State of Fear

Fear & anxiety are survival oriented responses to threats. They are emotional & physical responses to danger. They prepare us for fight, flight or freeze.

I am sitting here free from fear or anxiety, not facing any perceived threat. Safe in my own home, street & city.

However I had an interesting conversation with a friend yesterday about the state of fear that populations are kept in by politicians & the media. The "politics of fear," is a common and effective, though ethically debated, communication strategy, that seems to be used more & more regularly. Before you dismiss this as absolute rubbish there is extensive research confirming that fear & anxiety are strategically used to influence public opinion & behaviour.

Why? Well, several reasons;-

• Politicians want us to "rally round the flag" & trust them to handle the threat. They want us compliant.
• To influence voting behaviour - their party has the solution, not the opposition.
• Perpetual alarm stifles dissent
• In crises using specific fear inducing language & alarming statistics, as in Covid, encourages mass adherence to policy.

Similarly the media knows that emotional content, like fear & anxiety, drives consumption of their content. It captures more attention than positive news. Their business model incentivises sensationalism & negative bias. The story can run & run for days, ramping up the emotional & anxiety driven content. We have a distorted reality making people believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. Social media amplifies anxiety & anger. Misinformation spreads like wildfire.

Don't you get irritated by the way every information outlet repeats over & over the same story, often for days? Don't you get fed up of being drip fed the same information, the same interpretation of events? Often it is simply speculation, with no evidence whatsoever. So much so that we now have to have "fact checking". 

We are deliberately put in a vortex of fear. We are manipulated into compliance. 1984 had nothing on us. We can't tell the difference between fact & propaganda. Recently we are being prepared for the 3rd world war. An example is the World this Weekend on Sunday https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002ntq7  I have no idea how serious this threat is. But this programme is enough to get everyone asking for pamphlets telling us to be prepared, similar to those issued by Scandinavian countries in 2024. 

I really didn't expect to live in a world where I can't trust sources of information. Where the onus is on me to discriminate to avoid indoctrination.

 

At least Jonathan Pie can make us laugh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCMnJ4KicW8  But this really is no laughing matter. We are on a nihilistic trajectory with no apparent brake mechanism.