History of fear in America

So you go back to the early years, the terrible enemy was the Indians, who were going to destroy us. The colonists were, of course, invaders. They were invading the continent. Whatever you think about the Indians, they were defending their own territory. There's a scene in the Declaration of Independence, people read it every July 4th, but not many people pay attention to what they're reading. It's kind of like a prayer book, you move on somewhere else. But if you read it and pay attention, there are some pretty remarkable passages. So one passage is a list of a bill of indictment against King George the Third of England explaining why the colonists were revolting. One of them is “He unleashed against us the merciless Indian savages, whose known way of warfare is torture and destruction” and so on. Well, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that and is a very great thinker of the Enlightenment, knew perfectly well that it was the merciless English savages whose known way of warfare was destruction and murder and were taking over the country and driving out or exterminating the natives. But it's switched in the Declaration of Independence and nobody comments on it for years. That's another sign of the same concern.

After that it became the slaves. There was going to be a slave revolt, a terrible slave revolt, and the slave population, the black population was going to rise up and kill all the men, rape all the women, destroy the country, something like that. Then it goes on through the centuries. It becomes modern times, Hispanic narco-traffickers are going to come in and destroy the society. One thing after another. And these are real fears.

That's a lot of what lies behind the extremely unusual gun culture in the United States. It's quite unique. Homicides, deaths by guns in the United States are way outside—there's a kind of hysteria about having guns. A large part of the population believes they just have to have them to protect themselves. From who? From the United Nations. Or from the federal government. From aliens. Maybe from zombies. Whoever it is. We just have to have guns to protect ourselves. That's not known elsewhere in the world. Maybe in, say, Syria, a country that's warring you might find something like that. But in a country that's not only at peace but has an unusual security and a great degree of freedom, that's quite remarkable.

I suspect that what you're bringing up is part of that. I think it's, much of it is kind of just a recognition, at some level of the psyche, that if you've got your boot on somebody's neck, there's something wrong. And that the people you're oppressing may rise up and defend themselves, and then you're in trouble. And another is strange properties the country has always had of fear of invented dangers. There is a kind of paranoid streak in the culture that's pretty unusual.