I’ve heard that fear is a powerful motivator. Apparently there’s something to that notion because you see lots of people getting elected by promising to protect us from the host of mounting horrors that exist … well … everywhere. Scare tactics are a marketing tool second only to sex.
According to the Pew Research Center, a study in late 2016 showed that more than half of the registered voters (57%) believed that crime had gotten worse since 2008. We live in a time of great consternation and dread.
As it turns out, a sizable chunk of the country is delusional. Contrary to popular belief, violent crime and property crime have plummeted like a shot duck since their historical peak in the early 1990s, those halcyon days of “law and order” under George H.W. Bush. And, believe it or not, gun sales have declined dramatically since Trump’s election.
What seems to have gone up, actually, is our perception of peril. Just as so many of us believe that we’re one scratch ticket away from being a one-percenter, we are also confident that there’s a malevolent person lurking out there bent on doing us in.
Why all the anxiety? Surely it can’t be baseless. (And while we’re at it, what kind of cynic would exploit our trepidation?)
George Gerbner, who was a professor at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, came up with a theory to explain this phenomenon in 1976, along with his co-author, Larry Gross.
In a nutshell, Gerbner asserted that our perceptions of the world’s dangers were profoundly influenced and distorted by the television we were consuming. (Remember television?) He’d founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project in 1968 to study how changes in television content colored how viewers saw the world. Hint: Not positively. Gerbner coined the phrase “mean world syndrome” to describe how people who consumed lots of TV, especially violent content, were more likely to see the world as a threatening place.
Gerbner also claimed we aren’t as immune to the messages we were subjecting ourselves to as we liked to believe. Most of the shows, at the time, were devoted to crime and medical dramas, and consequently we collectively thought that there were many more cops, lawyers and doctors than was actually the case. We also thought that we were at great risk of being criminally harmed. We were, and are, much more likely to die slipping in the shower or bathtub than being killed by some guy. But I guess no one has come up with a way to market a suspenseful TV show about a lethal bathtub accident.
In the 1990s, voters supported candidates from both parties who “protected” us by enacting three-strikes-you’re-out laws and mandatory sentencing— and by reinforcing our paranoia by coining terms like “superpredators” and “wilding.” Lurid headlines and graphic news images further distorted our sense of danger. We were so convinced that we were at the threshold of civil collapse that we destroyed countless families and lives by our overreaction. And who was going to disabuse us of our agita? Politicians? The gun industry? The media? Nah. Sure, some egghead professors, scientists and data analysts suggested that we were not thinking rationally — but then who are you going to count on in a shootout? Dirty Harry or Atticus Finch?
So here we are in 2018, and TV has been replaced by the internet, a much more effective propagator of paranoia and alarm, and we are safer than we have been in the past 30 years. And yet, we are bristling with guns and cameras, and we’re making Draconian laws to defend ourselves from a risk that is vastly disproportionate to our response. Honestly, we should know better.
Bill Dwight is a Northampton City Councilor and a pie wrangler at the Florence Pie Bar.