Imagination Overdrive

Before Sept. 11, 2001 it was hard enough to pile down the jetway into the belly of a preposterous flying machine, sit patiently in my seat for enormous jet engines to whir to life with deafening power and then peacefully snooze as Bernoulli cheerily combated the force of gravity for hours on end. My mind found itself wandering down well-worn, if paranoiac paths, imagining images of small pebbles and pigeons being sucked into the intake of the engine directly outside my window and my horror at seeing the entire wing of our plane shudder and detach, tumbling end-over-end, destroying the beautiful and necessary symmetry of the airfoil at 29,000 feet.

But while my mind traversed these paths of catastrophic mechanical failure, the idea of a hijacking never entered my mind, not even once. My thoughts were well ensconced in the man vs. nature theme—with nature exacting a devilish price for the sheer hubris of man—not deranged and self-righteous men taking the lives of countless innocents. Hijackings were things that happened to airliners of other more fractious nations, or in the decade just prior to my existence—the bleary and shadowy 1970s.

Tom Friedman recently stated that our failure to anticipate the attacks of the 11th was not an intelligence failure, but a failure of imagination. Yes and no. I would say that the terrorists took advantage of an imagination credibility gap. Prior to the attacks, we may well have imagined the possibility of using planes to destroy buildings, or the capture of Air Force One, or the stealing of a nuclear device to threaten the world, or the earth colliding with a Rhode Island-sized asteroid. But all of these thoughts were not possibilities to be feared or contingencies to be mulled over, but rather idle flights of fancy, suitable only for the most base movie or trite short story.

The 11th utterly destroyed the buffer that separated our most horrific and surreal imaginings from the realm of possibility. Our dark storyteller was given free reign in the world of the conceivable and, predictably, gas masks, Cipro and cell phones began flying off the shelves. And, imagining even more previously unimaginable images, the American public was loath to once again trudge down the jetway onto what they perceived as suicidal cruise missiles. Even now, the airline industry reports business around 40 percent lower than this time last year.

But ironically, the enhanced credibility of dark imagination is just the thing that will prevent future attacks of this sort. The most dangerous and effective method of terrorist deterrence will not be the random I.D. checks in airports, the constant armed guards, the relentless searching of carry-on baggage, the new and powerful x-ray machines that will slice and dice baggage onscreen, the armed sky marshals ready to drop any prospective terrorist in their tracks. Nor will it be the pilots armed with hollow point bullets ready to defend the sanctum of the cockpit, or any other high-tech or high-force solution. Rather, the most intimidating obstacle in a hijacker’s mind will be the tens or hundreds of passengers who will believe the worst of their imaginations. The hijackers on the 11th played on our expectations of the credible outcomes of a hijacking: very high-stress, high-anxiety affairs, but without many casualties. Now the only expectation from hijacking can be death and catastrophe. Hijacked passengers will immediately consider inaction to be the potential cause of hundreds or perhaps thousands of deaths including their own, and will choose action. In fact, it seems that the passengers on Flight 93 did just that as they stood up to the terrorists to prevent the horrific possibility of more carnage.

Thus people are refusing to fly because they can imagine the once-unimaginable, and terrorists will refuse to create the once-unimaginable because it is no longer unimaginable. The sag in airplane travel epitomizes the double-edged sword that imaginative free rein provides. While this license will force us to face and interdict the worst acts imaginable done by one group of humans to others, rampant credulity of imagination creates irrational and damaging fears. The key is to harness this imaginative credibility for vigilance and not paranoia.

Just as I used to fear mechanical failure of an airplane, because I knew it to be a real, credible, albeit infinitesimal threat, I might now add the fear of terrorism to the credible, albeit infinitesimal, fears I face every day. But just as I am 1000 times more likely to die on the way to the airport than I am to die on an airplane, the chances of being directly affected by terror is also infinitesimally small, no matter how much psychic space is taken to fret about the possibility of incidents.

We do have more to fear than fear itself, but not by much.

B.J. Greenleaf ’01-’02 is a physics concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.