More often, it also serves as a defense against fear, because a threatening reality does not merely add another fact to the world; it imposes demands upon us. What presents itself as political courage is frequently little more than the removal of an unwanted reality from public consciousness. Hostility toward science eventually becomes hostility toward human beings, because the victims are rarely those who deliver the speeches, formulate the slogans, or receive the votes. The first seeks to make reality bearable; the second makes reality someone else’s problem. When denial becomes policy, that someone else is usually the person who was most vulnerable from the beginning.