Every country has its reflexes. France has existential crises. Britain has irony. The U.S. has moral amnesia. We rediscover that fear makes us cruel, then write an elegant apology once the damage is done. This isn’t just politics; it’s neurology. Fear lights up the brain, silences reason and floods the body with righteous certainty. In small tribes, that reflex helped us survive. Scaled up to a continent-sized democracy with a 24-hour news cycle, it becomes civilization’s worst habit: pattern repetition without ownership. A major episode came in 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act — the original “you’re the...