Terrorism Exploits Your Brain

"7 years on. Why does it still evoke so much emotion when I think about it? I don't know...but I hope it never becomes just another day to me. Some things are worth a violent, visceral, angry, resolved, proud, patriotic remembrance." - PCCboard

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I have waited until now to post this, in order to not join the flood of September 11 posts about remembering what happened seven years ago. But following uplinktruck's comments to my last post, I think it's time.

I do not commemorate 9/11. It is just another day for me. Just as many people are killed by a lightning strike as by terrorists.

I understand that sounds callous, but isn't it also callous to weigh a smaller tragedy as greater than a very large one? The hysterical emotion provoked by ghosts of 9/11 leads directly to a bigger problem, which is the War On Terror. If the War On Terror was a justifiable response to 9/11, we would have a War On Automobiles in vengeance for collision deaths. The reason humans make these mistakes of proportion is that our brains are wired to over-emphasize risks when they are very dramatic.

It's like a malicious computer hacker. The brain has security vulnerabilities through the emotions. Getting a sense of proportion can seem callous, but 9/11 is basically a computer virus of the brain now, and we have to issue a patch before even more harm is done in its name. That's more important.

I offer you a copy of that patch right here. Most of you have already installed it.

The message of the anniversary ought to be "remember the heroes," but instead it's "remember to fear, remember to hate." The heroes, like so many others in different tragedies who are equally worthy, are already a footnote in history, replaced by photo-ops for politicians. That's what the anniversary is now. I will not share that kind of memorial.

The word "terrorism" has "terror" in it because it's a form of psychological warfare. The only goal of killing people with a terrorist act is to inflict emotion on the population-- the deaths are just the means to this end. Look around; it worked. In the name of those emotions, we lost a lot of the civil rights and humanity toward prisoners that make this nation distinct from Iran. (Among other factors of course. Those are hardly the only two distinctions.)

Accept that terror is like hurricanes; it will always be with us, so what we need is forecasting and quality emergency response. You can live with this. The odds of dying in a terrorist attack are an order of magnitude lower than drowning in one's own bathtub.

Accept that we cannot stop terrorism by force, and in fact, that exacerbates it. Shooting up various other countries is pure vengeance, not deterrent. In fact it increases the problem by raising up a whole generation of new terrorists overseas.

Accept that if you die in a terrorist attack because you wouldn't give up your freedoms to prevent it, that's how you defend your country's freedom with your life.

The virus spreads through commemoration. 9/11 is a tool of manipulation. Let go of it, and the tool can't be used on you any more. That's the patch.