INTEGRAL PRAXIS

The Three Lenses of Threat Perception

Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC

The general logic of threat perception and response appears tobe consistent with the deep structure of human reason andcommunication that underlies all our worldly action.

Page 1

The Three Lenses of Threat Perception

Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC

In an essay in the

LA Times

, psychologist DanielGilbert offered some insight into how people tend toevaluate the extent to which something liketerrorism or global warming is a threat. Accordingto him:

NO ONE seems to care about the upcomingattack on the World Trade Center site.Why? Because it won't involve villains withbox cutters. Instead, it will involve meltingice sheets that swell the oceans and turnthat particular block of lower Manhattaninto an aquarium.The odds of this happening in the next fewdecades are better than the odds that adisgruntled Saudi will sneak onto anairplane and detonate a shoe bomb. Andyet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorismand … well, essentially nothing to preventglobal warming.Why are we less worried about the morelikely disaster? Because the human brainevolved to respond to threats that havefour features—features that terrorism hasand that global warming lacks.What, in Gilbert's estimation, are the four featuresof perceived threats?1.

they are the product of human intention;2.

they violate our moral sensibilities;3.

they represent an immediate problem; and4.

they appear suddenly or grow rapidly.Not to quibble, but when reading Gilbert'sdescriptions of the third and fourth features, Icouldn't help noticing how similar they were to oneanother, and how much less differentiated theywere than the first two features. I think they can beeasily combined into a single threat feature that wemight just as easily call

clear and present danger

.When we

clearly

perceive a suddenly appearing orrapidly mounting phenomenon that represents a

present

or easily foreseeable impediment to ourway of life, we may regard it as a significant threat.Thus, with all due respect to Gilbert, I think we cantighten up the list just a bit and work with threeprimary threat-perception criteria. A phenomenon ismost readily recognized as a threat if it is:1.

intentionally created by someone else;2.

morally offensive to me and others whoshare my values; and3.

a clear and present danger to me and mine.

Face Validity

There is a certain face validity to these threat-perception criteria, isn't there? They seem applic-able to many different issues, from terrorism andglobal warming to the debt trap,

and the military-industrial complex, helping us understand why anissue can appear to be a threat to some of us andnot to others. In fact, they are remarkably similarto the basic logic most of us use when we areresponding to a threatening situation: we attemptto verify an objective problem, denounce it onmoral grounds, and look for someone to blame forcreating, or not yet solving, the problem. Soundfamiliar?Having perceived a threat, we then look for a wayto respond, often following the same three-steppattern in reverse. If we cannot prevail upon thepeople who created the problem to voluntarilychange their offensive and destructive behavior, weelect politicians who promise to use the power of the government to force them to stop doingwhatever they've been doing to create the problemand reward the rest of us for doing whatever it iswe should be doing to make sure the problem neverhappens again. For really significant threats, wefind a leader who can inspire us to work together torespond to the threat (e.g., Churchill/FDR andfascism). In mythological terms, we search for asuperhero whose objective powers and moralrectitude can defeat our villain (e.g., Odysseus andthe many villains of the Odyssey, Superman andLex Luthor). Such is the universal structure of threat perception and response. But there issomething else to be seen in these threat criteria.Notice the pattern?

Validity Claims

This is the same pattern of validity claims in thedomains of

what is true

what is right

, and

what issincere

that we find in the universal pragmatics of Jürgen Habermas—the deep structure of reason andcommunication that underlies all our worldly action,including our efforts to evaluate and respond tothreats.

To claim that something is a clear andpresent danger is to make a positive truth claim

How do we tend to deal witha threatening situation whenwe are the people who havecreated the very situation?In one word: