Driven by Fear

“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.