Putting Terrorism into Perspective

The following excerpt from Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011 may be useful in putting the current hyperbolic concern about terrorism into perspective.

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“Compare the American death toll, with or without 9/11, to other preventable causes of death. Every year more than 40,000 Americans are killed in traffic accidents, 20,000 in falls, 18,000 in homicides, 3,000 by drowning (including 300 in bathtubs), 3,000 in fires, 24,000 from accidental poisoning, 2,500 from complications of surgery, 300 from suffocation in bed, 300 from inhalation of gastric contents, and 17,000 by “other and unspecified nontransport accidents and their sequelae.”184  In fact, in every year but 1995 and 2001, more Americans were killed by lightning, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and “ignition or melting of nightwear” than by terrorist attacks.185  The number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying. The cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has estimated that in the year after the 9/11 attacks, 1,500 Americans died in car accidents because they chose to drive rather than fly to their destinations out of fear of dying in a hijacked or sabotaged plane, unaware that the risk of death in a plane flight from Boston to Los Angeles is the same as the risk of death in a car trip of twelve miles. In other words the number of people who died by avoiding air travel was six times the number of people who died in the airplanes on September 11.186  And of course the 9/11 attacks sent the United States into two wars that have taken far more American and British lives than the hijackers did, to say nothing of the lives of Afghans and Iraqis.

The discrepancy between the panic generated by terrorism and the deaths generated by terrorism is no accident. Panic is the whole point of terrorism, as the word itself makes clear. Though definitions vary (as in the cliché “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”), terrorism is generally understood as premeditated violence perpetrated by a nonstate actor against noncombatants (civilians or off-duty soldiers) in pursuit of a political, religious, or social goal, designed to coerce a government or to intimidate or convey a message to a larger audience. The terrorists may want to extort a government into capitulating to a demand, to sap people’s confidence in their government’s ability to protect them, or to provoke massive repression that will turn people against their government or bring about violent chaos in which the terrorist faction hopes to prevail. Terrorists are altruistic in the sense of being motivated by a cause rather than by personal profit. They act by surprise and in secrecy; hence the ubiquitous appellation “cowardly.” And they are communicators, seeking publicity and attention, which they manufacture through fear.”

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011, pp. 380-1