Scary vs. Dangerous

What scares us and what’s actually dangerous are often very different things.  Forgetting that can lead to tragic results.  Despite that, in scary times, even smart people can be heard justifying knee-jerk responses by repeating the unhelpful adage, “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”  Rather than just accepting that, let’s think about it for a minute.

Looking at Reactions to Past Scares

In the wake 9/11, many Americans were afraid of flying.  We can all understand feeling that way after watching that day’s events unfold, but it led to an interesting result… more people died in the months following 9/11 because they listened exclusively to their fears and opted for an obviously more dangerous form of travel: driving.  One study showed an additional 353 people died in just the three months following 9/11 because of highway miles being chosen over flying miles, adding well over 10% to the fatalities of the day itself.

Likewise, nuclear power generation scares us.  Many of us remember the breathless reporting on Three Mile Island and Fukushima.  A lot of us watched the fantastic HBO miniseries about Chernobyl.  It’s scary stuff: unseen danger using a technology most of us only loosely understand.  But is it dangerous?  Pretty much exactly the opposite… it’s the safest form of energy generation – by far – that we have available to us AND it’s far better for the environment than burning fossil fuels.  It’s not really even disputed, but we see fewer and fewer nuclear plants and consequently hundreds of thousands of deaths each year related to the burning of coal around the world.

And Then Looking at Today’s Response

Which brings us to COVID-19.  To date, it seems equivalent to a somewhat nasty strain of the flu.  Solely for argument’s sake, let’s say it’s three times worse than the average annual flu.  Are we responding with three times our normal flu response?  More like 3,000 times, or maybe 3,000,000 times.

Schools and businesses are telling students and workers to stay home, travel is being restricted and major events in places with no cases of COVID-19 are being cancelled.  Heck, Italy just pulled a “hold my beer” and shut its whole damn self down.  Store shelves are devoid of water, canned goods and toilet paper.  The economy worldwide is slowing precipitously, and stock markets are down almost 20%.

The crazy thing is… these are no longer responses to COVID-19 – I can’t find many people who are actually afraid of that – they are responses to the response to COVID-19. 

But Why Does this Happen?

So, what’s going on?  We’re responding to the delivery of information rather than the actual information.  Just imagine if we had 24-hour reporting on the daily death toll of the modern American diet!  We would see updates on heart disease, diabetes, dementia and death that would positively dwarf anything COVID-19 is likely to drum up.  So why don’t we?  Because there’s nothing new or spectacular about dying from eating poorly.  As a result, we focus far more of our energy on something far less dangerous than a controllable mass killer.

We need to take a page from the Buddhists and Stoics by acknowledging an emotional response like fear, but then simply treating it as a signal to look more deeply into the thing causing the fear.  Is it really a threat, or just new?  How big a threat is it?  Is it worth my time, or would I do better to focus elsewhere? 

Putting our rational minds in charge of our final decisions and our actions is something well within the capabilities of human beings.  It is one of our most important advantages and traits.  Right now, we seem to be rejecting the whole concept as heartless and callous.  What’s actually heartless is condemning millions to poverty, disease and death to appease our own fears.