A story making the rounds sets the scene of a happy day at the beach, interrupted by someone shouting, "Shark!" What does everyone do? Run up the beach to their car, light up a cigarette, and head for home. It is intended to start people talking. How many people are killed by sharks in the US (off its coasts) every year? Usually none. How many people die in auto accidents in the US every year? About 45,000. How many people die of smoking-related cancer and heart disease in the US every year? More than 400,000.
For another perspective, more people ought to take up genealogy. It is interesting to find out about ancestors' families who lived in Victorian or Elizabethan times, or earlier. It's also interesting to see how many children the "average woman" gave birth to. My own family, with four of us boys, was average for the times (1950s), and there were plenty of families with six or eight kids. My grandparents' generation is filled with 8- and 10-kid families, and twelve or more was not a rare occurrence. A closer look makes this not interesting, but appalling. One of my great-grandmothers gave birth to nine children. Three survived to adulthood. Two married and had children. Among the descendants of those two couples, two persons lived into the 20th Century. Then there's a change in the trend: The descendants now number fourteen. What happened? Twentieth Century medicine, advancing to 21st Century medicine. In all my life (61+ years), I've only known two youngsters under five who died. My grandparents knew dozens.
I remember the father of a friend who died in 1967 of "uremia", or kidney failure. Dialysis was not common, and was costly, not covered by insurance (for anyone who had it). I have a friend today who has had a kidney transplant. I visited him at the dialysis center once, before the transplant. Such living is more hoping to live some day. I remember another friend's mother dying of cancer in her fifties. Close to forty years later, in late 2000, I had a worse cancer, but radical surgery plus chemotherapy seems to have cured me.
Such a little thing, a Fiddleback. My first wife suffered a bite from one of these "recluse" spiders, and with medical help, was entirely well a month later. Her doctor said, without the medicines, she'd have healed in about six to twelve months, and had a permanent scar on her leg the size of a football. Unless she died first, which one Fiddleback victim in twenty does unless they are treated. The fact is, prior to about 1950, fear of disease and early death due to bites and other accidents was entirely realistic and justified. Then there are people to worry about. Consider this quote:
Gallup polls consistently find that about 20 percent of Americans say they "frequently" or "occasionally" worry about getting murdered despite the fact that only 0.0056 percent [that is one in 18,000-my insert] of Americans actually are murdered annually. The average American is three times as likely to be killed in a car crash.(I just looked up some figures. In 2004, there were 16,137 homicides in the US, and 42,636 people died in car crashes. The ratio is 2.6:1.) The quote is from page 192 of The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't—and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger by Daniel Gardner. The author surveys the results of many, many studies and trends that expose the psychological underpinnings of our fears, particularly the irrational ones. When F.D. Roosevelt said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he was talking about irrational, unreasoning fear, fear that posed a greater threat to the US than the Depression. If your first impulse upon seeing a fire is to grab yon bucket and throw its contents, doesn't it make sense to first check whether the bucket is filled with water rather than oil?
It is quite settled psychological understanding now that we have two minds, a quick, emotional, rapid-responding mind and a slower, rational, painstaking mind. The most ebullient youngster will sometimes take things slow, think things through and make a rational decision. The stodgiest, most Vulcan-like square among us can jump like an Olympian when the right emotional button is pushed. The author calls the emotional mind "Gut" and the rational one "Head". We frequently find Head and Gut at odds, and the book is about the distressing frequency with which Head not only loses, but fails to put up any struggle at all.
Head may say, "Nothing good happens fast," but at the tickle of a pickpocket's touch, Gut can send you pelting after a thief, not caring whether he might be younger and in better shape than you. Gardner relates losing his wallet in Nigeria late one evening, and his instant decision to enter a slum to look for it, a decision that could easily have cost his life. What did he wish to recover? A picture of his children. Gut had said, "Save the kids!!" and without thinking, he tried.
Why is this? Gut is inherited from ancestors going back to little primates who were easy pickings for most predators bigger than a house cat. Even when apes got to the size of modern Chimps, they were still no match for the average lion, tiger, or crocodile. Instant Gut reactions saved their lives frequently enough to become hard-wired into all their descendants, particularly in us. So what's the value of Head?
Those who live by Gut alone can have no social life. Head allows us to communicate, to plan, to relate to one another and anticipate others' responses. It makes us more than a forest full of hot-blooded apes. The ecology of Chimps shows us how much they gain from being social creatures, and they have only one-tenth the amount of Head-type brain that Humans have.
Sitting on a fence, if you start to slip, a very fast reaction—perhaps a quick grab—will most likely keep you from falling off. That is Gut in action. It is good at what it does. While picking your way across the yard in the twilight, a sharp rustle or snap in the nearby bush can have you on the porch before you know you've moved. That noise probably wasn't a lion, but your reaction to it was pre-programmed into your brain by critters for whom a lion was a high probability. But there are drawbacks.
I worked a few years as an electronic technician. One of my colleagues was quite a practical joker. Almost everyone had fallen for this one: when someone was intently working on a circuit, he'd creep in unseen and make a snap with two fingers of one hand against the palm of the other. It sounds just like a capacitor discharging. The victim would always jump and zip both hands into the armpits (the safest place to have your hands when sparks begin to fly). On one occasion, though, the circuit being worked on was worth thousands, and was broken. The joker didn't get fired, but had his own encounter with a management "lion", who convinced him that jokes were intolerable on the job.
Consider the folks in the beach story. Somehow, the awful carnage on the roads slips below our radar, and the slow death suffered by so many tobacco users doesn't arouse us at all. But a SHARK! Now you're talking about a really awful way to die!! Or are you? I've seen someone going out slowly; I think the shark would be quicker and better, given my druthers.
But the book is about, not just the science of our fears, but the science of Using fear. How many TV ads threaten you, more or less subtly: don't use our product, and you'll have less fun, or get fat, or fail to "hook up", or just DIE. There's no mystery behind all the advertising about cholesterol. Among the three or four risk factors for heart problems, cholesterol is the one we can take a pill for. And the people who make the pills can afford lots of advertising. Guess what the biggest risk factor is? Getting old.
Gotta tell it: One neighbor in Oklahoma was an elderly man whom I often encountered taking walks. He was a retired professor of agronomy, and had been active all his life. He had the best garden in the county. One time I didn't see him for more than two weeks. When I saw him again, he was going slower. He said he'd had a heart attack. He said to his doctor, "Look, my cholesterol is below 120, I walk an hour a day, I don't smoke, I'm thin. I don't have any risk factors for heart disease!" The doctor said, "You have the biggest risk factor there is: you are 84." But there's no pill for being 84.
Merck or Bristol-Myers Squibb don't advertise their pills to old people. The actors are all in their 40s and 50s. And the news media are no help. It is always true that "if it bleeds, it leads". I seldom watch the nightly news for this reason. I don't need my Gut stirred up with an hour of well-crafted, emotional stories about crime, malfeasance, evil politicians, disaster, and woe. And I have an alternate channel ready to watch if an ad comes on that's just too much.
Then there's terrorism. From 9/11/01 and for about a year, it was on the tip of every tongue. Then the fear died down. Not enough to prevent two wars. By the way, I'm still in favor of both wars' early goals. But both have gone on too long. Anyway, terror fear has gone up and down, but it is certain that, if the recent Presidential election had been held prior to mid-2003, Obama would have lost by a landslide, to any Republican willing to shake a rifle, and Mrs. Clinton would have fared even worse, had she been the nominee. But our fears of terror have been replaced by fears of losing our homes, our savings, our jobs and our retirement funds.
Oh, yes, we've gone on since the book was written a year ago. Just yesterday, a quisling Congress voted in favor of the greatest theft in history. This one and its sister theft (proceeds donated to Henry Paulson, and passed on to a huge pack of fools) total $US 1.6 trillion. The money won't accomplish its goal, but it'll make a bunch of people feel better for a while. Meanwhile, middle class America just might get around $400 per person "tax cut", which is really only a one-time rebate. Let's see, 1.6 trillion divided by 3oo million is 5,333 per person. So the "tax cut" comes to less than 1/12th of the total boondoggle.
Neither President Obama nor a single Democratic Senator or Representative was interested in the proverb that Nothing Good Happens Fast. It was just like those time-share condo salespeople, who offer you a "great deal" that is "only good today, right now". Never true, and never worth it.
I used to have a definition of politics, as the craft of forcing people to do what they're probably going to do anyway. I have a new one: scaring them into doing things the worst way possible. As a species, we have a lot more evolving to do.
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