A Threat is Whatever You Perceive It to Be:
Threats cause anxiety. Okay, so what’s a threat?
Well, putting this into as simple terms as I possibly can for your average layman to understand, a “threat” is “whatever you feel threatened by”.
I talked about this in the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder section in the Instinctive Learning chapter. If you’re a businessman from New Jersey who feels threatened by a mugger attacking you with a knife, that can set off PTSD, or anxiety, or any other kinds of a fear reaction, depending on how badly you feel threatened by it. If you were my friend the former green beret that I met on the train, you’d feel threatened by it when it was happening, but then you’d just waste the guy and go back to whatever you were doing without a second thought.
Or, for another example, if you were serving in the military and fighting a war against somebody, and you heard people shooting artillery at you, at first you’d always perceive that as a threat. But then as you got used to the sound and could tell how close it was by how loud it was, and eventually you could tell if someone was shooting artillery at someone on your side who was miles away from you, you wouldn’t perceive that as a threat anymore.
So what do you think happens if someone crashes an airplane into a building and kills thousands of people? And then your TV stations and radio and newspapers and magazines broadcast it all over the world for the next five years? Or ten, or twenty, or fifty? Suddenly, this big threat is going to be right out there in front of everyone’s perception. People are going to remember it, they’re going to communicate it to other people, and they’re going to imagine it happening to them. But not only that, the more TV keeps this big threat in everyone’s faces, the more TV people are going to watch to try to keep track of it. The more it gets broadcast on the radio, the more people are going to listen to the radio. The more it gets printed in newspapers and magazines, the more newspapers and magazines people are going to buy. After all, this is America, where you win elections and make money by offering the public what they want.
So like I said in the last book, here we are, America this giant. Then one emotional aikido master comes along, kicks us in the knee, and runs away. So we chase him, but he leads us right into a tripwire, and we fall on our faces. As someone once said, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
So as I said, the terrorists have harnessed a weapon that exists inside every single one of “us”. But not only that, they’ve turned our political and economic systems against us too. They might be terrorists, but we built a fear bomb for them. All they had to do was to figure out how to light the fuse.
Now we have this perception, and we have our goals, and by acting upon our perceptions in pursuing our goals, we’ve gotten ourselves into a war nobody knows how to win. And what did Osama bin Ladin want right from the very beginning but to kill as many Americans as possible and make Arabs all over the world hate us? So who’s winning now?