The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,210

miles. In other words the number of people who died by avoiding air travel was six times the number of people who died in the airplanes on September 11.186 And of course the 9/11 attacks sent the United States into two wars that have taken far more American and British lives than the hijackers did, to say nothing of the lives of Afghans and Iraqis.

The discrepancy between the panic generated by terrorism and the deaths generated by terrorism is no accident. Panic is the whole point of terrorism, as the word itself makes clear. Though definitions vary (as in the cliché “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”), terrorism is generally understood as premeditated violence perpetrated by a nonstate actor against noncombatants (civilians or off-duty soldiers) in pursuit of a political, religious, or social goal, designed to coerce a government or to intimidate or convey a message to a larger audience. The terrorists may want to extort a government into capitulating to a demand, to sap people’s confidence in their government’s ability to protect them, or to provoke massive repression that will turn people against their government or bring about violent chaos in which the terrorist faction hopes to prevail. Terrorists are altruistic in the sense of being motivated by a cause rather than by personal profit. They act by surprise and in secrecy; hence the ubiquitous appellation “cowardly.” And they are communicators, seeking publicity and attention, which they manufacture through fear.

Terrorism is a form of asymmetrical warfare—a tactic of the weak against the strong—which leverages the psychology of fear to create emotional damage that is disproportionate to its damage in lives or property. Cognitive psychologists such as Tversky, Kahneman, Gigerenzer, and Slovic have shown that the perceived danger of a risk depends on two mental hobgoblins.187 The first is fathomability: it’s better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don’t. People are nervous about risks that are novel, undetectable, delayed in their effects, and poorly understood by the science of the day. The second contributor is dread. People worry about worst-case scenarios, the ones that are uncontrollable, catastrophic, involuntary, and inequitable (the people exposed to the risk are not the ones who benefit from it). The psychologists suggest that the illusions are a legacy of ancient brain circuitry that evolved to protect us against natural risks such as predators, poisons, enemies, and storms. They may have been the best guide to allocating vigilance in the prenumerate societies that predominated in human life until the compilation of statistical databases within the past century. Also, in an era of scientific ignorance these apparent quirks in the psychology of danger may have brought a secondary benefit: people exaggerate threats from enemies to extort compensation from them, to recruit allies against them, or to justify wiping them out preemptively (the superstitious killing discussed in chapter 4).188

Fallacies in risk perception are known to distort public policy. Money and laws have been directed at keeping additives out of food and chemical residues out of water supplies which pose infinitesimal risks to health, while measures that demonstrably save lives, such as enforcing lower highway speeds, are resisted.189 Sometimes a highly publicized accident becomes a prophetic allegory, an ominous portent of an apocalyptic danger. The 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant killed no one, and probably had no effect on cancer rates, but it halted the development of nuclear power in the United States and thus will contribute to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.

The 9/11 attacks also took on a portentous role in the nation’s consciousness. Large-scale terrorist plots were novel, undetectable, catastrophic (compared to what had come before), and inequitable, and thus maximized both unfathomability and dread. The terrorists’ ability to gain a large psychological payoff for a small investment in damage was lost on the Department of Homeland Security, which outdid itself in stoking fear and dread, beginning with a mission statement that warned, “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.” The payoff was not lost on Osama bin Laden, who gloated that “America is full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east,” and that the $500,000 he spent on the 9/11 attacks cost the country more than half a trillion dollars in economic losses in the immediate aftermath.190

Responsible leaders occasionally grasp the arithmetic of terrorism. In an unguarded moment during the 2004 presidential