Fearmap

Over the past year or so I went on the "nextdoor" website from time to time. It's like local facebook where you see posts from people in your neighborhood rather than your "friends". One common theme of the posts on there is: "here is an animal in my backyard and I am afraid." The animal might be a bear, a coyote, a fox, or even a squirrel or raccoon. The fear in the case of the squirrel or raccoon is that "it might damage my house." The fear in the case of the coyote is "it might kill me or my pets!"

People are similarly afraid of guns, or terrorism, or whatever the media is talking about. The animal fear, though is a little more interesting to me because it's "folk fear", that is, it's an organic fear topic rather than a media fabricated source of anxiety.

People don't post a picture of their car and say, "this thing might kill me!" even though there's been tens of thousands of traffic fatalities per year for ages, and they increased in recent years because of smartphone distractions. About 5,000 people die in the US now per year because of smartphone use in cars. (last time I looked) The odds of a severe car accident over a person's average lifespan is almost 1:1.

Fear is a pretty useful thing. It's anticipation of danger. It was pretty useful to be afraid of a cave that might have a bear in it 14,000 years ago, for example. Fear preps the body to react. It focuses the mind and sharpens the senses.

Fear about extremely unlikely things, like terrorist attack or mass school shootings, is a pretty big waste and leads to a big waste of resources and can lead to irrational plans, like Ohio's "armed teacher" plan. That's a very stupid plan. It's going to require a lot of expense and regulation to implement. It's like investing huge quantities of money against bear attacks or lightning safety because of media driven hysteria. Fear driven mass action seems pretty stupid most of the time.

Anyway, it's pretty clear that the "bear in the cave" model shouldn't apply to most things, but it does. The bear in the cave model is what hysterical women use when they see a coyote in their back yard. They also apply it to school shootings.

The reality for most people is they will die of a disease that's probably caused by their diet. If they stick to a strict diet, they will die of old age, or an accident. The things that will almost certainly cause their eventual demise do not cause fear. The things that are extremely unlikely to cause their death are a source of terror.