WHY TERRORISM WORKS

Fear makes people do irrational things. Lead causes brain damage in babies and children, so for the last three decades, we’ve been trying to rid ourselves of lead, to the point that we have a no-tolerance stance on having practically any lead in anything. Never mind that lead has a ton of useful applications, and that we can use it effectively with practically zero health risk. We are simply unwilling to subject ourselves and our children to lead, out of fear that something bad will happen.

Vioxx was pulled off the market when it was revealed that it can cause heart attacks in some patients. Never mind that in addition to causing death, Vioxx has also been saving lives; where was the conservation about which one it was doing more of? Fear of taking a pill that would cause you to die led to public pressure to take a pill off the market that might just save many more peoples’ lives than it could have killed.

My point is not that lead and Vioxx have no danger to them. My point is that fear causes us to overvalue that danger. Fear causes us to skew our rational analysis of things, such that we do things that are simply not logical.

And that’s why terrorism works: because it creates fear. It causes us to act irrationally, from ordinary individuals all the way to the President. FDR may have said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but today we live in a much more menacing world. There are no easy answers in the war on terrorism. But may we at least respond to it correctly: with healthy fear, but not with irrationality.