope in the same way. We need small, repeated action that tell us what we do matters, and that there’s a path forward.

For most of us, that fence is a lot lower than it looks. It’s turning down our feed, making the reactive social media hard to consume and choosing deeper, more nuanced forms of consumption (i.e., read books).

It’s finding belonging in the real world, knowing your neighbors instead of the blank faces on the app. It’s volunteering at your local church or youth sports league. It’s treating your child’s teacher as a partner on the quest to help your child, instead of an enemy to fight against.

It’s to stop rewarding those who use fear and outrage. Unfollow them online. Don’t vote for the egregious ones in politics. Champion basic human decency no matter what. Take the individual steps to stop rewarding outrage. And more so, minimize your time spent on the machine that demands it.

None of this fixes the country. But on an individual level, all of these small steps train that hopeful muscle and send the message you aren’t a dog stuck in the box. You don’t have to see a mailer designed to evoke emotion and give into it.

Fear is a cheap fuel. It’s fast to ignite and burns out quickly, requiring more and more doses to keep us going. Hope is a slow burning fuel. It doesn’t push us toward immediate action. But its impact compounds. It’s what allows us to develop persistence, and quiet down the inner alarm. It might not look powerful at first, but over the long haul, it’s the only thing that truly works.

Fear is cheap, and someone is always selling it. Hope we have to build ourselves. Let’s get to it. One small step at a time.

—Steve Magness

Go Deeper:

• Why we keep believing people are getting worse. On the illusion of moral decline.

• Finding hope in a cynical world.

• What turns anger into action? A model of collective action.

• The Cost of Safetyism.

Quotes to Make You Think:

“We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”

— “A Brief for the Defense”

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

— William James, The Principles of Psychology, “Attention”

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-Steve

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