Government

The Cognitive Dissonance Surrounding Violence

Violence is not becoming more prevalent in society, only our awareness of tragedy.

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An impressive volume of work has laid out in painstaking detail the historical decline of violence that has led us to the relative peace and prosperity of the modern era. Even more encouraging is the fact that it is not just physical violence that is steadily decreasing, but overall crime itself including property crime. Indeed, according to virtually every available metric we have, we are currently living in the most peaceful period in the history of our species. The only thing that could make all this great news depressing is if no one actually believed it, which, unfortunately many simply do not. In fact, most think the exact opposite is true and that we live in an era of increased crime and violence.

One reason many people have such a warped sense of violence is that authority figures such as the current president regularly promulgate the false premise that we are in the midst of a massive crime wave. Even when confronted with facts and statistics, those who further this false narrative on behalf of the president refuse to break script and instead prioritize feelings over facts. This president has also falsely claimed that hordes of disease-ridden immigrants are flooding into the United States in order to commit crimes when this is simply not true.

Of course, it is not just the president who can be blamed for the cognitive dissonance of most of the country surrounding the issue of violence. The news media has also contributed, albeit in a much different way, a fact author Steven Pinker has repeatedly illustrated:

If you base your beliefs about the state of the world on what you read in the news, your beliefs will be incorrect. This is not because of a conspiracy among journalists to hide or distort the truth. It’s because of an interaction between the nature of news—it’s about things that happen, particularly bad things—and the nature of human cognition. Forty years ago Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that people base their estimates of risk on how easily they can recall examples from memory. As long as rates of violence have not fallen to zero, the news media will always have examples of violence to serve us. It’s only by (1) counting the violent incidents, (2) scaling them by the number of opportunities for violence to occur, and (3) seeing how this ratio changes over time that one can get an objective sense of trends in violence.

Significant blame can also be attributed to the American public itself, which regularly propagates false narratives on social media platforms that they know or should know are dishonest despite the amount of obfuscation out there. For example, whenever a mass shooting occurs, such as at a school — tragic events that are thankfully becoming less common, not more so — my Facebook and Twitter feeds are filled with my friends, my otherwise intelligent friends, lamenting “This is America now” or “The new normal.” Moreover, shows such as South Park have satirized school shootings as common occurrences when again, it can be quantitatively proven that American schools are one of the safest places in the world for children to be. The only thing that has changed is how modern media platforms have made us all more increasingly aware of the rare tragedies that still occur.

Another cause for the cognitive dissonance around violence is plain ignorance of history. Many of my friends and family who are older than me have this weird and erroneous nostalgia for the so-called “good ol’ days.” The past however, was unequivocally more horrific than today. You think terrorism is bad now, imagine being a black person living in the Jim Crow south. If you can stomach it, read here about the regularly occurring terrorist acts committed by racist whites to terrify and control black people.

Most often, these terrorist acts of the Jim Crow era involved mutilation, torture, and were committed in full view of the public. In fact, they were often celebrated at the time by all too happy onlookers sometimes numbering in the thousands. These terroristic acts in the past against my fellow Americans proceeded well into the 1950s and 60s, time periods that many older Americans can still remember. Yet this obscene level of violence and terrorism never seems to factor into the nostalgia of the good ol’ days. Instead, it is young people today who are demonized by older Americans as being out of control and possessing no morality.

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The impact of all of this distortion is that we can get very bad policies that impair the historical arc of greater social cohesion the modern world is currently enjoying. For example, turning our schools into armed fortresses that run mass shooter drills are quite literally traumatizing children. It has become rather expected now that after a mass shooting destructive, ineffective, and unnecessary gun prohibition policies will be touted as guaranteed solutions. That bans on Muslims are necessary to combat religious violence, or border walls, or mass incarceration and civil asset forfeiture are needed to protect the public at large. Although these policy proposals differ in levels of animus and potential for harm, they all share in the fact that they are justified by a made-up view of violence.

To be clear, the world is still a violent place for all too many. But if we want to make even greater progress in the decline, we have to start being honest about violence and the desires of victims, instead of using instances of it to further ideological wish lists or sow distortion. We owe it to ourselves as a species to recognize the progress we have made in curbing violence, without resorting to the draconian prohibitionist laws or walls that many still want to unjustly inflict on society. We can be better, but perhaps most importantly, we need to recognize that we are better than this.

Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.

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