It’s sobering to realise that my own children, now in their 20s, have lived with the “War on Terror” as the background to their entire lives. They can barely remember 9/11, of course; they were toddlers, playing, oblivious to the telly on which those shocking images transfixed the adults.
But they have lived under the shadow of the Age of Panic ushered in by 9/11, just as surely as their parents lived under the shadow of the Cold War.
Panic. It’s everywhere, and has been for 20 years. Everything is the End of the World As We Know It and we only ever have Just Five Years to Act or Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve.
Because, while the repeated nostrum about 9/11 is that it was “the end of innocence”, in fact it was the beginning of panic.
Panic and fear began to inform political discourse and, as social media grew in reach if not in wisdom, exaggeration for the purpose of influence increased. The war on terrorism, on carbon dioxide, on loose credit, on COVID-19 – all morphed into existential struggles demanding political and cultural obedience. To paraphrase George W. Bush, “You are with us or you are with the enemy.”
Zero tolerance, zero emissions, COVID zero – as targets of public policy, these all had their origin at Ground Zero. It was in that hellish landscape that politicians and bureaucrats, of left and right, felt the full force of their failure. Half-measures to realise safety – exposed on September 11 – were replaced by a form of absolutism and an obsession with root causes.
9/11 was in many ways a fluke that succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its plotters, because of a concatenation of mistakes, stuff-ups and sheer coincidences, as well as the determination of evil people to do harm. At the same time, it offered a unique opportunity for power to governments and bureaucrats – as governments and especially bureaucrats are drawn to power like iron filings to magnets.
What we know now, of course, is that the 9/11 attacks were a flash in the pan. But the enormous expansion in the apparatus of the security state and its accompanying psychology of fear begun by them was not[…]
In top-down initiatives from wars to climate treaties, from diversity training to speech codes, the threat was invariably presented as being at fever pitch and rooted in deep patterns of oppression, from Saddam’s Iraq to the university campus – locations which, it turned out, were mostly free of the iniquities levelled at them.
The swiftness with which the state and its deep state shadow pounced on the opportunity offered by 9/11 is no doubt why so many are drawn to elaborate conspiracy theories. But that’s to mistake government’s combination of cluelessness and rank opportunism as Machiavellian masterminds.
But, like bureaucratic Pavlov’s dogs, having learned that they could get away with it once, the state/deep state have been flogging the same horse ever since.
Those who came to power in the decades after 9/11 sustained this sense of panic. From Australian state premiers, in their early 30s in 2001, to US presidents, leaders in the age of panic invariably claimed more powers, not fewer, and advanced government solutions to systematic problems.
What could save us from terrorism? The Patriot Act and war on Iraq. From climate change? International treaties. From social injustice? Social engineering. From COVID-19? Perpetual “snap” lockdowns.
Faced with global anything, individual action was not enough. Rather, in the 9/11 era a big, systematic response was necessary to defeat a big, systemic threat[…]Individual initiative was replaced by government regulation, common sense by catastrophism. From terrorism to COVID-19, people demanded government to bail them out; in the global financial crisis of 2007-’09, government did just that.
The Age
Yet what 9/11 really should have taught us was that it’s individuals who really make the difference and governments are useless and obstructive. The government missed every opportunity to thwart the 9/11 attacks. Firefighters, police, office workers and ordinary New Yorkers were the heroes who rose to the occasion.
Government is the problem, yet it’s utterly convinced that it’s the only solution. It’s long past time for the people to put it back in its place.
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