Our Useless Security Theater
7th September 2012
When terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, they scared a lot of Americans, and they made us feel existentially less secure.
Yet to place the tragedy in a different perspective: Few have a similar terror of highway fatalities, which kill more than ten times that many people in America every year.
Yeah, well, if your car engine stops, you stop. If your airplane engine stops, you die. Cars typically don’t face the prospect of a religious-fanatic passenger grabbing the wheel and steering you into a crowd of pedestrians.
Following 9/11, U.S. society reacted by constructing a complicated and largely useless “security theater.” Policies give the appearance of keeping control and protecting people against existential threats, but in reality they do very little.
Recently, waiting on line for various checks at an airport, I stood next to a pilot (who also has to go through many of the same checks as passengers). When the TSA personnel were not looking, he rolled his eyes at me and said “You know, I am licensed to bring a gun into the cockpit, but I can’t bring more than three ounces of shampoo!”
Sort of a metaphor for how government employees operate: It’s more important to appear to be doing something than to actually get something done.