It is a strange thing, how the brain calculates danger.
You would think a kilogram of fear is the same everywhere, like a kilogram of sugar. But it is not. Fear is priced locally. In one city you hear a car backfire and three people dive under the table, in another you hear automatic gunfire and people only speed up their steps because they are late for work. The bullets travel at the same speed. Only the stories in people’s heads are different.
In Europe, we have perfected a very specific art: the overestimation of risk in a relatively safe environment. It is like installing a full anti-missile system over a small village where the worst threat is a drunk farmer with fireworks on New Year’s Eve. People exchange horror stories about crime the same way they exchange recipes, and with similar exaggerations. “Here it is becoming like Latin America,” they say, while walking alone at midnight with their smartphone in hand, annoyed that the food delivery is ten minutes late.
Reality – the boring statistical one, not the Netflix kind – says otherwise. Most of Europe is historically safe. Homicide rates are low, violent crime is rare, and for an average person, the most lethal daily risk is still the combination of a sofa, a fridge, and a car: you eat too much, you move too little, and then you die slowly and predictably because your arteries have decided they are tired of your lifestyle choices. But this does not produce moral panic, because cholesterol has bad marketing and no villains with knives.
So why do people in safe places feel so unsafe?
Because our threat detectors are very old and very stupid. They were built for a world where rustling in the bushes could be a tiger, not a notification. Evolution did not have time to patch the firmware for modern media environments. When every crime in your city is pushed into your pocket with dramatic headlines and pictures, your brain does not say: “Ah, conditional probability in a population of two million.” It says: “The world is on fire, and I do not have a fire extinguisher, only a yoga app.”
You see one stabbing on the news, one robbery caught on camera, one neighbour telling a story from a friend of a friend who was “almost killed” (translation: lost a phone in a club). Then the brain quietly updates the background wallpaper: the world is dangerous, I am under siege. It does not matter that statistically you are more likely to be injured falling in your bathroom. We do not have bathroom panic on social media. No politician ever wins an election promising “aggressive anti-shower measures”.
So we overestimate crime, overestimate strangers, overestimate the probability that tonight in our European city something terrible will happen to us. And then we underestimate all the slow, unsexy risks: obesity, alcohol, stress, loneliness. Those are boring, and also our fault, which is inconvenient.
Now, shift the camera to a different reality. Let us say Colombia, or any country with high crime and high inequality, where the homicide rate is not an abstract historical number but a background noise. There, the problem is almost the opposite: people systematically underestimate how abnormal their risk level is. Or, more precisely, they cannot afford to treat it as abnormal, because they still have to go to work and buy food and get on with life.
Imagine you grow up in a neighbourhood where people you know are robbed, shot, or disappear. Not every day, not like a war movie, but regularly enough to shape the air. You learn rules: do not show your phone, do not walk on that street at night, do not argue when a guy with a gun asks for your wallet. These rules are not written anywhere, but everybody knows them, the same way everybody knows when the garbage truck comes. Danger becomes infrastructure.
After a while, the human brain does what it always does with chronic unpleasant stimuli: it normalises. You cannot live in constant panic; the system would burn out. So you adapt. The abnormal becomes a baseline. A robbery is “unfortunate but not shocking”. A murder in your barrio is “sad but expected”. You look at some European headline where they write about “shocking wave of violence” because of three muggings in six months, and you feel a mix of bitterness and dark amusement. It is not that your fear detector is broken. It is that you had to shut down some alarms just to function.
This is the humiliating part: being forced to accept conditions that should never be considered normal for a human being. High risk of being robbed, constant background threat, state that is sometimes absent, sometimes corrupt, sometimes actively dangerous. You live in a place where your life is statistically cheaper than the life of a citizen in Berlin or Vienna, and you know it. But you still have to get up tomorrow and go to work. Dignity is slowly eaten away, bite by bite, not by one dramatic event but by a long chain of small adaptations: you avoid this bus, that street, you do not wear what you like, you do not say what you think in front of certain people. You live in a shrinking circle, and you call it “being realistic”.
And then we have the migration story. People start to run – from places that used to be relatively safe and are sliding down the scale, or from places that have been bad for decades and are now getting worse. Maybe the country was “like Europe” once: functioning institutions, some rule of law, crime that felt manageable. Then corruption grows, inequality widens, politics becomes a circus with guns, and the line between state and organised crime becomes a matter of uniforms, not methods.
There is a specific psychological stage when people begin to leave: when the risk structure changes from “annoying but tolerable” to “I cannot trust tomorrow”. Not just crime – although that is visible – but a general feeling that the rules are dissolving. Courts do not work, police is dangerous, politicians are clowns or predators, people with guns decide more than people with laws. At this stage, those who can calculate long-term risk start packing.
Refugees and emigrants are often treated in receiving countries as if they were running away from some exotic chaos they never understood. In reality, many of them measured the risk better than local elites. They watched the curve go up: violence, economic collapse, state failure. They compared it to their children’s future and decided to step out of the experiment. You can call that cowardice if you like. It is still better than waiting heroically until your pension disappears in inflation and your son disappears in a shallow grave.
Now add one more layer of dark comedy: some of the places they run to are themselves gently drifting downward. People move from a country that is becoming like Colombia to a country that was like Europe and is trying its best to imitate the same trajectory with more bureaucracy and better coffee. They bring with them the memory of risk, the smell of how it starts: polarisation, cheap politics, corruption treated as “normal business”, media feeding fear instead of information. They say: “We have seen this movie.” Locals answer: “You are exaggerating, it cannot happen here.” This sentence has been spoken in many languages before things got worse.
The magnitude of risk is not just a number. It is a complex mixture of probability, impact, and your ability to actually do something about it. A small risk of something catastrophic, where you are helpless, can feel worse than a larger risk of something survivable you think you can control. In Europe, people sometimes behave as if they are living under permanent apocalypse, even when the objective risk is relatively low and the system still functions. In high-crime countries, people sometimes behave as if life is almost normal, because they have no tools to change the fundamentals and cannot stay in fight-or-flight mode forever.
Of course, it is comforting to believe that the universe will treat you fairly if you are a good citizen, pay your taxes, recycle plastic, and vote. But risk does not care. It does not read your social media posts about justice. It just propagates through structures: bad governance, inequality, corruption, weak institutions, polarisation. If you keep those ingredients long enough, you cook the same dish almost everywhere: more violence, more crime, more people leaving.
The cruel part is that risk is unequally distributed even inside one country. In a European capital, the lawyer in a renovated district and the single mother in a decaying estate live in different universes of risk, but both are still arguing on the same internet about “how dangerous the city has become”. In a Latin American city, a gated community with private security and electric fences may have murder rates not much higher than Europe, while the barrio two kilometres away is basically a low-intensity war zone. The statistics are averaged, the reality is not.
And yet, everybody talks as if “the country” has one single level of danger for everyone. It is a comforting lie. It lets people feel that their personal experience is universal. It also hides the fact that, usually, the poor pay the price first and the rich only start to worry when the fire is already at their garden fence.
There is also a moral laziness in the European fear. When you overestimate your own risk, you can feel like a hero without doing much. You survived a walk through a moderately rough neighbourhood? Congratulations, urban warrior. You have a pocket knife in a city with low homicide rate? Very tactical. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, people are actually negotiating real danger, not cosplay. They are dealing with the consequences of states that failed, elites that looted, and global markets that treated their country as a resource extraction machine with some inconvenient humans on top.
The irony is that both groups – the over-fearing Europeans and the under-fearing citizens of high-crime states – are, in different ways, victims of the same cognitive machinery. Our brains are bad at large numbers and long-term trends. We remember vivid stories, not silent baselines. We confuse media exposure with probability. We adapt to slow deterioration until it is too late. We react emotionally to sharp, visible events, not to structural decay.
If you want a depressing exercise, try this: imagine two timelines for your own country. One, where the homicide rate stays low, institutions remain mostly honest, and political conflict is noisy but bounded by rules. Another, where corruption deepens, the justice system becomes openly partisan, economic gaps widen, and violence becomes a usual tool in politics. Then ask yourself: in which timeline do you think more people will say “It is fine, you are exaggerating” for longer? The answer is obvious. We are always late in recognising structural risk. We only panic efficiently after something explodes, not before.
So what to do with this?
One option is to stay in the usual posture: Europeans will continue to clutch their pearls about crime waves that are mostly media artefacts, residents of places like Colombia will continue to live in objectively dangerous conditions that they cannot afford to treat as exceptional, and migrants will continue to be treated as hysterical or ungrateful when they warn about patterns they have already survived once.
A more honest option is to admit that our internal risk thermometers are broken in systematic ways. In safe countries, we should learn to distinguish between feeling unsafe and actually being unsafe, and redirect some of that fear energy into dealing with slower, less glamorous risks: institutional decay, corrupt politics, creeping normalisation of injustice. In dangerous countries, people should not be forced to put on a brave face and call their reality “normal”; the rest of the world should stop treating their situation as background noise of the global economy.
Above all, we should stop comforting ourselves with the idea that “it cannot happen here”. It can. The distance between a European city and a Latin American city, in terms of crime and risk, is not written in the stars. It is an outcome of choices, institutions, and time. You can move along that axis in both directions. It just normally happens slower than the attention span of the average citizen.
Magnitude of risk is not about how scared you are. It is about how much damage reality can do to you, and how well you are prepared to see it coming before it knocks on your door. The rest – knives, tanks, dramatic speeches about “unsafe streets” – is often just noise our brains produce to avoid looking at the deeper, boring, structural work we do not want to do.
But of course, it is much easier to buy another lock, another alarm, another fantasy of control, and tell yourself bedtime stories about how brave you are in this dangerous world. It is less pleasant to admit that, statistically, the world might be less dangerous than you think – or more dangerous in ways you do not want to see.
The tiger in the bushes, these days, is often not a man with a gun. It is a slow erosion of the things that keep the man with a gun from running the neighbourhood. If we only react to the gun and ignore the erosion, we should not be surprised when one day our own “European normality” starts to look suspiciously like the reality from which other people are already trying to escape.
