The unbearable feeling of safety

Leading the politics of fear

I’ve just returned from Johannesburg. Every street is lined with walls topped with barbed wire, protecting the people who live inside their fortresses from whatever frightens them on the outside. The people in the walls must believe they are safer. I feel claustrophobic, wondering what it must be like to live inside their prison. Maximum security is not just for inmates.

Now military helicopters circle over my home in central London while the army patrols the streets. Journalists ask which political candidate in the forthcoming election will make people “feel safer”. After recent terror attacks, safety dominates the debate, and the front pages of every newspaper are filled with pictures of fearful people running from nightmares.

Our televisions are also scary places. The latest season of House of Cards open with Frank Underwood’s play for power through fear. He greets citizens outside the White House whispering “I’ll keep you safe”. A fictional president that now reflects real life, mirroring the actual attempts of POTUS to keep out the “bad hombres” by closing borders, banning travel and building walls.

We have a biological response to fear — our bodies tell us to freeze, fight or flee. Our primal ancestors regularly faced danger that was a real threat to their lives. Now we have 24 hour news replicating the sabre-toothed tiger in the bush — a constant narrative of fear broadcast into our homes and our minds. This noise drowns out any logical reasoning — we know that we are more likely to die from choking on our food than from a marauding foreign jihadist, yet men with knives will always scare us more than a hot dog lodged in our throats.

The more negative news we subject ourselves to, the more likely we are to see our own lives under threat. We don’t even need to be involved in the trauma. Just watching the news is causing us stress:

“Violent media exposure can exacerbate or contribute to the development of stress, anxiety, depression and even post-traumatic stress disorder.”

It’s when fear becomes political that we all need to awaken from our anxiety. Leaders have a responsibility to create the conditions for social cohesion. Simon Sinek refers to this as the Circle of Safety. Since threats in our world are never going to go away, or will simply change over time, it’s a leaders role to build trust in their people. Trust makes the culture stronger.

In the Circle, safety comes from connection to each other — not protection from others. If our political leaders believe their role is to protect us from what scares us outside, then there is a chance they will also believe that there must be a constant threat. The U.K. and US both publicly issue “terror threat levels”. I find this strange when every other day someone in the US is shot by children playing with guns , while obesity is killing 1 in 10 British people . Yet these heightened threats to our lives do not make the evening news, nor do we ask the government to protect us from them.

It’s easy to blame anything outside for what’s not working inside. I coach leaders in business to create a Circle of Safety through openness, responsibility, wholehearted leadership, and by enabling people to be the best version of themselves. It is not done through blame, control, or pointing fingers at the “bad guys”. What I consistently see in my work is that the source of fear in business comes from the inside, based on how the culture reacts to perceived threats.

Nation states are not businesses but I believe the same principles of leadership apply. It’s easy to blame an ideology, or foreign people, rather than address the policies and social conditions that may lead people to turn to violence. Our political leaders are failing at building trust and connection in our culture. They stoke the flame of fear, blame each other, point to external forces — and it is creating division in our society. We’ve often heard UK Prime Minister Theresa May say “the first job of any government is to keep its citizens safe and secure”. If this was truly the government’s agenda political party manifestos would strongly address how we connect and care for each other, in addition to how our police enforce the law.

It may take decades to bring down the walls that separate people in Johannesburg. We have choices now though that can stop the walls being put up in our own countries. The overwhelming response of people in Manchester and London to violence shows how strong our communities are. People are not giving in to blame and hate. When I see that, I feel safe.