On Fear

“Mine is the last voice that you will ever hear. Do not be afraid.” Perhaps apropos that this came up in a song tonight. It got me thinking again about something that has been troubling me for quite a while. The context for the quote is that it came out of some civil defense preparedness training films in England in the late 70s and early 80s. If you are a fan of 80s music, and especially the 12” or remix, you may be familiar with the quote as being a sample used in remixes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes. Sometimes, it’s just the first sentence and sometime’s it’s the whole thing. The idea of using it here was to drive the point home about what the song was about. Two Tribes is essentially a political song talking about the Cold War that was probably at its height when the song was recorded with a trigger-happy Reagan in the White House and an inscrutable and rapidly rotating collection of Soviet premiers in the Kremlin. The uncertainty and the us vs. them mentality was either at its worst or it just seemed it with the rhetoric being broadcast around the world as cable TV made everything more immediate.

The Cold War was just another way to bring people in line with a particular way of thinking. If you drive people to fear the enemy with a lot of language about how they are coming over to take everything away from you and kill everyone, you can get those people to get behind a lot of policies that may not be in their best interests. As it turned out in the end, the Soviets really had no ability to do anything at all to come after us. Their technology and their infrastructure was completely inadequate and they had their hands full with their neighbors. The Russian bear, as it turns out, had no bite. Same thing with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

We continue to be afraid of everything, simply because no one is asking the right questions. Why are you voting for the candidate you are voting for this fall? Because the other candidate would be worse. The entire campaign for both candidates will likely be entirely based around how bad the other one will be. They are using our instinct for fear of the unknown against us. How does that help us get ahead in the end? How do we ever focus on the right answers when all we are encouraged to do is be afraid of everyone else? Of course, the news media doesn’t help at all here. You get people afraid and they are more inclined to watch your product so they can know all the ways they need to be afraid. Fear almost seems to be addictive.

I see the same thing in the way we approach the problem of information security. If you present even people who have experience in the information technology (IT) field about something relating to infosec, they will often a) jump straight to a solution even before they’ve heard or understood the problem, and b) base their decision in fear of what is going to happen. Rather than taking a rational and logical approach, the immediate instinct appears to be “what is the worst thing I can imagine happening and multiply that by 10?” It’s utterly illogical and irrational. You can’t make a case for protecting yourself by saying “all the badness!!!” Hyperbole simply doesn’t help make your case. You can’t scare a business into spending a lot of money on people and technology you have no justification for.

One of my favorite questions when I do anything with risk in an online class is just having students identify a risk from their daily lives. It takes the whole concept out of the technology space. From this perspective, and if you look at the dictionary, risk is defined as exposure to the potential for loss or damage. We are talking about potential, which means you factor in probability to really get an idea of risk. I’ve had students who say that driving is a risk because they could die. Well, you’ve jumped to an extreme situation but what is the likelihood of that. Just because death may be involved doesn’t make it more of a risk. What it means is that is an outcome that you are the most afraid of but that doesn’t mean the risk increases because the probability of you dying on the road is really quite low. Think about the number of hours you have been driving over the course of your life and you haven’t died yet. The vast majority of people on the roads have an accumulation of driving time the measures in … years? They haven’t died. This means that it’s a very low probability, which dramatically lowers the overall risk.

Jumping straight to the thing that could lead to something you really fear is not an understanding of risk. Focusing on fear is how we currently live our lives in the modern world, though. It’s what we are encouraged to do. Look at the news. Zika virus!! Be afraid!! It’s coming to your neighborhood real soon now!! Think about all of the incidents that the news has incited us into a complete lather about going back decades. The Communists are coming! (they didn’t) The Communists are infiltrating our government! (they didn’t in reality and certainly no more so than we did in the other direction, so perhaps a bit hypocritical) There are razor blades in the apples you get at Halloween! (there weren’t) The Advil is poisoned! (or was it Tylenol? I forget. either way, it wasn’t) We are programmed to react to fear. It’s a pretty serious motivator.

Wouldn’t life be so much easier if we just opted to not react everytime someone attempted to provoke us to fear? Wouldn’t it be better if you were able to think critically about whether it’s realistic or probably and, thus, something to actually be concerned enough to do something about? A lack of understanding is not a risk and also not an opportunity to be afraid. It’s just an opportunity to educate yourself.