The elite cadre of people who read this blog know that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the emotion of fear lately. Just today I was wondering how it relates to the economy and our current recession.

Economic decisions are, at least partly, psychological decisions. If I’m trying to decide between buying a house, or waiting to see if the price drops, I’m testing my ability to predict the behavior of the other homebuyers in my market. And the length of time that I’m willing to wait has to do with the steeliness of my nerves — a psychological aspect of my character.

When Bush and Obama infused cash into the economy, they were essentially trying to tell people that cash was still liquid, and that that would keep things going until the economy naturally rebounded. It obviously didn’t work as well as they, particularly Obama, hoped. And I think the reason why is that people were asking themselves the obvious questions, “What if I spend (instead of save) and the economy doesn’t rebound quickly enough? Will I regret spending money now that I could use to eat in the future?”

This series of questions has a lot to do with why I haven’t purchased a new guitar lately. People, myself included, are understandably cautious. And caution is a very mild form of fear.

How we handle our economic decisions during a downturn is a bit like being locked in a closet. As a kid, when you were stuffed into a closet, you immediately panicked. You had a couple minutes of pure terror, then that kind of faded to extreme concern, and that went down a few notches to worry, and finally, hours later, you were genuinely bored. Fear and painful emotions have an extreme initial impact, but then go away.

I suspect there’s a lot of people right now putting off whether they should buy a new TV or set of camping supplies or guitar. They’re holding off, because they’re worried that the money they spend now is money they’ll need later. I think that as time goes on, that “worry” will ultimately become boring and they’ll say, “Aw, fuck it, let’s just buy the damn thing.”

Will that end the recession? Economics is a lot more complex than that, but I think that is a component.

Occasionally I will be engaging in deep, profound thought (of course, deep, profound thought is the only kind of thought I’m capable of engaging in) and a headline will arise about the very topic I’m contemplating. This happened recently while I was musing on the neurological processes related to the emotion of fear. All of a sudden, Juan Williams gets fired from NPR for stating on the Fox television network that Muslims on planes make him nervous. Here’s the exact quote.

“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

This comment has led many to accuse Williams of bigotry. Was he being bigoted? I think it depends on how you unpack his comment.

I’ve loosely touched on the idea in previous posts that we have different kinds of fear reactions. We have what might be called “shock,” which occurs when our limbic system fires off at the barest hint of a threat. We see something in our garden that looks like a snake and we jump. Seconds later, we realize it’s merely a garden hose.

We also have more conscious kinds of fear. When we contemplate crime or cancer we’re experiencing fear on a more cerebral level.

Now, let me state for the record that I don’t consider viewing flying Muslims as a threat to be a “reasonable” response. Yes, it’s possible these particular Muslims are planning to hijack your plane and fly it into a building, but the odds are slim. And, as many have pointed out, Muslims planning such an attack would probably not draw attention to themselves by wearing traditional Muslim garb.

However, it’s also not reasonable to jump at the sight of a garden hose. Primitive fear is not reasonable. More cerebral kinds of fear, like fears of crime or cancer, are reasonable to a degree (as long as they don’t take over your life.)

So was Juan Williams saying that he experiences a shot of primal, limbic fear when he sees Muslims on an airplane, or a more elevated kind of fear? It’s tough to say, but the use of the word “nervous” as well as “anxiety” — which I’ve heard him use in clarifying statements — implies to me that he’s experiencing a gut level, limbic kind of fear. The kind of fear one can’t expect to be reasonable (or non-bigoted.)

On the surface, there’s really nothing wrong with what Williams is saying: he just admitting that he experiences fear at certain kinds of stimuli. If he says he experiences fear whenever he sees men wearing rainbow clown wigs, who were we to tell him he’s not?

Was NPR right to fire Williams? NPR has made clear their reasons for his dismissal.

One reason he was fired, according to Vivian Schiller, NPR’s CEO, is that the company felt he wasn’t performing the role of a news analyst:
“News analysts may not take personal public positions on controversial issues; doing so undermines their credibility as analysts, and that’s what’s happened in this situation,” said Schiller in an email to NPR member stations, some of which are upset about Williams’ firing.

For the most part, this seems reasonable. If an NPR news analyst announced that he thought the Jews planned 9/11 and that the Jews were now sending an armada of men wearing rainbow clown wigs to get him, we would feel this analyst had undermined his own credibility. And we wouldn’t blame NPR for firing him.

However, Juan Williams has been on Fox for close to a decade (I think), during which time I’m sure he’s taken public positions on more than a few controversial issues. Why fire him now? My suspicion is that NPR has been wanting to axe Williams for some time, and this was the first available opportunity.

The whole controversy has led me to ask myself a question: do I get nervous when I see Muslims on planes? Certainly, I take note of them when I see them. It would be fair to say that their presence does remind me of 9/11. But I don’t recall ever experiencing that “twinge” of fear — I think my rational system has trained my primitive limbic fear system that the odds of being on a plane with terrorists are highly unlikely. On the other hand, if I was, say, flying into Israel, and saw a 28-year-old man in Muslim garb, I might have a little jolt. It’s not rational, but that kind of fear never is.

Lately, I’ve been reading a rather interesting book on the subject of fear. (I would tell you the title, but it’s in the other room, and I’m too lazy to get up and look.) So far, the book argues that humans developed a deep and resonant sense of fear to make up for our various shortcomings — we’re not particularly strong or fast, and we don’t have built-in defenses like armor or claws or fangs. We’re good at planning and strategy, but that’s not always useful in emergency situations where we need to make a decision pronto. We need a system of awareness that is very sensitive to potential dangers, hence fear.

The main driver of our system of fear is the limbic system which takes incoming sensory information and scans it for danger. It doesn’t take much to set off, which is why you sometimes see a long limp object in the yard and think “oh my God, it’s a snake,” only to discover it’s your garden hose. The limbic system presumes the worse, and investigates later.

Our system of fear also explains a lot of our base prejudices. It doesn’t take much to convince us that the people on the other side of the hill, or people of a different race, or who wear different clothes, are try to kill us. And through much of history, a sizable portion of those people were trying to kill us. Thus it’s easy for our brain to accept the evil motivations prescribed to what sociologists would refer to as “the other” — the person who is unlike us.

I’ve become increasingly interested in how the design of our neurological system relates to the realm of politics. One thing I’ve always noted is the willingness of people to believe utterly absurd things about their political opponents. Democrats don’t just want progressive taxation, they want to ultimately convert the United States into a socialist hellhole where white men are enslaved by cackling minorities. Republicans don’t want to just reduce government power, they want to hand the reins of government over to corporations who will then force everyone to eat bioengineered food while constructing a Gulag for Mexicans. Why is it always so easy to believe the worst about your opponent?

I suspect the limbic system is at play here. When fired up, the limbic system is responsible for releasing various hormones and neurotransmitters into our system. This may correspond to a state of fear, or perhaps to what I view as a cousin of fear, our sense of outrage. When you look at the world of political theater, many people seem addicted to their own outrage. I’m guessing they’re actually addicted to the rush of chemicals they get when they stir themselves up into a state of outrage.