Why do terrorist attacks horrify us more than, say, tornadoes, floods or fires, which are no less terrible in their consequences? And why is it okay? Psychophysiologist’s explanation.
Terror is spreading more and more widely in the world, and its real task is not to destroy individual people, but to create in us a feeling of helplessness, impotence. Unfortunately, the way terror is presented to the public by the media often contributes to the formation of this feeling and even guilt – by no means among terrorists.
Attempts are often made to present the murder of innocent random people as a struggle by terrorists for their “infringed rights.” But such a frank distortion of the problem provokes a protest from everyone who is not interested in this distortion and therefore “does not work.” I will now talk about more subtle manipulations of public opinion.
I attended a public speech by a fairly well-known journalist who spoke about terror and asked the audience: “Do you know how many people died when terrorist planes crashed into the twin skyscrapers in New York?” The hall answered immediately and almost in chorus: “About three thousand people.” ” Right. And how many people died during the recent Far Eastern tsunami?” the journalist asked the next question. The hall was confused, some listeners called different numbers. “You see,” the speaker said with satisfaction, “you don’t remember this figure, you don’t care about it, but 100 times more people died there. But this tragedy did not affect either the Europeans or the Americans, the people of your race with whom you identify yourself, and the dead are indifferent to you. You are racists.”
I remembered how, during a conversation about the terrorist attacks in Israel, some of my compatriots, interested in continuing the so-called “peace process”, people of the same race and nationality as the victims of terror, said with surprise and even indignation: “Why are you so focused specifically on these dead? Why don’t you talk about those who constantly die in road accidents and other accidents, although there are many more of them than victims of terror? Are those who die in accidents and their loved ones less worthy of compassion?
Of course no. In normal people who do not suffer from mental callousness, someone’s accidental death causes pity, longing, and sometimes even a feeling of helplessness.
But these feelings are really different from the feelings that terror evokes. And they should be different, there is nothing unnatural in this. Neither mass catastrophes associated with natural disasters nor accidents are the result of someone’s conscious intention, there is no malicious intent in these tragic accidents. Unlike those who died due to natural disasters, the victims of terrorist attacks should not only evoke compassion, and certainly not the feeling of helplessness (which terrorists rely on) – they should evoke feelings of anger and a desire for just retribution. Our civilization is based on moral standards that do not refer to the action of the forces of nature, but only to human actions. One can talk about guilt in a crime only with a conscious choice of behavior. And it is quite natural that the victims of a conscious crime are remembered better than the victims of random disasters in which no one is guilty and which do not require condemnation of someone’s behavior.
Equating the victims of terrorist attacks with the victims of the tsunami devalues the basis of the existence of our civilization and human society – its moral and ethical values and the responsibility of each for the behavior he chooses. Man, of course, is a natural phenomenon, but his actions cannot be treated in the same way as natural phenomena – he is endowed with consciousness and freedom of choice. And when media representatives compare the victims of terrorist attacks with the victims of the tsunami, this is a devaluation of the basic moral norms of civilization, thanks to which we exist, and the deliberate formation of a sense of helplessness in the face of evil.