The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,209

the men, the absence of democracy gave them the opportunity, but tens of millions of deaths ultimately depended on the decisions of just three individuals.

THE TRAJECTORY OF TERRORISM

Terrorism is a peculiar category of violence, because it has a cockeyed ratio of fear to harm. Compared to the number of deaths from homicide, war, and genocide, the worldwide toll from terrorism is in the noise: fewer than 400 deaths a year since 1968 from international terrorism (where perpetrators from one country cause damage in another), and about 2,500 a year since 1998 from domestic terrorism.178 The numbers we have been dealing with in this chapter have been at least two orders of magnitude higher.

But after the September 11, 2001, attacks, terrorism became an obsession. Pundits and politicians turned up the rhetoric to eleven, and the word existential (generally modifying threat or crisis) had not seen as much use since the heyday of Sartre and Camus. Experts proclaimed that terrorism made the United States “vulnerable” and “fragile,” and that it threatened to do away with the “ascendancy of the modern state,” “our way of life,” or “civilization itself.”179 In a 2005 essay in The Atlantic, for example, a former White House counterterrorism official confidently prophesied that by the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks the American economy would be shut down by chronic bombings of casinos, subways, and shopping malls, the regular downing of commercial airliners by shoulder-launched missiles, and acts of cataclysmic sabotage at chemical plants.180 The massive bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security was created overnight to reassure the nation with such security theater as color-coded terrorist alerts, advisories to stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape, obsessive checking of identification cards (despite fakes being so plentiful that George W. Bush’s own daughter was arrested for using one to order a margarita), the confiscation of nail clippers at airports, the girding of rural post offices with concrete barriers, and the designation of eighty thousand locations as “potential terrorist targets,” including Weeki Wachee Springs, a Florida tourist trap in which comely women dressed as mermaids swim around in large glass tanks.

All this was in response to a threat that has killed a trifling number of Americans. The nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks were literally off the chart—way down in the tail of the power-law distribution into which terrorist attacks fall.181 According to the Global Terrorism Database of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (the major publicly available dataset on terrorist attacks), between 1970 and 2007 only one other terrorist attack in the entire world has killed as many as 500 people.182 In the United States, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killed 165, a shooting spree by two teenagers at Columbine High School in 1999 killed 17, and no other attack has killed as many as a dozen. Other than 9/11, the number of people killed by terrorists on American soil during these thirty-eight years was 340, and the number killed after 9/11—the date that inaugurated the so-called Age of Terror—was 11. While some additional plots were foiled by the Department of Homeland Security, many of their claims have turned out to be the proverbial elephant repellent, with every elephant-free day serving as proof of its effectiveness.183

Compare the American death toll, with or without 9/11, to other preventable causes of death. Every year more than 40,000 Americans are killed in traffic accidents, 20,000 in falls, 18,000 in homicides, 3,000 by drowning (including 300 in bathtubs), 3,000 in fires, 24,000 from accidental poisoning, 2,500 from complications of surgery, 300 from suffocation in bed, 300 from inhalation of gastric contents, and 17,000 by “other and unspecified nontransport accidents and their sequelae.”184 In fact, in every year but 1995 and 2001, more Americans were killed by lightning, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and “ignition or melting of nightwear” than by terrorist attacks.185 The number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying. The cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has estimated that in the year after the 9/11 attacks, 1,500 Americans died in car accidents because they chose to drive rather than fly to their destinations out of fear of dying in a hijacked or sabotaged plane, unaware that the risk of death in a plane flight from Boston to Los Angeles is the same as the risk of death in a car trip of twelve