Does Homeland Security have OCD?
You know that feeling you get when something in your environment is a bit off? You might not even consciously know what feels out of place, but it triggers a rush of anxiety and suddenly you’re locking the back door and looking out the window for predators. That instinct, my friends, is the result of an ancient hardwired system in our brains called the “Security Motivational System”.
Humans have developed this “spidey sense” over our evolutionary timeline by surviving rare, black swan events. Scholars believe when it malfunctions, it is responsible for anxiety driven obsessive compulsive behaviors (checking and re-checking locks, hand-washing, etc.). But I wonder, could collective malfunction of this system in our brains be driving the equivalent of obsessive compulsive disorder in national homeland security policy? Put another way, is our ancient hard-wiring driving societal investment in activities which aren’t really making us safer?
Authors John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, of Terror, Security and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits and Costs of Homeland Security, argue that homeland security policy is driven — and undermined — by fear and anxiety. The way we dutifully take off our shoes at the airport and spend more on anti-terrorism than disaster resiliency (when natural disasters kill more people) has left me pondering if the SMS could serve as a powerful metaphor for the anxiety-driven “phenomena of probability neglect and cost neglect, of obsessive worst-case thinking and of extreme risk aversion so often found in public and official discussion of the terrorism issue,” described by Mueller and Stewart in their book.
The scholars who have modeled the SMS, Erik Woody and Henry Szechtman, hypothesize it could be having a profound impact on the security field. They say it operates in System 1 — the subconscious part of our brain which runs in the background quietly observing. In a normal system, the SMS makes us feel anxious and engage in behaviors to probe our environment and reassure ourselves — like double-checking to make sure that we closed the garage door. Most importantly, it’s not cognitive closure that shuts down the system — it’s the action of physically checking the garage door which winds down the anxiety.
Woody and Szechtman propose that when the SMS malfunctions, the behaviors that normally shut down the system (and end our feelings of anxiety) have no effect — catching people in an endless loop of obsessive compulsive behaviors and anxiety. They also say managing security threats in a way that separates decision makers from the physical behaviors which shut down the SMS could be keeping homeland security in a constant state of unproductive anxiety. They cite the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court’s rejection of only 10 of 20,909 requests for surveillance between 2001 and 2013 as potential evidence that without the ability to engage in reassuring behavior, FISA judges are stuck in an anxious, extremely risk averse state of mind.
Just as installing a lock on a door is a prudent security measure, our nation must invest some amount in intelligence collection, security and defense. But what if Woody and Szechtman are right? Is our nation’s obsession with terrorism and other rare threats really societal OCD? Is homeland security policy a manifestation of a malfunctioning SMS writ large, complete with repetitive behaviors that do little to keep us safe? Are our ancient instincts pushing us to spend so much on anti-terrorism that we’re hurting our country’s ability to thrive, alienating the rest of the world and needlessly violating people’s privacy?
I would argue an expensive border wall, sweeping immigration ban and other blunt tools are out of proportion with the threats we face. Tell zombie breakdown what you think — are we too obsessed with homeland security to our detriment? What policies or programs do you think are a waste of resources and what should we be focusing on to keep ourselves safe?
-M
