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.

The Walking Dead and Freedom

For the past two years, I was dismayed at how many of my friends were watching and discussing on social media the series, The Walking Dead, and its companion, Fear the Walking Dead, two related shows about an apocalyptic world when Earth is struck by a mysterious virus originating from space.

Humans turn into the walking dead (zombies) when they die from natural death or from this virus. Everyone is infected, the CDC can do nothing about it, and it is actually blown up to prevent the escape of other variants of the virus. Nobody can evade the “turning” into flesh-eating zombies when they die of natural death, viral disease, accident, or are bitten by “walkers.”

The Bible says that the dead shall rise again but Christians had imagined that the risen dead would be normal humans again, not slow moving and guttural zombies who must feast on fresh blood and live tissue in order to survive.

Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead. (Isaiah 26:19)

In the Walking Dead, the action takes place on the southeastern area of the United States. In the companion series, Fear the Walking Dead, which intersects at some point with some of the Walking Dead characters, the story is told how the virus occurred on the west coast, the trials and tribulations of characters in Los Angeles area, San Diego, Mexicali, Tijuana, and  other compounds on farms in Mexico.

Life transforms from the mundane to a survival of the fittest, kill or be killed, kill or be bitten, a constant battle that takes the main characters from town to town, along familiar roads now strewn with abandoned bloody cars, and an ever increasing army of walking zombies in search of a living, breathing victim.

A group of survivors, led by officer Rick, eventually finds a prison with tall fences, barbed wire and cells that can be cleaned of corpses and the walking dead. This prison becomes their freedom, their home for the foreseeable future. They feel safe inside, they can grow food in the courtyard, they have some medical supplies scavenged along the way or during their daily incursions “outside.”

Outside is a world of danger, gloom and doom, so frightening that the alternative of living inside a prison for the rest of their lives seems like safety from harm, a bleak world, but secure. The world is far from secure, as various living, breathing groups survive by praying on the weak and the defenseless.

The virus cannot get to Sheriff Deputy Rick Grimes' group and the dreaded walkers, the feared zombies with sharp teeth, are neutralized by the existence of the prison fence. The prison, with its enforced fences and gates, becomes the symbol of freedom. Designed to keep people in, the prison becomes safe heaven and keeps undesirables out. However, in greater numbers, they can still break down barriers and the chicken wire fence.

The viral pandemic destroyed the world as they knew it and there was no going back. They were driven into abject fear by their own friends and relatives, infected by a virus and now dead. Fear and the instinct for survival at all costs had become the epicenter of their lives.

I could not help but recognize the same real or imagined fear, in our world, a panic bordering at time on mass-driven hysteria, that is still driving our population in the United States and around the globe, two years after the World Health Organization’s (WHO) declaration of a pandemic.

President Trump brought into the White House and on the world stage two specialists, Drs. Fauci and Brix, who proceeded to scare the American population with death and dying on a daily basis. Dr. Fauci never left the White House, coloring the proverbial “sky is falling” with various colors of fright.

The abject fear drummed up and identical narratives repeated on every venue of mass communication by eager to please journos, drove the population at first forcibly into lockdowns and then by personal choice behind a mask and self-exile behind closed doors. People’s homes were no longer their castles, they became their voluntary prisons from which they communicated with the outside world by virtual Zoom calls and smart phones.

People gave up their freedoms immediately because they were driven into mass hysteria by globalists with a plan to fundamentally change their lives into the Marxist Shangri La they envisioned as a way to control everything from the Build Back Better platform of the Great Reset agenda of the World Economic Forum (WEF). The Great Reset | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)

Build back what? Voluntary prisons? Better jails and isolation? By rules devised by a few psychotic billionaires and U.N.? Build better fairy dust solar and wind energy so we can stop using fossil fuels like the United Nations has been advocating for seven decades but nobody listened? Plunging us into medieval darkness and despair? Funny how suddenly prominent world leaders  inserted the same rhetorical phrase, Build Back Better, into their speeches. And they were all doing it for the World Economic Forum’s The Great Reset agenda, ‘never let a crisis go to waste, global communism/fascism.

An engineered for gain-of-function virus provided an amazing excuse to do all the things psychotic globalists at U.N. couldn’t – engage planet lockdown, destroy fossil fuels, destroy medicine, get rid of a lot of old people, reduce consumption drastically, reduce the food supply, reduce water usage, reduce land use by a whopping percentage, and force humanity back into the dark ages.

You are not just hiding behind a prison barbed wired fence to find freedom, you are hiding behind a soulless mask, where your social cues are hidden, your empathy and compassion are diminished, and you experience constant fear. Behind a mask, people tend to become more prone to outbursts of violence, less empathetic, and they tend to dehumanize their peers.

Your life is not much better than officer Rick’s group in the Walking Dead, or those in Fear the Walking Dead, hiding in your home prison as a safer alternative to the dangerous outside world governed by a virus created as a bio weapon in Wuhan, you struggle to escape the Corona-19 Virus, and in the process you have lost your freedom and your humanity in one fell swoop.