Giving fear; selling hope

Last night I said that politicians have nothing to sell but hope. I stand by that remark, but not without noting that politicians regularly give away fear.

"You must vote for Me, or your life will be ruined by poverty|terrorism|loss of liberty|loss of convenience."

It's easy to see them doing it. There's no point in naming names, because they all do it. In some ways fear is the opposite face of a coin to hope. Hope is the vision of a positive future; fear is the vision of a negative future.

It has been shown by the work of Nobel-laureate Daniel Kahneman that, in addition to the optimism bias I noted in my previous post about hope, there is another bias, too, a salient exemplar bias--when there is a specific well-known case, people misjudge the likelihood of other such cases. So, for example, the highly publicized events of 9/11/2001 have termendous impact in people's decision-making processes. The death toll of the events was approximately 3000. The entire resources of a nation have been mobilized to prevent another such attack. The US government has spent nearly a trillion dollars on military action in the name of preventing such attacks. The government has passed laws that are in clear contradiction with the basic principles found in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. You can judge whether this is right or wrong, the important point is that repeated invocation of September 11 activates a salient example that influences humans' ability to make accurate judgements of probability.

I have digressed somewhat from the notion that we can give away fear and sell hope, but I just want to follow up what I was thinking about in the coment on salient examples. In 2001 there were, according to the US government, nearly 38,000 fatal automobile crashes in the US, leading to over 42,000 fatalities. In 2001, we did not declare war on automobile fatalities. This despite there having been roughly the same number of fatalities each year in the preceding decade, thus meaning the death toll from terrorist actions in the US was approximately one 100th the significance of the death toll rom traffic fatalities. But we have a war on terrorism that is costing hundreds of billions, while the annual death toll for auto fatalities continues to slowly rise, while it has no salient example to frighten people into action.

It is easier to give away fear and sell hope if there is a salient example.
And on this point, it might be noted that monster storms like Hurricane Katrina might be the salient examples needed to make people take the idea of global warming more seriously.

Wouldn't it be great if politicians were actually motivated by the same fears and ideals that they use to motivate the electorate? Wouldn't it be great if politicians tried to deliver the hope they promised? Wouldn't it be great if politicians were interested in serving the needs of the people, rather than grabbing as much as possible for themselves?