What worries you, masters you.

— John Locke

Observing the latest bout of irrational fear and stupidity over Ebola and the radical jihad group ISIS, I’m reminded of my own innate fear, an emotion that drove my politics and infected my life until I was almost middle-aged.  I am ashamed to confess, but I can only control the anxiety and paranoia now because I first admit it and then seek to understand it.  When I was a conservative, I fretted about people and issues from faraway places that had zero actual impact on my daily life.  The terror was both illogical and very real. The feelings were so intense that they left no room for me to consider the motivations and opinions of other people, which is the defining characteristic of modern conservative politics.

The last election demonstrates the triumph of fear over reason.  People were scared, disillusioned and confused, so they didn’t vote.  Now that the election is over, I predict that the Ebola crisis and the ISIS will crawl back into their rightful irrelevance to American’s everyday lives. We’re already seeing the coverage peter out, now that the mission of scaring people at the polls has been accomplished.

There is one political party most dedicated to creating and exploiting irrational fear in Americans.  Sure, the left does it too (and they should not), but only the conservative ideology is defined by it. They have their own marketing arms in Fox News and talk radio that dish out a daily dose of abject terror expressly to drive emotional people to vote against their own interests.   The first two casualties of fear are always perspective and reason.

Let’s look at these latest two issues with just the smallest amount of logic.  Ebola is a serious health issue, sure, but numbers show how little it impacts America.  There has only been one death and a handful of cases in this country.  For perspective: 87 Americans on an “average day” are killed by gun violence and more than 30,000 a year are killed in car accidents.  I’d like to say conservative media has been the only culprit, but you can’t flip on a station without a dose of needless fear-mongering.  It’s a strong statement, but I would argue this is the worst display of journalistic malpractice since the flawed run-up to the second Iraq War.  ISIS is another issue frightening Americans, yet no one inside America has been killed by this primitive band of outlaws.  In this country, you have a better chance of dying from a slip in the tub than being killed by a terrorist. ISIS is a serious foreign policy challenge, but they don’t have a navy, air force or even a rowboat with which they could reach the U.S.  The obsession over these issues is childish and stupid, yet they are driving America’s political conversation at the expense of real challenges and problems.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I sat in a professional seminar about the “emotions we bring to work” every day.  The speaker, Chris Olex, started with a discussion of the four “basic” emotions: happy, sad, angry and afraid, but fear was the runaway star of the show.  Olex spent almost the entire session trying to get the attendees to understand how fear drives our most primitive and unreasonable reactions.  She spent a great deal of time explaining the “amygdala,” the part of the brain responsible for our basic survival.

Often called “reptilian,” the amygdala houses our fear and anger, also known as the basic two planks of the Republican Party platform.  It creates in some people an animalistic fear of the ill-defined “other” who is out to take your job, collect unearned government benefits or have kinky sex with your daughter.  It’s a classic amygdala play.

It’s easy to understand the fear, because it’s hard to think rationally when so many people are telling us to panic.  Chicken Little has nothing if not conviction.  When I was a conservative, there was a parade of “media sources” that were more than happy to confirm my worst fears and suspicions on every subject.  One of the most common phrases on talk radio today is some derivation of, “I think that’s right!”  Listen to it and count up the agreements, no matter how trivial or outlandish. Everyone always agrees.  It’s an exercise in existential confirmation bias.

You’ve heard the names, Hannity, Ingraham, Savage and countless others, all dripping with fear and outrage so unwarranted it’s indistinguishable from parody.  The big daddy of them all is Fox News poster boy Bill O’Reilly.  O’Reilly has been at the fore of the most recent and unreasonable terror.  His alarmist, mob rhetoric over ISIS and Ebola makes the people who consume it less informed.  I doubt he believes his own irrationality, but if he really buys his own nonsense, he must be the most frightened man-child on basic cable.