Franklin D. Roosevelt at his first inaugural address encouraged Americans to stand up to that “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
It may have taken a few more generations, but America finally lost the war against that “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror".

We've been afraid before, but this time its different.
In the 1950's American society united in a fear of nuclear annihilation. During WWII the country's common fear of fascism united the nation in the war effort.
However, today our fear divides us. We fear our government. We fear strangers. We fear our neighbors. More than anything else, we fear things that aren't there, and its tearing our society apart.

An alien watching primetime television could be forgiven for thinking that the United States was undergoing a tsunami of serial killers and terrorists. Then there are shows like The Following, where a cult of serial killers act like a terrorist cell. On every station there is a plethora of sick, twisted, graphic murders.
  Those fictional serial killers usually target children and women. So is it any surprise that Americans today are terrified for our children? Especially when we are told that a child goes missing every 90 seconds.
  That's a terrifying number! No wonder parents are freaked out.

 The problem with the 90 seconds number is that it implies something that isn't true.

 
   There are lots of reasons why a child may go missing - they may have run away, or failed to come home on time - and cases like this may be worrying, but they are very different from the case of a child being kidnapped by a stranger in the street.
   Just 115 of the 797,500 children were subject to what Finkelhor and his co-authors define as a "stereotypical" kidnapping - that is, they were abducted by a stranger and detained overnight, perhaps permanently, or taken at least 50 miles away.
  In fact, almost half the children recorded in the study were what the authors call "benign missing". That means their parent or guardian thought they were missing, but they soon turned up.

Every 90 seconds is a lot more scary than once every three days.
  What's more, the data from the study is 15 years old, when the crime rate was significantly higher than today.

  Just as staggering is the fact that men are 76% of violent crime victims, not women.

  You would never know that from TV shows, of which 66% contain violence, the vast majority of which contains violent acts without remorse. You would think that white women made up the bulk of murder victims.
  In a 2009 study violence against women on TV grew 120% over a five year period and 400% against adolescent women. 92% of these attacks were explicitly depicted.
  But when you look at the real  numbers you discover that white women are the safest race and gender.

 It's not that a lot of men don't die on TV. Legions of male cops, soldiers, heavies and henchmen have met their doom on primetime. It's just that they are expected to die.

  The violent crime rate in America has fallen to its lowest level since 1978. Violent crimes are happening at half the 1993 rate.
   In fact, the violent crime rate is about to hit a century low.

 This is fairly preliminary data, but Rick Nevin reports that if current trends keep up, we'll end 2013 with the murder rate in America at its lowest rate in over a century.

Some people refuse to believe the FBI statistics. It's understandable because we are hardwired to retain fear long after any scary experience. However, surveys show the exact same downward trend.

  The National Crime Victimization Survey reports that the rate of violent victimizations has declined by 67 percent since 1993. This reflects a 70 percent decline in rape and sexual assault; a 66 percent decline in robbery; a 77 percent decline in aggravated assault; and a 64 percent decline in simple assault.

 
The world is “more dangerous than it has ever been.”

  That's what Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last year during a Senate hearing. More dangerous than during the Cold War or WWII.
   That's pretty scary, right? I mean we have ISIS and al-Qaeda, and lots of other scary people out there. Just watch the news for Gawd Sakes!

 News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, “Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news. And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times.

 We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the military every year to fight terrorists, despite the fact that year after year more Americans die from lightening strikes than terrorism. Your chances of being killed by a terrorist are about one in 20 million.
   Of course the media and politicians tell us a very different story.

 The number of wars are considerably less than a few decades ago. What's more they aren't as bloody as they have been.

  It's not just the number and intensity of wars that have declined. It's the overall level of violence as well.

 England, Canada, and most other industrialized countries have also seen their homicide rates fall in the past decade. Among the 88 countries with reliable data, 67 have seen a decline in the past 15 years.

 Even places famous for crime have seen unprecedented declines in murder.

Bogotá, Colombia has witnessed a fivefold decline in homicides in the last 20 years.
Murders in Medellín, Colombia have dropped 85% in the same two decades.
In São Paolo murders are down 70% in a decade.
In Rio de Janeiro they are down almost 2/3rd in five years.
In Russia they are down 46%. In South Africa the murder rate has been cut in half.

Consequences of our Culture of Fear

  It's easy to blame all this manufactured fear on some sort of conspiracy to control the public, but the real causes are much more pedestrian.
  The media pushes out the fear simply to get ratings so they can keep their jobs.

 As networks battle for ratings and newspapers grasp at disappearing readers, the urge to lead with sensational stories grows....
  Television shows seem almost single-mindedly intent on triggering our anxieties—and tend to lay the blame squarely on those fools who were not fearful enough. In a recent episode of CBS’ Criminal Minds, a pair of grief-stricken parents blubbered in front of the agents sent to recover their abducted son. The father, it seems, had argued that the 5-year-old ought to be allowed to walk to a friend’s house . . . alone. “I thought we were babying him,” he moans, as the aggrieved mother issues a stony, reproachful stare.

 You also see the fear hype in politics today, and that naturally triggers a paranoid response, but once again the pedestrian reasons make more sense.
   Corporate ownership of the modern political process doesn't allow the politicians much wiggle-room for bold changes in the system. Or even the ability to address critical social problems.
  So without the traditional tools of politics to motivate their political base to vote - the ability to inspire them with bold initiatives - they are forced to use other methods.

 In a telling preelection episode of Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart, reporter John Oliver dove into the crowds at campaign rallies for then–­Democratic candidate Barack Obama and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. With total aplomb, citizens at each rally expressed their fear, even terror, as to what would happen if their candidate’s opponent were to be elected. Oliver’s conclusion? “There’s no red America, no blue America. There’s just one scared shitless America.”
..
  Savvy politicians understand exactly how and when to exploit these tendencies. “In conditions when conventional political ideologies fail to inspire, there is a temptation to resort to the politics of fear,” writes Alex Gourevitch in the Winter 2008 edition of the journal n+1. “The hope is that the quest for security, rather than anything higher, can become a unifying political principle in its own right.”

 Fearmongering simply to win an election often works, but is harmful when it becomes the primary tool of the system, which it has.
  Even more disturbing is that the American public demands the fearmongering from its elected officials. Much like public's commitment to the false idea that the world is getting more dangerous, and an irrational rejection of facts that show otherwise (on both the Republican and Democratic sides of the aisle), no politician could possibly get elected these days if he told the American public that their fears were misplaced.

 “The political calculus always favors the politics of fear,” says Gardner. The rhetoric is so dominant that, until just recently, to simply reject it—to declare that the public’s fears are perhaps partially unfounded, if not at the very least answering to miscalculated priorities—would amount to political suicide.

 A lot of people have written about how media violence desensitizes people. Other speculate that is causes violence. Both claims are controversial.
   For some reason few people have spent as much time drawing a much more logical conclusion:

   Too much television/movie/game violence makes people develop an unfounded (and possibly unconscious) belief that there is more violence in society than there actually is.

   Is it really so hard to believe that we are conditioning ourselves to fear? Scientists have already shown that there are two paths in the brain for fear: one conscience and one subconscious.
   It's not that our fear isn't real. It's very real. The problem is that our reasons to be afraid are imaginary, but have real world consequences.

  Consider how our mostly media manufactured fear of child abduction prevents children from playing outside, but doesn't save them from a sedentary lifestyle which causes a whole host of physical and emotional health problems.

  It's easy to attribute some people's obsession with guns on paranoia, but isn't an unfounded fear of danger from violence just a more mild version of paranoia?
  So while the general public becomes more and more irrationally fearful of being a victim of violence, some turn to guns for safety. On an emotional level it makes sense.

  It can also go a long ways toward explaining why cops are shooting more citizens, even while they are safer than ever before.
  They watch the same cop shows we do, which depict cops being killed by the score.
The news media loves hyping the fear.
 Two years ago the NY Times told us that police being killed on duty was going up. Three years ago MSNBC reported a "war on cops going on".
   One Texas sheriff told NBC that "I think it's a hundred times more likely today that an officer will be assaulted compared to twenty, thirty years ago." These sorts of claims are rarely questioned.

   Just last year the St. Louis Police were complaining about being outgunned.

 “We’re outgunned out there all the time,” said Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers Association. “The thugs out there have dangerous and sophisticated weapons.”

He obviously never mentioned that his department has military-grade weapons.

 The reality for cops is much different.

 The number of fatalities of U.S. law enforcement officers in 2013 is the lowest in 54 years and the number dying in firearms-related incidents is the lowest since the 1800s, according to a preliminary report by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

That's the lowest number of police officers killed in the line of duty since 1959, despite the population of the country doubling.

  Of course there are other factors involved, and we can and should debate how much of an influence each of those factors influence the trends.
  But shouldn't we take a moment to consider that maybe, just maybe, the cops are telling the truth? That time and time again they were afraid for their lives.
Irrationally afraid? Yes, most likely. But afraid nonetheless.
Consider that society in general is irrationally afraid these days, we are hardly the ones to hold that against them.
  That doesn't excuse them for killing unarmed people, but it does put it into a different context.

  According to every TV show and politician running for office, the solution to our exploding violent crime rate, the one that doesn't exist except in our minds, has always been locking people up, but studies show that mass incarceration doesn't work.
   However, that hasn't stopped us from trying anyway.

 I remember how Cold War Warriors used to point out the size of the population and the brutality and torture in Soviet gulags as proof that the Soviet Union wasn't free.
  What does it say about America that we put people in prison at the same rate as at the peak of Stalin's rule?
  And as for brutality, 1 in 10 prisoners are raped.
  As for torture, at any one time around 80,000 prisoners are in solitary confinement, often for years at a time.

  We are paying a very heavy price for our culture of fear. We've created a society that is increasingly intolerant, increasingly isolated, increasingly less free, all in the name of slaying demons that don't exist except in our minds.

Scary Terrorists

  Terrorists, real ones, are motivated to exaggerate their terrorist acts in order to gain volunteers and drum up funding.
   So does the government. FBI agents and CIA intelligence officials, a top constitutional and military law expert, Time magazine, the Washington Post and others, have all said that the government was "“trying to create an atmosphere of fear in which the American people would give them more power”.
   The former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge admitted that he raised the terror alert to help Bush win reelection. Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Senate that war on terror is a “a mythical historical narrative”.
   So what does the government resort to? Create a threat.

 There’s only one small problem. In the absence of real terror attacks in the U.S., it’s difficult to keep the stupid serfs shivering in a corner in the fetal position. Enter fake terrorist attacks; funded, created and planned by the FBI.

 The terror threat in the West is nearly non-existent outside of what the FBI creates. You are in more danger of dying from brain-eating parasites, food poisoning, and “autoerotic asphyxiation” than by terrorists.
   What's more, 97.5% of terrorists attacks on U.S. soil since 1970 have been carried out by non-muslims. The percentage in Europe is similar, and an overwhelming majority of victims of terrorism are muslim.
Time after time the FBI has paid informants large amounts of cash to help "disrupt a terror plot".
  They then find a target and they give him the detailed plans for the attack and money to carry it out. Sometimes the target refuses to go along with the plot and the FBI has to conjole him into it.

  In the case of the impoverished James Cromitie, the target refused to go along with the FBI-sponsored plot of eight months. Only after the FBI agreed to pay him $250,000 did he finally agree. He was sentenced to 25 years.
   Judge McMahon wrote an increadible indictment of the government that you should read:

 As it turns out, the Government did absolutely everything that the defense predicted in its previous motion to dismiss the indictment. The Government indisputably “manufactured” the crimes of which defendants stand convicted. The Government invented all of the details of the scheme - many of them, such as the trip to Connecticut and the inclusion of Stewart AFB as a target, for specific legal purposes of which the defendants could not possibly have been aware (the former gave rise to federal jurisdiction and the latter mandated a twenty-five year minimum sentence). The Government selected the targets. The Government designed and built the phony ordnance that the defendants planted (or planned to plant) at Government-selected targets. The Government provided every item used in the plot: cameras, cell phones, cars, maps and even a gun. The Government did all the driving (as none of the defendants had a car or a driver’s license). The Government funded the entire project. And the Government, through its agent, offered the defendants large sums of money, contingent on their participation in the heinous scheme...
  “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that James Cromitie could never have dreamed up the scenario in which he actually became involved. And if by some chance he had, he would not have had the slightest idea how to make it happen.”