Fear Theater: Danger on Paper
Your perception of danger contrasts rhetoric with experience.
I recently took a favela tour, where I counted nine people with guns—six of them obvious mafia members carrying weapons that made IDF Galils and Tavors look like pea shooters. One man flashed a switchblade at me. I was with an organized tour that had the mafia’s OK to walk through, as long as we didn’t film or stray from the path. The mafia used hand signals and walkie-talkies to communicate. And I felt safe.
I’m not a danger seeker. I don’t ride motorcycles or skydive, and I would never enter a favela without a guide. But I wanted to see Brazil’s version of Jennin, where sewage systems aren’t guaranteed and mobs rule.
Throughout the tour, the guide explained why he felt safer in the favela than anywhere else. He grew up there. Personal experience always trumps outside perspectives. He knew his home. He felt safe.
In the guide’s mind, it was so safe, you didn’t need police.
The truth, of course, is more complicated. My more affluent Brazilian friends would never enter a favela, even on an organized tour. They told me it’s a death sentence. Earlier this year an Argentinian tourist was murdered by Red Command when his GPS took him through a favela to see the Christ the Redeemer statue.
My guide argued for mob justice. People in favelas don’t rob their neighbors. If they did, the mafia would give them a “massage.” The gangs maintain totalitarian control over their turf. Police don’t enter, and if they do, it usually ends in blood for them and some very dangerous character.
Statistically speaking, policing helps. There’s no way around that research. Still, many feel danger around police. If the only time you saw police were for brutal shootouts, you probably would not trust them either. Police are less worried about collateral damage when nabbing someone who skipped a bribe or robbed the wrong person than the mafia might even be. The mafia also has a reputation to uphold.
Then there are turf wars, which make defending favelas as “safe” even harder. Those moments are deadly. Civilians get caught in crossfire. Nobody cries war crime or drafts a UN resolution. It’s just life in the City of God. But to a civilian, a turf war once a year might be preferable to daily concerns with your neighbors .
As an Israeli, the guide’s take felt familiar. Israelis often feel safe—even during war. When Iran or Iraq attack, confidence dips, but fewer die in those weeks than in many U.S. cities over the same span. There are American mass shootings with higher body counts than a month of intifada attacks.
So I joke with my American friends who fear visiting Israel: “You live in Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore—the hood! I’m more afraid to visit you.” Of course, feelings of safety are not based on crime statistics.
Because news coverage magnifies Israeli danger while U.S. mass shootings disappear in a day’s cycle, the perception flips. Media doesn’t teach people what’s dangerous. It teaches them what to fear.
In 2025, the panic is over “trans shooters.” A handful of incidents, and suddenly it’s a craze, no different than the old urban legend of razor blades in Halloween candy. Fear theater is about spotlight, not scale.
Meanwhile, in Israel, a young girl can walk alone at 3 a.m. Millions know this. The worst of the non-terrorist crime in Israel is bike theft or stolen phones on the beach. But, yes, terrorism exists. So Israelis feel safe, considering terrorism like any other violence, while outsiders fear crime different to the kind they’re used to.
The outsiders—sometimes from countries with far worse crime—hear about Israel and imagine chaos.
Because safety is contextual and relative. Some feel safe in war, where at least the rules are clear. Some cancer patients feel safe on their deathbed, because they’ve accepted the worst. Safety isn’t the absence of danger. It’s the presence of belonging, order, and familiarity.
Paradoxically, the same control that makes people feel safe can also make them feel suffocated. Mafia rules in favelas, armies in nations—they impose predictability. Predictability feels safe, even if freedom disappears. But the tradeoff is real: freedom without order feels dangerous, order without freedom feels stifling.
Feeling safe has a lot to do with feeling welcome. A tour of any unknown feels safe only if the guide knows the people along the way. You might get called a gringo, but that’s lighter than being called a Jew in parts of Belgium or Spain, where hatred is cold and casual. I felt safer among tattooed gangsters with Stars of David than in Europe’s polished avenues.
I’ve heard stories of people so accustomed to war that they only feel safe on the battlefield. Safety is never objective.
Which is why danger is unpredictable. People tell me I should leave Israel during war. But what if the plane gets hit? Or what if I get hit by a car in my final destination? Fear theater is distortion—it magnifies the visible, dramatic dangers while ignoring the ordinary risks that kill just the same.
As Baz Luhrmann put it: “The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4 PM on some idle Tuesday.”
