A
blog of Bridge
Environment, updated most Thursdays
To
the Boston Terrorist(s),
You
may be feeling smug right now, after detonating two bombs in Boston that killed
three and injured over 100 more. I know the reaction you are trying to
generate. I study how people perceive and respond to uncertainty, and your
efforts definitely take advantage of these tendencies in us.
Not
familiar with the details? I’m not surprised. You are actually being
short-sided about human nature, only accounting for part of it. Let me go over
those details with you. In addition to teaching you that people are less easily
manipulated than you think, the details will also give readers of this letter
to you a sense of hope. I love my work in part because of the hope it provides
me and others.
People
have two gut reactions to uncertainty: denial and overreaction. In general, denial
is healthy…who would want to spend their waking hours (or worse, sleeping ones)
worrying about everything that might go wrong. It turns out that Murphy’s Law
is just plain wrong. So many things could
go wrong, but few actually do. We only have so much time, energy, and resources
to devote to averting problems. If we worried about every possibility, we would
spend our lives stressed and broke, and still be unable to prevent bad things
from happening. Fortunately, most risks pass by unnoticed or appreciated.
When
it does occur, overreaction can be a problem. In the US, tens of thousands of
people die from car crashes and gun violence each year. Yet we are much more
afraid of dying in a plane crash, particularly at the hands of terrorists like you.
Though they do so without your malice, sharks also play on our fear of the
unknown and have a prominent place in our nightmares despite only killing a few
people a year worldwide. Because of our tendency to freak out about rare
events, we do not always have our priorities right. In this way, you terrorists
can sometimes push us into sacrificing key resources, including our own
liberty, to calm the irrational fear you generate. That’s your ultimate
victory, right…to tear down our way of life, or better yet, to prompt us to
tear it apart ourselves?
You
won’t win, though. Counterbalancing the human tendency towards terror are
optimism and altruism. Optimism is tightly tied to our ability to ignore
uncertainty as described above. Altruism, the act of giving of ourselves to
help others, is a fascinating phenomenon. It challenges the simplified view of
evolution. How could a gene evolve to help others at the helpers expense, since
individuals with the helper gene would be less likely to survive and would instead
be helping the competition? Yet altruism is undeniable. Beehives, termite
mounds, and naked mole rat colonies are all examples of eusociality, where most
individuals give up reproduction in order to support the king, queen, and their
offspring. Evolutionary biologists believe that genetics play a key role in
eusociality, since individuals are sacrificing to help their close relatives
who are likely to share the helper gene. Similar examples can be found in some birds,
which will sometimes help their parents or sibling if they are unable to have
babies themselves in a given year. Not all altruism is directed at family,
though. Vampire bats live in colonies and require a blood meal every couple of
days to avoid starvation. It is common for full bats returning to the colony to
regurgitate food to the hungry, not all of whom are relatives. A mechanism that
might explain this phenomenon is that these bats are able to recognize each
other, and ones that do not share are ostracized from the colony. Thus, vampire
bat altruism may simply be a form of enlightened self-interest.
We
humans, however, present far more dramatic examples of altruism. Terrorist
attacks bring out the very best of these. Mr. Rogers, a beloved television
character, said it well:
“When I was a
boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look
for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
Indeed,
in the footage of the detonation of your bombs and the immediate aftermath, we
see many people rushing towards the noise, smoke, and chaos. Mind you, those
running away were not showing signs of overreaction to the possibility of additional
bombs. Their response was pretty reasonable. The helpers were the remarkable
ones. Their optimism and altruism put a major dent in your plans.
As
much as their efforts to help the injured and vulnerable make them heroes, they
deserve at least as much credit for the example they set by not letting your
strategy work. The damage you do in deaths and injuries, though tragic and
significant to the individuals who have suffered directly from your attack,
pales in comparison with the number of deaths and injuries that occur during
our daily lives from a wide range of less terror-provoking causes, such as
disease and accidents. The real threat you pose is the fear you create and its
ability to cloud our judgment on priorities. That is why we call you
terrorists.
Thanks
to the helpers, the ones who push back their fear and run to help others, your
strategy is doomed. Altruism and optimism are alive and well. Mr. Rogers’
mother was right…you will always find people who are helping. Their selfless
sacrifices serve as an example to counteract your entire strategy.
Sincerely,
Josh
For
more information, read our other blog posts and visit us at Bridge Environment.
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