Another great article forwarded by Joe Hart & Kay Lee <mrjah@flakeysol.com>:

Newshawk: Jim Rosenfield
Source: Los Angeles Times Book Reviews
Contact: letters@latimes.com
Fax: 2132374712
Pubdate: June 27, 1999
Author: MICHAEL SHERMER

THE CULTURE OF FEAR: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong
Things; By Barry Glassner; (BasicBooks: 276 pp., $25)

USC sociologist Barry Glassner has written a gutsy expose of one of the
most widespread delusions of our time: misplaced fear. Glassner
demonstrates with precision and clarity that Americans today have built
what he calls a "culture of fear" by buying into rumors and hearsay that
pass for facts.

Who traffics in fear mongering? Follow the money, says Glassner, to the
politicians when they win elections by grossly exaggerating (and sometimes
outright lying about) crime and drug use percentages under their opponents'
watch. To advocacy groups that profit because nothing drives fundraisers
faster than expectations of doom, which promise to be thwarted just in time
if the donor's contribution is beefy enough. To conservatives decrying the
demise of the family, and to liberals proclaiming the destruction of the
environment.

Religion also plays on our fears by hyping the doom and gloom of this world
to make the next world seem all the more appealing or frightening. An
evangelical Christian friend of mine recently insisted that we are in the
"end times" because the Bible prophesied an increase in immorality and
malfeasance. Because everyone knows crime is an epidemic problem in
America that worsens by the year ("just look at the recent Colorado
shooting," he enthused), the end is nigh.

On the same day as my friend's comments, the FBI released its findings that
we are in the midst of the longest decline in crime rates since the bureau
began collecting data in 1930. Such examples illustrate a paradox: We are
more fearful at the very time when things have never been so good. "Give us
a happy ending and we write a new disaster story," says Glassner.

As storytelling animals, we spin dramatic tales of calamity and misfortune.
"In the late 1990s the number of drug users had decreased by half compared
to a decade earlier," yet the "majority of adults rank drug abuse as the
greatest danger to America's youth."

Ditto the economy, where "the unemployment rate was below 5% for the first
time in a quarter century. Yet pundits warned of imminent economic disaster."

In this century alone, modern medicine and social hygiene practices and
technologies have nearly doubled our life spans and improved our health
immeasurably, yet Glassner points out that if you tally up the reported
disease statistics, out of 266 million Americans, 543 million of us are
seriously ill.

How can this be? To quote Disraeli: "lies, damn lies, and statistics." We
may be good storytellers, but we are lousy statisticians.

Glassner shows, for example, that women in their 40s believe they have a
one in 10 chance of dying of breast cancer, but their real lifetime odds
are more like one in 250. In addition, he notes that some "feminists
helped popularize the frightful but erroneous statistic that two of three
teen mothers had been seduced and abandoned by adult men," when in reality
it "is more like one in 10, but some feminists continued to cultivate the
scare well after the bogus stat had been definitively debunked."

The bigger problem here is the law of large numbers, or as the magician
Penn Jillette likes to say: "million to one odds happen eight times a day
in New York." In America, million to one odds happen 266 times a day, and
of those, the most sensational dozen make the evening news, especially if
captured on
video.

Herein lies the problem: we are daily fed numbers we cannot comprehend
about threats to our security we cannot tolerate.

But better safe than sorry, right? Wrong, says Glassner. Pathological
fear takes a dramatic toll on our psyches and wallets: "We waste tens of
billions of dollars and person hours every year on largely mythical hazards
like road rage, on prison cells occupied by people who pose little or no
danger to others, on programs designed to protect young people from dangers
that few of them ever face, on compensation for victims of metaphorical
illnesses, and on technology to make airline travel which is already safer
than other means of transportation safer still."

Of all the institutions feeding our fears, the media takes center stage for
sensationalism. "If it bleeds, it leads" is the old adage about headlines.
Glassner cites an Emory University study showing that the leading cause of
death -- heart disease -- received the same amount of press coverage as the
11th-ranked one, homicide. Not surprisingly, drug use, the lowest ranking
risk factor associated with serious illness and death, received as much
attention as the second ranked risk factor -- poor diet and lack of exercise.

>From 1990 to 1998, America's murder rate decreased by 20% while the number
of murder stories on network newscasts increased by an incredible 600% (and
this doesn't include O.J. stories). "The short answer to why Americans
harbor so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money await
those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic
substitutes."

The long answer is in the details so well documented and presented in this
important book, which has the courage to point out that Gulf War Syndrome
is a chimera, that television does not cause violence, that Satanic cults
are phantasmagorical, that many recovered memories of child abuse are
nothing more than false memories planted by bad therapists, and that
silicone breast implants cause nothing more than metastatic litigation.

So as the nation wrings its collective hands in despair over what to do
about the murders at Columbine High School and their media-driven clones,
we would be well advised to remember the law of large numbers, the illusory
nature of fear and our penchant to focus on the most egregious events.
Most of what we dread, as Glassner convincingly argues, is the vaporous
byproduct of a culture of fear of which we are both creators and victims.

Michael Shermer, Author of "Why People Believe Weird Things," and the
Forthcoming "How We Believe: the Search for God in an Age of Science," is
Publisher of Skeptic Magazine.

Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times