The Situation of Fear

Here is the introduction of a current Rolling Stone article by Neill Strauss reviewing the situation of fear, including work by Situationist Contributor, John Jost:

From Jen Senko believes that her father was brainwashed. As Senko, a New York filmmaker, tells it, her father was a “nonpolitical Democrat.” But then he transferred to a new job that required a long commute and began listening to conservative radio host Bob Grant during the drive. Eventually, he was holing himself up for three hours every day in the family kitchen, mainlining Rush Limbaugh and, during commercials, Fox News.

“It reminded me of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Senko says. “He used to love talking to different people to try to learn their language, but then he became angry about illegal immigrants coming to the country, that they were taking jobs from Americans, and that English was becoming the secondary language.”

Senko is not alone. A California schoolteacher says her marriage fell apart after her husband started watching Fox News and yelling about government plots to take away his guns and freedom. On the left, my friend Phoebe has had to physically remove her mom, who she describes as a “Sam Seder news junkie,” from family functions for raging against relatives about the “dark place” this country is going to.

“All of these emotions, especially fear, whip people up into a state of alarm and they become angry and almost evangelical about what they believe,” says Senko. “It’s like a disease infecting millions of people around the country.”

If this election cycle is a mirror, then it is reflecting a society choked with fear. It’s not just threats of terrorism, economic collapse, cyberwarfare and government corruption – each of which some 70 percent of our citizenry is afraid of, according to the Chapman University Survey on American Fears. It’s the stakes of the election itself, with Hillary Clinton at last month’s debate conjuring images of an angry Donald Trump with his finger on the nuclear codes, while Trump warned “we’re not going to have a country” if things don’t change.

Meanwhile, the electorate is commensurately terrified of its potential leaders. According to a September Associated Press poll, 56 percent of Americans said they’d be afraid if Trump won the election, while 43 percent said they’d be afraid if Clinton won – with 18 percent of respondents saying they’re afraid of either candidate winning.

Trump’s rhetoric has only served to fan the flames: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” “It’s only getting worse.” “You walk down the street, you get shot.” Build a wall. Ban the Muslims. Obama founded ISIS. Hillary is the devil. Death, destruction, violence, poverty, weakness. And I alone can make America safe again.

But just how unsafe is America today?

According to Lewis & Clark College president Barry Glassner, one of the country’s leading sociologists and author of The Culture of Fear, “Most Americans are living in the safest place at the safest time in human history.”

Around the globe, household wealth, longevity and education are on the rise, while violent crime and extreme poverty are down. In the U.S., life expectancy is higher than ever, our air is the cleanest it’s been in a decade, and despite a slight uptick last year, violent crime has been trending down since 1991. As reported in The Atlantic, 2015 was “the best year in history for the average human being.”

So how is it possible to be living in the safest time in human history, yet at the exact same time to be so scared?

Because, according to Glassner, “we are living in the most fearmongering time in human history. And the main reason for this is that there’s a lot of power and money available to individuals and organizations who can perpetuate these fears.”

For mass media, insurance companies, Big Pharma, advocacy groups, lawyers, politicians and so many more, your fear is worth billions. And fortunately for them, your fear is also very easy to manipulate. We’re wired to respond to it above everything else. If we miss an opportunity for abundance, life goes on; if we miss an important fear cue, it doesn’t.

“The more we learn about the brain, the more we learn it’s not something that’s supposed to make you happy all the time,” says Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neurobiology professor who runs a lab studying fear. “It’s mostly a stress-reactive machine. Its primary job is to keep us alive, which is why it’s so easy to flip people into fear all the time.”

In other words, our biology and psychology are as flawed and susceptible to corruption as the systems and politicians we’re so afraid of. In particular, when it comes to assessing future risks, there is a litany of cognitive distortions and emotional overreactions that we fall prey to.

Many believe the amygdala, a tiny, almond-shaped region deep in each hemisphere of the brain, is the home of our emotional responses, specifically fear. The author Daniel Goleman has coined the term “amygdala hijacking” to describe what inflammatory rhetoric and imagery are designed to do: trigger the emotional brain before the logical brain has a chance to stop it. This is what both the right and the left believe their opponent’s media are doing to people.

So in order to resist being manipulated by those who spread fear for personal, political and corporate gain, it’s necessary to understand it. And the first thing to understand is that although the emotion may look like fear, sound like fear and smell like fear, neuroscientists argue that it is actually something quite different. . . .

Read the entire article here.

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Jon Hanson & Jacob Lipton Respond To Randall Kennedy’s “Black Tape” Op-ed

Randall KennedyFrom the Justice Blog:

In the spirit of fostering a community-wide conversation, we wanted to respond to Randall Kennedy’s provocative op-ed.

Although Randy is unperturbed by the black tape recently placed over his photograph, he is quite concerned about something else: the potentially destructive effects of taking the outrage and demands of some students at Harvard Law School – and at universities around the country – too seriously.

These students perceive racism not only on the walls of Harvard Law School but also in its history, culture, curriculum, and personnel. Having asked some of those students to explain “with as much particularity as possible” the sources of their discontent, Randy is largely unconvinced. Some of their “complaints” may have “a ring of validity,” but others “are dubious.” True, their “accusations warrant close examination and may well justify further reforms,” but his primary concern is with the intensity and unintended consequences of their grievances. On the pages of The New York Times, he cautions those youngsters to avoid “exaggerat[ing] the scope of the racism” or “minimizing their own strength and the victories that they and their forebears have already achieved.”

Read their full essay here.

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‘Experimenter’ Star Peter Sarsgaard On Stanley Milgram

Milgram's Shock Box

 

From NPR:

The Milgram experiments showed that humans will do bad things under the right circumstances. NPR’s Rachel Martin interviews the star of the film “Experimenter” that explores Stanley Milgram’s life.

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Trent Smith on Deep Capture and Obesity – The Video

Trent Smith Poster

In the fall of 2014, Trent Smith delivered a talk titled “The Economics of Information, Deep Capture, and the Obesity Debate.”  Here’s the abstract and, below that, the video of his talk.

Are consumers susceptible to manipulation by large corporations?  Or are consumers basically rational, able to decide for themselves what to buy and how to live?  This lecture will argue that these seemingly contradictory views of the American consumer are not mutually exclusive, and in fact follow directly from economic models of imperfect information.  Examples of U.S. food industry practices, both historical and in the ongoing public debate over the causes of the obesity epidemic, serve to illustrate a broader phenomenon: when large industrial producers take steps to limit the information available to consumers, a market breakdown can occur in which low-quality products dominate the market.  As a result, consumer welfare and–in the case of food–public health suffers.  This would seem to represent a clear instance of the phenomenon known as “deep capture,” in which powerful commercial interests attempt to influence conventional wisdoms that might affect industry profits.

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You can review hundreds of Situationist posts related to the topic of “deep capture” here

Elizabeth Loftus on “The Memory Factory”

A lecture by Elizabeth F. Loftus, Distinguished Professor of Social Ecology and Professor of Law and Cognitive Science at University of California, Irvine.

In this lecture, Loftus shows us that people can be led to develop rich false memories for events that never happened. False memories look very much like true ones: they can be confidently told, detailed, and expressed with emotion.

From Radcliffe Magazine, an excerpt from an article by Susan Seligson:

Elizabeth Loftus can make people “remember” that eggs once made them sick or that as children they were briefly lost in a mall, though both “memories” are false.

A high-profile forensic psychologist and memory researcher, Loftus does this not as a parlor trick, although she’s witty and entertaining—and clearly savors toppling the assumptions of TED audiences and, once, 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl. For decades, Loftus has led one of the sides in what has been dubbed “the memory wars.”

“I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives,” says the Los Angeles native, now a distinguished professor of social ecology and a professor of law and cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Her UC website playfully describes Loftus as “an expert on nothing.” That’s because her groundbreaking studies of false memories, involving thousands of subjects, drive home the point that human memory is unreliable at best, and malleable enough to wreck the lives of the unjustly accused.

Loftus visited the Radcliffe Institute at the end of April to speak about her 40 years of work in the memory field, which have won her the 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. Loftus, who has a PhD from Stanford, has testified in more than 250 legal cases and consulted on many others, including those of Michael Jackson, Oliver North, O.J. Simpson, and Martha Stewart. Despite often unsparing attacks from the defense (“I often joke that I deserve combat pay,” she says), Loftus can shatter, with sound science, the record/playback notion of how we remember and how memories become narratives. “Memory actually works more like a Wikipedia page,” says Loftus. “You can go into your page and change things. But so can other people.”