“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.” – Thomas Sowell
Fear is a powerful emotional reaction, rational and irrational. The dictionary defines fear as “an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.”
Fear is
ingrained in our human behavior and in animals’ survival instinct. Fear is
considered by psychologists a “negative” emotion that can and will often cloud
reasoning and common sense and will drive humans and animals alike to behave
often in ways that are counterproductive to survival or to a positive outcome.
Animals
can detect fear in other animals by smell, sight, and hearing. Scientists have
shown that animals smell fear via certain chemicals. Some creatures are better
sighted than others, but the hearing is always many times better than humans.
The
common elements of fear in humans are the perception of danger (which
triggers a response), the seriousness of the danger (the risk of
survival or non-survival), and how imminent is the danger (right now or
later).
To
avoid the unpleasant potential outcomes of fear, we mitigate fear by developing
coping mechanisms such as denial, avoidance, and submission.
Everyone is unique in her or his response to fear and how they mitigate
specific elements of it.
The primary
reason millions of people lined up like sheep to get their inoculations, even
fighting with those who were deemed by the government as first in line, was fear
– fear of death, fear of losing their jobs, fear of being unable to travel
to their favorite destinations, fear of being rejected and ostracized at work,
fear of not being allowed to shop for food, to enter a doctor’s office, to
enter a hospital to get treatment, to eat in a restaurant, go to school, and
many others.
In
2020, the abject fear of one virus had become the dominant force driving humanity’s
lives, social interaction, and the distance and numbers allowed in any one spot.
For many humans, this abject fear still controls their lives to the exclusion
of all else.
The
government was glad to use fear to control the population, to control
elections, to control the economy, to control human interaction, to control
religion, flying, schooling, vacations, parks, woods, beaches, concerts, which
direction people walked or lined up in order to gain access in public life, to
control which businesses stayed closed and which remained open, which jobs were
essential and which weren’t, etc.
Fear
still drives many Americans to wear masks while in the ocean, while walking
alone on the beach, in a forest, on a deserted street, in their own cars alone,
and when eating in a restaurant with their spouse. One wonders if they wear the
masks to bed.
Fear
fuels negative transformations, but it can also fuel positive ones. Once a
child accidentally touches a hot plate and suffers a burn, the fear of that
pain teaches him/her to never touch something hot or boiling.
Children
tend to be fearless; adults harbor a serious dose of fear based
on experience, knowledge, or lack thereof, and senior citizens are superlatively
fearful because their very existence can be threatened by the wrong physical
move.
Fear is
triggered by dark places, strange and sudden noises, heights, depths, flying,
social interaction/rejection, public speaking, snakes, spiders, rats, mice,
scorpions, bears, tigers, gators, abandonment, getting lost at sea, getting
lost in the desert, death, dying, drowning, avalanches, choking, disease, contagions,
cancer, and many others.
Fear
can be exacerbated by unexplainable phobias and severe anxiety with no apparent
cause.
Movies
use scare tactics to induce fear in viewers – grotesque masks, makeup,
frightening music in anticipation of attacks, and other methods. It was
reported, for example, that some viewers of the silent film The Phantom of
the Opera fainted in theaters when the character’s mask was removed.
Daily
scare tactics of a powerful person on a White House platform, issuing dire
warnings against not wearing a mask or not social distancing, worked very well
as proven by the Covid-19 public fear.
Public
service announcements (PSAs) with manufactured consensus science worked very
well as a tool of fear mongering.
Fear may
or may not increase the chance of survival. The most recent example of this
perception was the face mask still required in some places and still worn voluntarily
by people two years after the Covid-19 pandemic. This fear is irrational as
masks were not effective in controlling the spread of the Covid-19 virus.
Walter
Canon described in the early twentieth century the “flight-or-fight”
response to fear. Human reactions to fear are fight, freeze, faint,
and flee.
Neuroscientist
Joseph Ledoux wrote that humans are different from animals in perceiving fear because
they perceive it as a feeling. The amygdala appears to be the “fear
center of the brain.”
Research
found that two types of neurons are responsible for fear response:
-
Flight is triggered by activation of cells which express
corticotropin
-
Freezing is triggered by activation of cells which express
somatostatin
“The
researchers suggest that we can switch rapidly between responses to ensure the
highest chance of survival.” The Four Types of Fear - Foundation for
Conscious Living
Media and government-driven fear
of massive population die-off was used to control billions of people who were
forced into untested, multiple “vaccinations” despite the mounting injuries and
deaths. When that fear was not enough to inject everyone with highly
experimental gene-therapy shots, government strict quarantine and massive job-firings
for non-compliance were used. World-wide bureaucrats learned from this two-year
experiment that abject fear can be effective in population control but
destroys the world’s economies and irreparably alters their lives forever.