Brussels: It doesn't matter if the perceived risk is (mostly) fiction

The Brussels attack today has everyone back on their heels again. It goes without saying that the "genius" of terrorism is that it elevates the perception of risk beyond reality, and provokes responses that are out of proportion to the odds of someday being a victim yourself. If you're used to thinking in terms of financial securities, you can think of what terrorists are doing as shorting the public sense of security (which has a very high value and is hard to build) at fire-sale prices to steal a political benefit to just a few (in this case, ISIS/Daesh). The narrative that we are not safe is created, one that is so strong that it's hard to walk it back (even after the debatable happy ending to the Paris attacks with the arrest of Salah Abdeslam). If you don't like financial market analogies, another way of putting this is that the terrorists are fragmenting the public to create a stable constituency comprised of individuals who are so scared that they are willing to destroy themselves in order to save themselves; once this constituency is big enough, all they have to do is sit back and watch it destroy itself.

So, today, stock markets are weakening, the US is ramping up security, Trump is already demagoguing it.

It doesn't matter that the perceived risk to any one individual is largely a fiction. In fact, it's worth taking a detour to talk about how fiction works so that we can understand why we as humans are so comfortable taking extreme, maximalist positions in response to terror attacks.

Fiction writers, especially novelists, are implored by their editors and other experts to raise the stakes quickly, in the first 50 pages, or else lose the reader. It doesn't matter if the material is tragic, comedic, romantic, thrilling, or otherwise. Fiction must find a way to capture your attention and pull you in. And if you're the author, editing your story to create that tension might involve asking yourself some of these kinds questions (taken from an article in Writers Digest by Jessica Page Morrell):

• Have you begun the story at the last possible moment?
• Does the opening create intense curiosity?
• Is there a single dramatic question that focuses the story? 
• Is the story overpopulated? 
• Does the story locale contribute to the tension?
• Are the subplots a source of tension?
• Do the flashbacks contain tension, or do they meander backward in time?
• Is there a major reversal or surprise midway? 
• Is there too little or too much foreshadowing? 
• Have you withheld information from the reader until the last moment? 
• Are the stakes high and the consequences for failure dreadful?

In short, does your story involve real crisis? Are the stakes well defined, and do they really matter to the characters and the readers?

What focuses our attention is the tension that comes with anticipating how the story will unfold. The Empire's destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars made it quite clear that the Rebel base on Yavin 4 would certainly be destroyed if the small band of fighters failed to destroy the Death Star (in contrast, there was nothing at stake in The Phantom Menace). Frank and Claire Underwood live with everything to lose in House of Cards, and even if I don't like them as people I find myself compelled to see how they maintain the cracked and plastered edifice that keeps them in power. In The Hunt for Red October, the Soviets stand to lose their revolutionary stealth propulsion system if Marko Ramius can find his way to surrender the submarine under his command to the United States; at the same time, the captain of the USS Dallas makes a huge gamble to trust that Ramius is indeed planning to defect. It could go very badly for either party. The vast bulk of Arthur Dent's adventures in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy occur after his home planet of Earth is destroyed, and so drawing us in to wonder what could possible come next.

It's no accident that the stakes, as a concept, are both (1) a way in which we evaluate compelling fiction, and (2) how we define the fault lines of cultural change. If the stakes are high, and the actions of a group or groups would lead to greater risk of loss, then the change will be resisted. Conflict sells as fiction, AND it's the engine of cultural change. What do I mean by this?

In fiction, a character who has lost everything discovers he has a son he never knew about. The discovery reintroduces the possibility of loss to the character's story, and the character now embarks on a journey to prevent that loss. The stakes go up even more if the son has some reason to be fearful of his long-lost father's reappearance: say, for instance, the father was connected to the mob and the son is running for office. The stakes define the range of plausible actions that the characters might choose, both foreshadowing the development of the story, and introducing a conflict with an uncertain outcome in which one side or the other might lose big.

In cultural change, the stakes establish the boundaries for how and -- very importantly -- how quickly cultural change can be expected to take place. As long as the stakes remain high for a group or sub-group, you can expect them to resist change. The fossil fuel industry is less likely to give credence to climate change research since doing so would imply an imperative to act to reduce / cap emissions, thus stranding their assets in the ground and gutting their balance sheets.

In fiction as in culture, the stakes evolve in four different ways:

• Fizzle: The loss associated with a cultural change is no longer deemed serious, either because another solution has appeared or because the problem that the solution solved is no longer a threat (e.g., as child mortality rates drop, so can birth rates)
• (New) Crisis: The loss associated with NOT undergoing a cultural change reveals itself to be more serious than the loss associated with the change itself (e.g., the impact of future climate change if nothing is done) -- even then, there will be core constituencies, usually the most powerful with the most to lose, that will not buy in, so the conflict may still continue
• Upside: The benefits or advantages associated with a cultural change reveal themselves to significantly and immediately (or very quickly) outweigh the cost (e.g., getting a smart phone versus a flip phone)
• Death: The loss associated with a cultural change is now moot due to lack of standing interest (e.g., the dead have no need for a lower retirement age).

These are the fundamental building blocks of cultural change, and each of them involves changes to the perceived stakes. They punctuate what would otherwise be periods of stasis while everyone does the routine, every-day work of doing what they believe will protect what's theirs.

And it's all about perception. Our perception of actual risk is often inflated. I grew up in the 70s and 80s on a white bread city block in Long Beach, California, swarmed by hordes of children playing in the streets. Today, those streets are empty. There aren't any fewer children, but parents don't let them roam free like they used to. I'm not sure what triggered the change, but I tend to think it's tied to the emergence of national news broadcasting delivered in the style of local news, or maybe it was John Walsh's personal tragedy and his show America's Most Wanted. Not to diminish the real risk of non-family / stereotypical kidnappings of minors in the US, but I would expect that national media exposure of tragic cases in a nation of ~300M people would tend to elevate the perception of risk among parents beyond the actual risk, to the point that the upside to "roaming free" is no longer possible to discern. So in cultural change, it doesn't matter if the perceived stakes are a fiction (or just exaggerated). Until the perceived stakes evolve in one of the four ways listed above, don't expect anyone to see it otherwise. In fact, expect cultural solutions to adjust to fit the stakes (i.e., kids no longer roam the streets).

Same with Brussels. The narrative told by terrorists, using explosives as their medium, is so powerful that we are drawn into the story without much real reflection. Governments then try to tell a counter-narrative with a cultural solution that involves trying to 100% guarantee everyone's safety. (Except that the Belgians appear to be realistic about this counter-narrative, even if Trump isn't.) Thus, unless we can (1) find a way to tell another narrative that successfully fizzles the threat from terrorism, or (2) our actions create new cultural crises that everyone recognizes as worse than the terrorist threat itself, or (3) we identify huge and immediate upsides to avoiding buying into the terrorist narrative, or (4) the people who remember the Brussels attack all die off, don't expect people to see this in any other way than an existential risk, even if the odds of being hurt or killed in such an attack (1 in 20 million) is still far less than being attacked by a shark (1 in 11.5 million), killed by a dog (1 in 18 million), or killed in a car accident in your lifetime (1 in 100 ... wear your seatbelt and don't drive like an idiot!).

There's something interesting here about fiction, as well. What are we doing when we tell stories? Are we working through the implications of conflict so that we can better understand the risks and benefits of our decisions? Are we simply entertaining ourselves with tales of high stakes? Or is fiction just a way of reflecting how we think as humans? Or is it a way of building and reinforcing cultural solutions, regardless of whether the cultural solutions are the most rational?