Let your security blanket slip | Books | The Guardian: ....we confuse the feeling of security with the reality of reducing risk. The "security theatre" of modern airports makes us feel better, without making us more secure. Indeed, it arguably makes us less secure, swallowing up resources that might otherwise be spent on more effective measures, and making airport staff, focused on finding oversized bottles of shower gel, less alert to genuinely suspicious behaviour. "Security is both a feeling and a reality," as Schneier has put it, "and they're not the same."
But this desire for a feeling of security doesn't only lure us into irrationality when it comes to air travel: it lures us into irrationality all the time. We live, we're constantly being reminded, in highly insecure times; huge swathes of our personal lives and our politics, in response to everything from the eurozone crisis to climate change, are directed by the quest to feel secure. But those responses, all too often, are counterproductive. Afraid of physical dangers, people move to gated communities, thereby undermining community cohesion and increasing the potential for more danger.