Ahh, but it doesn’t, that’s part of the problem. It only pays to react appropriately, and we humans don’t DO that without a whole bunch of training once you break past your monkeysphere. (Science. . . funny science)
Fear (especially of the unknown) causes us to react badly and stupidly and we inevitably make things worse. The statistical likelihood of somebody actually putting cute little dolls with dresses on everybody’s porches and then following that up with something negative is infinitesimal.
So how does somebody react? Do they drive their kids to school instead of letting them walk to the bus? Do they buy a gun and keep it in the home to defend against said imagined criminal?
Well done! By increasing their driving they’ve increased the possibility of a fatal accident far beyond the chances of the imagined initial threat. By buying that gun they’ve taken it to an even higher level.
And, of course, we’re not even mentioning what they just did to their kid. Children learn from their parents reactions, and this is just one step towards creating one more paranoid adult.
And why are paranoid adults threats? Because they’re the ones who see reports about plan crashes and instead choose to drive to their vacation destination (again, greatly increasing the risk to themselves and others). They react to events like 9/11 by not properly resisting their elected officials starting a war against a country that had nothing to do with the event, causing uncountable suffering both abroad (I’m not talking just ‘American soldier deaths’ here), creating more ‘terrorists’, and causing local economic suffering that also destroys families and uncountable lives.
Before one says ‘that’s part of the human condition’. No. No it’s not. It’s cultural training, pure and simple.
Again, the media is one of the major culprits. The ‘news’ is no such thing. It’s bite-sized pieces of horror selected from several billion people across the world and served up to you, the listener, in order to terrify and titillate you into watching so that they can gather advertising revenue.
You and so many others aren’t worried about some perceived threat for any statistically viable reason, you’re worried because you’re trained to do so.
The cumulative effect of this is honestly a freakin’ nightmare. We create more problems than we started with…over and over and over again.
I’m not saying we should all live in tiny villages away from the world, I don’t need to have solutions to point out a fundamental problem (though a few of us are indeed working on an actual solution despite having no real resources or aid nor any of that ‘desire to be important’ that so many have).
Even without solutions, there’s still that fundamental flaw. It still exists. It’s still horrible. It’s still evidence of a cultural sickness that we don’t first say ‘Neat! Free doll!’
