The full title of this 1997 nonfiction bestseller is The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence. I bought myself a copy because Carolyn Hax recommends it so often in her "Tell Me About It" advice column and online chats, especially when a letter writer shows signs of being the victim of domestic abuse, stalking or other potentially violent circumstances.
At first, I was not sure if I was going to like the book. Having read, and mostly agreed with, sociologist Barry Glassner's Culture of Fear (1999), which points out how much media portrayals of violence and other fear-inducing phenomena grossly distort people's perception of what they truly need to be afraid of, I thought this book would simply urge people to trust their every fearful instinct.
In fact, de Becker's and Glassner's books fit together very well. De Becker is the founder and CEO of a major personal security firm, Gavin De Becker and Associates. He is in the business of predicting and preventing violence, so he has no truck with what in the later chapters of his book he calls "manufactured" fears brought on by an eyeball-hungry media. Unlike Glassner, though, de Becker explicitly values the sensation of "true fear" as a valuable signal that can save one's life in a truly dangerous situation - a signal that is all too frequently suppressed. That observation will be familiar to reader's of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (2005), another book exploring the power of rapid cognition in situations in which one is forced to think fast.
Both Gladwell and de Becker recognize that intuition, like chance, favors the prepared mind - even the evolutionarily-honed survival instinct that de Becker believes resides in every one of us. De Becker's aim in The Gift of Fear is to bring his own expertise to bear on the ordinary and extraordinary instances of his readers' lives in which "high-stakes prediction" of violence is necessary. He does this through many stories drawn from his clients' experiences with crimes as unusual as assassination and as common as spousal abuse and stalking, interspersed with glimpses into his own process of judging the likelihood of violence in the situation at hand. He wants his readersto accept that violence is inherent to human society, to trust and act upon intuitions warning them of immanent violence, (here de Becker urges women, especially, to overcome their social conditioning toward "niceness") - but to reduce the intrusion of worries that can actually detract from one's ability to respond to "real fear."
This seems like a very tricky line to walk, but de Becker manages it, with authority. I would recommend this book to many people, for many reasons.
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