Sasha Abramsky: The thing about fear is that it's a very sticky emotion: The neuroscience on this suggests that once one has developed a fear of something -- be it a person of a particular color or a method of traveling (flying, say), be it a certain animal or a particular disease -- it's very hard to un-learn that fear. This would be bad enough if it took primary experience of something to develop such a fear. But what makes it far worse is that fear is also extremely easy to acquire as a result of indirect exposure to something.

And so, we watch these stories; we horrify ourselves time after time after time, and it validates our fears and our anxieties; it allows us to form psychological, and even political, communities with fear as the bonding agent. As I reported [in] Jumping at Shadows, I was continually struck by how the people I interviewed were using their fear -- not necessarily consciously -- as a lens through which to understand their rapidly changing world, their shifting economic and cultural and political environments. It's extraordinary, because when fear acquires such currency, almost such cultural cache, it opens the door to a very demagogic, strongman kind of politics. And we saw this, of course, during the last presidential election campaign. And today, we're seeing it in how the Trump presidency operates -- this endless churning of fear, this endless pitting of "us" against "them."

Throughout Jumping at Shadows, this is one of the leitmotifs that fascinates me: Why we fear some things so profoundly, perhaps to the point of irrationality, whereas other things we shrug off, ignore, respond to with, at best, a yawn. You know, in a rational world, we'd be really very fearful of the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as the concentration of vast destructive power in the hands of a few global leaders: Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping in China and the other leaders of the nuclear states. Yet, until the recent flare-up in tensions with North Korea, nuclear weapons have existed largely outside of popular consciousness since the end of the Cold War. It's such an overwhelming issue that it's easier to psychologically offload, to focus on other, smaller, more relatable fears instead. I guess the same holds for climate change, which even after all of the recent hurricanes and epic wildfires, even after all of the evidence that icecaps are melting, that species are dying off as the climate changes, doesn't seem to have really grabbed the American imagination. Yes, more Americans are scared of climate change today than was the case a decade ago, but it's still a relatively small group of people. And yet, this really is something with such vast potential for harm that we should be focusing much more of our political and emotional energies on it.

Promulgating fear is not a good way of creating community. It's certainly not a good way of shaping our national political conversation.