Terror Management

by digby

Here’s an interesting post at Thought Theatre about something called Terror Management Theory, which is a fascinating study of how people react to the knowledge of their own mortality. It’s particularly relevant to this ongoing sense among some Americans that terrorism is an existensial threat even if they live in Topeka (or especially because they live in Topeka.)

When looking at the fact that nearly two thirds of Americans polled seemingly accept a program of widespread domestic surveillance, the theory offers a plausible explanation. Essentially, anything that helps assuage the fear of death can potentially be seen as an acceptable situation whether it be rational, real, or imagined. To offer an analogy, one might look at those who refuse to fly in an airplane…despite statistics demonstrating that flying is safer than driving, the fear of what is perceived to be a more certain death can overcome the logical data. I suspect this same thinking is, to a degree, at play in these otherwise confounding numbers.

In fact, after the 2004 election, a number of psychologists speculated that fear of death may have actually given President Bush the needed edge.

Michael Tomasky over at TAPPED also attributes the public’s evident acceptance of the NSA spying on citizens to a fear of terrorism. Perhaps that’s true. I would certainly agree that it was true in the first years after 9/11. (Ezra says the public hasn’t thought it through and Greg Sargent says the Washington post poll is flawed.)

I suspect, however, that we are dealing with something completely different: people are just not shocked at having their personal information in a data base. After all, it seems like any Tom, Dick or Ravi has access to your financial information, your shopping habits and your online surfing habits. Perfect strangers can google your name and find the term paper you wrote in the 8th grade, along with your last four addresses and your current phone number. You can call up that satellite mapping thing and zoom in right on your house — and find out how much it and all your neighbors’ houses are worth. It just doesn’t seem like a big deal in America anymore to have strangers know your habits.

What Americans are not used to, however, is a government invading their privacy and using the long arm of the law against them for its own purposes. Corporate Big Brother is mostly just an opportunity to sell you things or to deny you the ability to buy things — a pain in the neck, but rarely ruinous. Government Big Brother is a whole different animal. You get caught in that maw and you might just not come out. I don’t think they understand the difference.

The key way to talk about this, I think, is to focus on the fact that they’ve been lying about it for no good reason. For instance, it’s quite strange that they keep making the bizarre argument that terrorists didn’t know their phones were being tapped. Is there anybody above the age of six who believes that? (And anyway, if they’re that stupid, they’ll reveal themselves in some other way and the FBI can just get a court order like they would with any other stupid criminal.) If this program is legal then there’s really no logical reason why they didn’t make it public. They must be hiding something.

That’s something the public can understand. They don’t trust this administration but they just haven’t been shown a good reason why allowing the government to handle the same private information that Verizon and Bell South has is more dangerous to their health than the terrorist boogeyman coming to Topeka to kill them in their beds. You’ve got to raise their suspicions, not rely on principle. In this age of no privacy, they don’t see why it’s a big deal.

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