Your immediate threat is not some vaguely drawn demon or cascading evil that remains years away from doing its worst -- eventually. Your immediate threat is what kills you first. The closer it gets, the more indisputable its intentions.
What prevents otherwise sentient beings from identifying such approaching threats? Some friends and colleagues marinated in the same brine of graduate work in homeland security through the Naval Postgraduate School recently traded observations on such matters while discussing at length the evils of the times. In the process of our iterative discourse, certain themes surfaced, including these:
1. Popular fixation on distant, intractable dilemmas (at times reflexively characterized as "wicked problems" so frequently that the most blatant sign of wickedness has become wearing out this cliché). By concentrating on problems which may indeed be real but remain years or decades away from producing their apocalyptic impact, we fall into a trap that yields near term gain at a price.
The gain is bureaucratic insulation from accountability. In other words, the end of the world may eventually arrive according to whatever model projects its ETA, but as long as it does not get here on our watch, no one will hold us accountable for what we do about it. This liberation from consequences frees us to pursue prudent and wrongheaded strategies with equal gusto. And if we cloak our actions with popular, emotive resonance, there is seldom a penalty to face for wasting resources or getting it wrong. Such is the cost of doing business when one calls one's business saving the world.
The price for succumbing to such fixations extends beyond waste of resources. A big price is intentional narrowing of defensive focus to the point of losing the capacity to detect more deadly threats approaching obliquely, in flanking maneuvers. After all, an adversary bent on your destruction seldom neglects the value of surprise if he can catch you unawares and lower his risk by dealing a death blow while you are directing your attention elsewhere.
2. Diminished capacity to distinguish imminent threats to life from confected, outrage du jour that people styling themselves as victims rail against, whether their cause of the moment is some perceived social injustice or no longer having free meals at the company cafeteria.
3. Loss of predator-resistant defenses. People now accustomed to having their stated preferences accommodated and their self-definitions validated see the world differently than their recent predecessors did. The latter had to fight. They grew up without expecting the world to go their way. The requirement to struggle, to compete, and to be ready to engage in combat for both advancement and survival imparted certain programming beneficial to defense. That programming included constant horizon scanning for predators and a premium on early threat detection, effective threat avoidance, and vigorous self-defense. When you have to fight for what you have, you optimize for keeping it and for thwarting attackers who contrive to take it away.
So What?
A distant threat becomes a disembodied abstraction, a topic more suited to debate than action. People obsessed exclusively with eventual and apocalyptic threats spend more energy talking about them and exploiting them for personal advantage than preparing to grapple with them on their own. Making this society's problem takes it off the My Problems list.
The net result is vulnerability that invites ruthless adversaries to strike such self-neutered targets. This situation favors those willing to slit throats over those programmed to see no fast-moving evil. And so, your greatest threat becomes whatever is willing and able to kill you first, because that threat will deny you the luxury of being around when the eventual threat comes to pass.
Perhaps Hilaire Belloc best captured the image of this kind of threat when observing,
"We sit by and watch the barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile."
