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“Fear has never created a single job or fed a single family.”

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Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada weighed in on our Presidential election when he recently addressed the United Nations. He told world leaders, “Fear has never created a single job or fed a single family.”

His quote sounds good, very statesman-like, but unfortunately it’s completely incorrect. If you pause for just a moment and consider what fear does you’d have to conclude it creates a tremendous number of jobs. Consider the following:

  • The military – It exists because of the threat of war.
  • Police – They exist to serve and protect. This arises because of fear and people who break the law.
  • Insurance – It gives peace of mind because it reduces the anxiety that comes with the fear of loss (home destroyed, car accident, theft, etc.).

I’ve spent my adult life in the insurance industry and I tell people we’re a noble industry because we do two things:

  1. We help people. When people have a loss they’re thankful when they have the right insurance to help them get back on their feet.
  2. We help the economy. When an insurance company guarantees payment in the event your home or auto is destroyed banks lend more freely. That means more homes and autos are sold which means more people are employed as each are made.

Trudeau’s statement that fear doesn’t create jobs is ludicrous. Here are just a few facts from 2015 on the U.S. insurance industry from the Insurance Information Institute:

  • People spent more than $1.2 trillion on insurance products.
  • There were 5,296 insurance companies.
  • The industry employed 2.5 million people.

In much the same way that marketing professionals want you to buy their product, Mr. Trudeau wants people to buy into the notion that Donald Trump is peddling fear in an effort to win the election. He is, but so is Hillary Clinton. As I wrote this summer in The Politics of Fear: They’re Trying to Scarcity the Hell Out of You, using fear to win votes is a very old strategy and is used equally on both sides of the aisle.

Whenever someone is using fear they’re tapping into the principle of scarcity. First know this; fear has served mankind well because it’s a survival instinct. From Robert Cialdini’s book Influence Science and Practice, according to social psychologists Haselton & Nettle, “One prominent theory accounts for the primacy of loss over gain in evolutionary terms. If one has enough to survive, an increase in resources will be helpful but a decrease in those same resources could be fatal. Consequently, it would be adaptive to be especially sensitive to the possibility of loss.”

Second, quite often fear of loss moves us to take actions that ultimately serve us well. If scarcity led to more bad choices than good we’d stop responding to it.

Having shared those two thoughts remember this – there are times when scarcity is legitimate and there are times when it’s manipulative. Manipulators realize the power of this principle and will use it to their advantage.

So the real question becomes; is the fear (scarcity) legitimate? If it is then you should pay heed and take appropriate action. When it’s not legitimate then reframe it as someone’s attempt to manipulate you.

And what about the November election? It’s my personal opinion that both Republicans and Democrats are trying to manipulate all of us. They all tell half-truths, outright lie and manipulate statistics in their favor in an effort to grab power. Each side tells us every election that it’s the most important election ever, that our country and way of life is at stake. It’s all BS!

I started with Mr. Trudeau so I guess I should end with him. Canadians seem to love him. He’s young, good looking and charismatic so he’s gaining notoriety on the world stage. I don’t know a lot about him but I know this, his quote about fear not producing jobs or feeding people is laughable. As you should do with any politician, you would do well to look beyond the veneer and critically think about what he says next time he speaks.

Man’s Need to Add Meaning

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Over the years I’ve watched many of the Ken Burns PBS documentaries while running on my treadmill. I started with The War (WWII), and then it was on to Prohibition, The Dust Bowl, The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, and most recently The Roosevelts. If you’ve never seen any of them I can’t encourage you enough to check them out because they are amazing!

I must admit, I’m not much of a baseball fan but the storytelling from the narrator and interviewees were so compelling and the players so interesting in that series, that I found myself excited every day to learn more about the history of the sport. Something that really stood out was the importance so many people put on the game of baseball as well as the meaning and significance they attached to America’s national pastime.

When it comes to necessity, I think it’s safe to say the local grocery store, corner gas station, a nearby hospital, your town’s fire department, banks and any number of other businesses or institutions are far more important to daily life than baseball. If baseball were gone tomorrow many people would be upset, would miss it terribly but life would go on pretty much as it does during the baseball offseason. However, without some of the institutions noted above, life would be much more difficult, dangerous and perhaps deadly in a matter of days in some cases.

So why is a sport like baseball so important to so many people? I think much of it has to do with the meaning we ascribe to it and the significance we attach to the game, its players, and the statistics. This line of thinking was driven home as I read the following from Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind, in which he quoted a prominent linguist, George Lakoff:

“‘A large part of self-understanding,’ says Lakoff, ‘is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives.’ The more we understand metaphor, the more we understand ourselves.”

In his most famous work, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl shared his life experience having survived three years in four different Nazi concentration camps. He believed he could translate the pain he endured into a meaningful life where he helped others.

It’s a subtle, yet important difference: drawing meaning from what you’ve personally experienced versus something else like a sport. But in the end it’s the same desire – we want to know that our lives have meaning and significance. It’s inevitable that sometimes we attach more meaning to some things than perhaps they deserve. From the Burns’ series on baseball here are some examples:

Willie Mays is known more for his famous over the shoulder catch than any other play. It took incredible skill to cover as much ground as he did then essentially make a blind catch over his left shoulder. People who saw it swore nobody else could have made that catch. Spectacular? Yes! Impossible for anyone else? Doubtful.

When the Dodgers and Giants left New York it seemed disastrous! Fans were outraged and felt betrayed but the sun came up the next day and has every day for 60+ years. Life continued on just as it had before baseball. Their well-being and significance wasn’t as wrapped up in a team as they thought.

It was thought that no one else could have done what Jackie Robinson did. What he did was heroic, considering all that was going on in society and he is to be admired for his courage to step into the situation becoming the first black player in the majors. But if it were not Jackie, someone would have eventually taken on that role.

This post in no way is meant to diminish baseball or any of its heroes. In fact, quite the opposite for me because I haven’t been as drawn to the game as I was watching the series, since I was an adolescent.

However, sometimes we attach too much significance to things, people, and events and that choice ends up hurting us. If your favorite team fails to win the big game or championship it stinks but life goes on. Or if a hero turns out to be something different than what we thought (Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Pete Rose, etc.) it devastates some people. To allow any of these situations to do more than give you a bad day or memory is to give it more power over your life than it deserves.

People, places and things do not define us. We define ourselves and that means we can narrate our own stories. So I’ll leave you with this question – What story are you writing?