It's mostly about livestock management: let's say you've got 300 million free Americans each of whom is convinced that they know the way things ought to be and when you ask each of them about what that means they all have quite different opinions -- often the exact opposites. And yet we all still have to be managed in such a way that everybody gets to work on time and there is enough food in the supermarket and the toilet empties when flushed. Daunting task that.
If you've had the good fortune to manage a flock of animals -- human or others -- you come to realize that animal management ultimately consists of creating the perfect amount of fear in each member of the managed group. The trick is you must create just enough fear so that they can be moved about in an orderly manner and not enough fear to panic them. Cows, goats and people respond the same way for the same reasons -- we are herd animals. Given plenty of appetizing food, gentle but firm routing, agreeable music and lighting and words -- we are routinized and made more productive for our owners. But if we get too frightened we stampede and the owners lose control.
So best management practices call for a fear object -- a cattle prod for cattle, say -- not enough to damage the worker but enough to control her. She won't want that to happen again but it didn't reduce her productivity. A traffic ticket works that way for you and I. But to scale up to species size: in cattle, predators are the most obvious threat so cattle gather together in very large groups. The safest place to be to protect your genes to get by is in the center of the herd. On the fringes lurk the teeth and claws. Bulls exist for this moment -- to confront the threat. If that system fails or is perceived to have failed the herd panics because the best strategy then is to disperse to present no large attractive targets and keep genetic losses to outliers in the group.
We have slain all the grizzly bears and the Indians and the Nazis and the Communists so the threat from a nation-sized predator is missing and predictably the nation is getting a bit out of control. We need a credible threat, not too large and not too small. Big enough to make you take off your shoes at the airport and be grateful every day for the brave men and women who are defending our way of life at great personal sacrifice, but not so much that you'll join the militia upstate. This, not climate change or Chinese ambitions or deflation, is the biggest and most important problem for our owners. It takes teamwork, dedication and innovation to impose controls on such a huge restless, clueless mass which includes heavily armed men, many of whom are trained killers and not getting their share. Religion, sports, cheap beer and pornography can only take you so far. At some point you need a bogeyman. Something to unite us, to make us feel threatened as a nation. Something Nazi-size: over there somewhere else, evil, not good customers. It's hard to find the right fit nowadays being the world's only superpower. Invasion from Mars by robot aliens? Come on, this is serious. Russia? Been there, done that. North Korea? Comedy movie. India? Please. Africa has plague potential, but that doesn't work until it's too late.
Radical Arabs? Perfect: easily identifiable colorful costumes. Semites. No actual threat, no planes, ships or missiles. No problems for the banking industry. Skinny savages waving AK-47s and chopping off heads. Perfect for today's Americans.
Bicycle helmet wearing daddies and gun toting mommies are just scared enough to tolerate a constant tightening of the leash. Because Arabs could blow up a mall otherwise.
Some of us remember bogeymen that had, like, intercontinental ballistic missiles, two million soldiers, hydrogen bombs -- stuff like that. And some of us were scared enough to dig holes in our backyard or pray for peace. None of us took off our shoes though.
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