"Scared Selfish," Or, "You Can't Blame The Mess We're In On 9/11 Anymore."

In 2004, the academic journal American Sociologist published a special issue on the "sociology of terrorism." One of the more interesting articles was entitled, "Scared Selfish: A Culture of Fear's Values in the Age of Terrorism."

The argument put forward by the authors of the article depends, in part, upon Barry Glassner's 1999 study (note well the date), The Culture of Fear (COF). Glassner's book describes how certain interest groups in American society consistently employ fear as a tactic to circumvent reasoned debate about crucial issues of public concern. Fear is used because it generates a visceral response that drowns out deliberation and induces a craving for comfort and frantic attempts to silence that craving. In the process, intelligent discussion is silenced as well. When rational deliberation is short-circuited, democracy is rendered dysfunctional.

The claim that those who commit acts of terror are enemies of democracy is hardly controversial; but what about those who engage in the systematic inculcation of a culture of fear through other means? Do they not occupy much of the same moral ground as terrorists? After all, fear-mongers target their appeals to the same portion of the human brain as terrorists: the so-called "reptilian" brain. Perhaps fear-mongers are best thought of as individuals and groups engaged in a form of "soft" terror.

Glassner argues in COF that Americans are frightened of the "wrong things"--e.g., Willie Horton, "Welfare Queens" and, most recently, universal health-care's government-sponsored "death panels." By the way, it does not strike me as merely coincidental that these three examples were put into popular circulation by those who hug the political right. That said, those on the left are certainly not above circumventing rational deliberation when the opportunity arises.

Glassner argues further that even when Americans fear legitimate threats, those threats are systematically exaggerated for tactical advantage. The authors of "Scared Selfish" offer an interesting example: "if an attack like the one on 9/11 occurred every year, a person residing in this country is still 15 times more likely to be murdered by a fellow citizen and has a similar likelihood of dying in a car accident. Clearly, by these objective numbers, the threat of dangerous drivers and homicidal neighbors is greater than the threat of terrorism" (p. 95).

We know (or claim to know) those who constitute the "hard" terror architects of the American "culture of fear." But who are its "soft" terror architects? The authors of "Scared Selfish" suggest several candidates:

Creating and sustaining this fear serves some of the most powerful interests in American society. The media are interested in cultivating fear because it sells more ads and publications. The more afraid people are, the more information they crave. Politicians are interested in cultivating fear because it provides fertile ground to offer solutions. The more afraid people are, the more they crave solutions to the problem. As an added benefit, a political entity can blame the opposition for creating the dreaded conditions and stake out safe political positions against the danger. Commercial interests also benefit as people seek goods and services to make them safer. Finally, various governmental institutions benefit as they receive more funding to take care of the problem (p. 94).

These are all fairly obvious candidates and, in my view, are all rightly implicated. But we can provide more specific identification of the culprits involved: individual by individual, corporation by corporation, government agency by government agency. Fear, though naturally occurring in every culture, is present in unnatural quantities in American culture and, as Glassner's book demonstrates by its publication date, this is not a post-9/11 phenomenon. Just as major brand name cigarette manufacturers raised levels of nicotine in their products in order to addict their victims, the architects of what Seymour Melman once named the Permanent War Economy (the Pentagon, the Congress, Presidential Administrations stretching from at least Truman to Obama, defense contractors and weapons manufacturers) and their allies in this country's news and communications media are not anonymous. They have names, addresses (physical and electronic), and phone numbers. A minority of these individuals have jobs that depend upon public elections for their tenure—only a very small minority.

This brings up the widely suppressed fact that our “democracy” is largely controlled by individuals and organizations not held directly accountable to the people; consequently, to describe the American government as “democratic” is an unwarranted conceit. Even so, the term “democracy” ought to be retained by Americans as a prescription, so long as we do not trick ourselves into believing that it is adequate as a description. That said, the “soft” terror enemies of our democratic aspirations can be, and should be, specifically identified and held publically accountable for every contribution that they make towards the continued inculcation of the culture of fear. We must drive them from power and take our economy and our government from their grip.

On October 31, 1963, then Sen. George S. McGovern attempted to do this very thing. For on that long ago date, Sen. McGovern introduced a bill on the floor of the Senate entitled the Economic Conversion Act. That bill was designed to facilitate the conversion of this country’s economy from its basis in non-productive warfare industries to productive peace-time industries. McGovern introduced this bill in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis and, therefore, at (or near) one of the high water marks of the Cold War. In other words, he attempted to prepare the country to abandon the culture of fear despite the fact that it was, even then, deep in fear’s embrace. The provisions of the Act were designed to reassure the large numbers of people employed in the so-called “defense” industry that the Federal government would actively supervise their transition to employment in new and productive peace-time industries. McGovern hoped to counter the (fear-driven) objections to dismantling the Permanent War Economy: too many people will lose their jobs, our entire way of life will collapse.

The bill went nowhere, of course. I believe it received a total of two votes. I don’t know who voted for it besides McGovern himself. Within a month, President Kennedy was shot dead and Lyndon Johnson entered the Oval office and began to escalate the United States’ utterly unwarranted aggression against the people of Viet Nam. The tyranny of the monied warrior class (the de facto Plutocratic War Party that runs this country) had triumphed again and McGovern’s attempt to use the machinery of government to undermine the culture of fear was delayed. Nine years later, when McGovern’s populist campaign for the Presidency took the Democratic Party establishment by surprise, powerful figures within that establishment (we can name names: Hubert Humphrey, George Meany, and Richard Daley) worked to deprive McGovern of the support of organized labor, the Chicago party machine and, in the case of Humphrey, attempted to publicly discredit McGovern by insinuating that he had ties to the Communist Party.

It isn't much, but we can point fingers. We can name names. We can refuse direct participation in the Permanent War Economy. We can resist the culture of fear and renounce those who appeal to our reptilian brains and trade on our insecurities.

Let 9/11/09 be just another day. Or let it be the first day that we begin to assert our right as a people to be free from the purveyors of “soft” terror. Let us at least act as free women and men, pledging to one another that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Perhaps if we begin to act in that way, we will eventually come to believe that we deserve to live free from the manufactured culture of fear and the Permanent War Economy that is its sole beneficiary.