In that time since the infamous attacks on US home soil of 9/11, the
US had launched two wars of aggression against Afghanistan and
Iraq, to devastating effect. These full-scale incursions of
America's "coalition of the willing", fully destabilised both countries,
and forcefully shattered Iraq into the chaotic state we find it in today.
The driving force behind such actions was fear on a cultural scale.
Specifically the fear that further attacks on the scale of 9/11 could be
perpetrated again by an invisible enemy of unfathomable number,
presenting a threat to the very way of life of Western civilisation at
large. To combat these terrorists, the public of the developed world
accepted sweeping restrictions on their freedom, in the name of
protecting the very same freedom. This huge irony, of course, is not
lost on the author of this compelling book, and it is this cultural
manipulation of fear to maintain power that is its central theme.
So how does one define Fear? Of course the logical starting point is
to identify fear as an emotion, and a potentially powerful one at that.
Fear, in many situations can be a direct motivator for action, and it
has interplay between a catalyst to fight when channelled into anger
(i.e. a direct action to protect oneself) and an impetus to flight when
focused towards hope (i.e. the hope of self preservation). The main
factor of fear is that it focuses its concentration on an external object
or situation, onto which the drive of the emotion is projected, so one
is usually afraid of something.
"fear is one of the most important power factors that exists, and the
person that can control its direction in a society has gained
considerable power over that society."
Ideological threats have long been used to keep the public under
control. Now that the Cold War and its ever present threat of nuclear
annihilation have run their course, it seems that governments and
their media mouthpieces are forever attempting to drum up new ways
for the public to be kept afraid, and to increase funding for programs
to seemingly combat the object to which this public fear has been
directed towards.
"Here a danger lurks for every government: that it complies with the
fear of its citizens. The authorities are constantly on guard when the
fear of a phenomenon grows. The reason for this is that this fear also
undermines the legitimacy of the state, since this legitimacy rests
quite fundamentally on the ability of the state to protect its citizens.
This protection not only applies to its ability to prevent citizens from
being exposed to violence from other citizens, military forces from
another state or terrorists but also to illnesses and various
phenomena that can constitute a health risk. If the state does not
seem to be able to provide its citizens with this protection, it leads
potentially to a destabilising of the state. So the state must make it
clear that it is combatting that which causes the fear. The problem is
that this can cause the fear to escalate, since the state has to
legitimise its acts by referring to the danger that creates the fear. In
order to bolster its legitimacy, these dangers will often be over-
dramatised. Fear has once more gained high status as a basis of
political theory."
This cultural propagation of an emotion has more effect than the fear
of external threats to our well being; it can infect a culture with the
collective identity of victimhood, where any consideration of risk is
overwhelmingly associated negatively, and any growth towards
progress through positive risk taking becomes severely stunted.
"a danger does not capture our attention before someone is found
who can be blamed for it."
"... in our attempts to deal with the risk around us, we often choose
means that are worse than the problem they are meant to combat.
The word 'risk' comes from the Italian risicare, which means 'to dare'.
So risk is connected with making a choice. A risk is something one
chooses to take. The question is how much risk we are willing to
expose ourselves to, both as individuals and as a society. The
answer would seem to be : as little as possible. In present-day
discourse, a risk is not something one chooses but rather something
one is exposed to against one's will. Today, there are few people
who remember that the expression 'risk' could originally have both a
negative and a positive meaning, since to take a risk also includes a
positive possibility. Today, the concept of risk is almost exclusively
negatively charged, with a few exceptions - such as on the stock
market and in extreme sport. To a great extent, 'risk' has become
synonymous with 'danger'."
A culture that wholly gives itself over to the adverse attitudes towards
risk is a society which largely becomes devoid of personal
responsibility, and gives itself over to an all pervasive low level
ideology of fear, where almost everything can be construed as a
threat to the individual and society at large.
Fear can be the glue which holds the oaths of a social contract in a
culture together, but the balance has to be struck between a fear of
breaking commonly agreed norms and rules and the descent into
forms of all consuming cultural repression through fear.
The surveillance state, which has gained so much traction in the war
on terror, works on Bentham's panopticon model, a model for a
prison where normalised order is maintained out of the paranoid fear
of potentially being watched all the time by everyone. In the same
manner, our streets are watched by closed circuit television, which is
archived to be studied later in case of an "incident", and it is the act
merely having a camera pointed at a location (whether it is on or off)
which generally regulates public behaviour out of the fear of being
watched, or caught if we are doing something 'untoward'. At the
same time, this can provide comfort from potential danger, with the
feeling that someone is watching over us at all times,. Of course this
frequently swings back to fear, even if doing nothing wrong, in two
ways, why are "they" watching me? Or why are "they" watching this
location? In a similar fashion our virtual lives are monitored by
monstrous agencies such as GCHQ in Britain and the NSA in the
USA.
This has extended into our language, with fear based censorship and
thought policing of political correctness.
I feel that this has been grown out of a very human trait, centred on
the fear of being hounded for saying the wrong thing. I also feel that
this demonstrates the totalitarianism inherent in
such "liberal" attitudes. This self-policing of thought has a tendency to
inhibit emotional growth, exemplified by the millennial mind-set and
their unrealistic infatuation with the notion of equality.
"We make every effort to eliminate all risks from children's lives. Our
dread of children being harmed in some way or other leads, it would
seem, to our robbing them of important experiences. ... they should
preferably not learn that the world is first and foremost to be met with
fear. A development has taken place from considering fear as an
emotion children ought to learn to overcome to considering fear as a
natural part of their lives."
"Our fear is the problem that comes with our luxury: we live such
secure lives that we can worry about innumerable dangers that have
practically no chance of making an impact on our lives."
This translates very easily to the manner in which the news media
operates, as the portrayal of threats is sold to the consuming public in
a direct manner, which bypasses critical cognitive processes.
Disasters are framed as a direct menace to the viewer’s atomised
experience of everyday life.
"people most often have a quite hazy understanding of probability,
focusing more on the worst conceivable outcome than on what is
most likely. Highly statistical differences have little effect on people's
conception of risk. No matter how improbable they are, disaster
scenarios always create fear. ...
...In general, people get to know about various dangers via the
media, and the mass media cultivate 'dramatic' scenarios. News is
also entertainment that has to captivate, so attempts are often made
to establish a relationship between the viewer and the news being
communicated. Ideally, the news item should have a direct
relevance to the viewer's own life. Single events are presented
within a framework that would seem to represent a social problem,
something that can affect 'us all', or at least a large part of the
population."