CarderPlanet
Professional
Fear is an innate emotion that is essential for survival. But in human culture, fear went beyond the biological function and began to play an important role in the formation of culture and morality. It is used in religion and the media, in economics and politics, in psychology and marketing and by political scientists, presidents and eco-activists. Fear is at the core of our worldview. Let's figure out how to find it and defeat it.
Niccolo Machiavelli, Italian thinker of the Renaissance, arguing about what is more reliable support for the ruler - love or fear of subordinates, wrote: “They say that it is best when they are afraid and love at the same time; however, love does not get along well with fear, so if you have to choose, then it is safer to choose fear ... for love is supported by gratitude, which people, being bad, can be neglected for their own benefit, while fear is supported by the threat of punishment, which cannot be neglected. "
How fear entered liberal discourse
American philosopher Judith Shklyar in 1989 put forward the concept of “liberalism of fear". She argued that in our time, fear is the best tool for uniting people, a force that can establish solidarity between people in the fight against the threats of terrorism and violence:
And while Judith Shklyar has spoken out against the government's abuse of power and advocated for the preservation of citizens' rights and freedoms in a democratic society, the methods by which she wanted to unite people relied on the fear through which the authorities traditionally control people.
At the end of the twentieth century, philosopher Hans Jonas, one of the most prominent ideologues of the environmental movement, wrote that in order to avoid an ecological catastrophe that threatens our planet, it is wise and ethical to use the tools of fear:
Instead of fear of the Lord - "scientific" phobias
For many centuries, religious teachings have shown people what is worth and should not be afraid, and fear of God was considered an unconditional virtue of a believer.
One of the first authors of the theory of fear as the main source of religion is the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus. He suggested that people were afraid of thunder and thought that the gods are the sources of this phenomenon.
Fear of evil - demons, evil spirits and eternal torment in the afterlife restrained and directed the followers of various cults to a good, righteous life, for which salvation, bliss and eternal life were promised.
With the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, Western culture began to criticize religion, which was opposed to rationalism and free thinking. French philosopher and educator Denis Diderot wrote: "Religion prevents people from seeing, because under pain of eternal punishment it forbids them to look." Advanced thinkers pinned more and more hopes on science that could replace blind faith with knowledge and free people from the shackles of irrational fears.
In the twentieth century, British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that fear, and especially fear of the unknown, lies at the heart of any religion. And Albert Einstein wrote that "the path to real religion lies not through the fear of life and death, and blind faith, but through the pursuit of rational knowledge."
Science has indeed solved many of our problems: it has increased the life expectancy of people, protected us from epidemics that claimed millions of lives of our ancestors, and reduced infant mortality.
But if religion promised eternal life, bliss and protection of higher powers, then science is in no hurry to endow our being with a meaning that goes beyond survival and the transfer of its genetic makeup to the next generation of mortal beings.
She coldly states the facts: we are a vulnerable biological species, which is threatened by literally everything around, from small to large, from giant asteroids from space that can destroy our planet, to microscopic bacteria, superviruses that can kill people from the inside.
Science itself is aimed at human prosperity. But in the hands of the media and politicians, it has become another effective means of intimidating people. If earlier, to legitimize terrible predictions it was enough to say: "It is written in the Holy Scriptures", but now, to justify any threats and fears, it is enough to assert that "scientific research shows." People will be disarmed.
How science is used to instill panic
In the media environment (with the participation of politicians and scientists), “competitive alarmism” has become popular.
One and the same phenomenon is viewed by different groups from opposite sides, a dispute flares up, and the one who can more frighten the layman wins. For example, one group of scientists and journalists argue that children should never be left in the open sun due to the risk of skin cancer. Another group is sounding the alarm: due to insufficient sun exposure, children suffer from vitamin D deficiency, which leads to severe health consequences.
On the one hand, they talk about the problem of adolescent obesity, due to which modern adolescents will live less than their parents, and on the other hand, they frighten adolescents with stories of anorexia, eating disorders and unhealthy diets.
Or, for example, the issue of global warming. Some journalists suggest equating climate change denial with Holocaust denial and pursuing such doubts at the legislative level. And President Trump says that he is not going to take any serious action towards climate protection: “I am not going to sacrifice the economic well-being of the country for the sake of something that no one knows for sure. There are scientists from two sides in this matter. And I agree that the climate is changing, but it changes in one direction, then in the other, then in one, then in the other. So let's see. "
At first glance, it might seem that such a polarization of opinions should lead to a moderate position: do not overeat, but also do not starve, sunbathe a little, sort your garbage, but do not panic about global warming. This may be the case in some cases, but for most people the sense of truth is blurred. The bottom line is a feeling of insecurity, danger and helplessness. And often such elusiveness of truth and an appeal to fear leads to the birth of new omnipotent demons of our time - belief in the apocalyptic outcome of a technogenic civilization.
Apocalyptic expectations from nuclear threat to machine uprising
Apocalyptic discourse has become the norm of our time. Moreover, it comes not so much from believers, for whom the expectation of the end of the world is the norm of life, but also from atheistic technocrats, scientists, journalists and, of course, politicians.
For example, in the British newspaper the Guardian alone, the word “extinction” appeared 93 times in 1988, 207 times in 2007, and a whopping 602 times in 2016.
Global warming, according to scientists and eco-activists, is no less a threat to humanity than an all-out nuclear war. Artificial intelligence and robots, according to technocrats, pose an existential threat and promise us unprecedented economic upheavals.
In 1947, the University of Chicago magazine Bulletin of Atomic Scientists launched a project called Doomsday Clock. Every few years, a clock appears on the cover of the magazine, showing a few minutes before midnight.
The arrow moves depending on the tension of the world situation, and midnight itself symbolizes the moment of a nuclear cataclysm. The hand is moved by a council of experts, including 18 Nobel laureates, and now the clock shows two minutes before midnight.
This is the worst indicator since 1953, when the USSR and the United States first tested thermonuclear bombs.
Against this background, the issues of nuclear war are constantly raised in world politics and the media. Countries like Iran and North Korea threaten to develop nuclear weapons and destroy Israel or America. The United States responds with threats of preemptive nuclear strikes. Russia demonstrates videos in which atomic bombs are flying at the United States and says that in the event of mutual nuclear annihilation, "we, as martyrs, will go to paradise, and they will simply die."
As a result, 51.6% of Americans and 40% of Russians experience constant fear of a new world war.
Elon Musk expressed the idea that humanity is a carrier of a virus: it stimulates us to develop cybernetics and the exact sciences in order to quickly create robots, which are the purpose of our existence. And when the robots come, even if they don't kill us, we will become for them what the monkeys are for people now. And we can only be comforted by the fact that, perhaps, they will not pay special attention to us - as we do not particularly watch chimpanzees.
This is another media image, from which it follows that humanity is unable to stop its suicidal progress. Science appears as an inert, accelerating machine that inevitably carries us to the end of time.
Although technology industry leaders like Elon Musk often act as high-profile alarmists and paint the future dangers of robots brightest, they do not think to stop developing them, because if not they, then their competitor will certainly do it.
Scientists are not to blame for their dangerous inventions, businessmen and financiers are not to blame for world economic crises, politicians are not to blame for wars.
Or at least that's what they claim. Nevertheless, they all continue to scare us with these "beyond their control" circumstances.
How to scare correctly
Appeal to fear Is a well-known practice. It is used in marketing, psychology and propaganda to modify human behavior and includes three key factors:fear, the threat and perceived effectiveness...
For the fear appeal to work, you need to be in precise proportions. If the victim thinks that the proposed measures to avoid the danger are too complicated or for some reason unavailable, he will also be unable to do anything. Bending over with the fear component can lead to a stupor and dysfunctional anxiety.
How fear of the unknown affects the brain
The fear of the unknown is often referred to irrational fear... According to some scholars, it is at the root of all other fears.
A meta-analysis of studies shows that exposure to unknown factors increases the heartbeat, activates the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Moreover, studies show that during the primary cognitive processing of environmental stimuli, we automatically define something as dangerous or safe, based on whether we know this stimulus or not: the unknown is regarded as a danger. Such fearfulness in relation to the new is balanced by other biological mechanisms, for example, our tendency to learn, and largely depends on upbringing and social environment.
An overabundance of unknown factors, for example, in a war zone, and insecurity lead to nervous system disorders, panic attacks and other disruptions.
In unusual and unpredictable situations, the brain looks for things in the environment that, according to past experience, are associated with danger or safety. Of course, not all uncertainty and unpredictability causes fear or anxiety in people: we do not want to know in advance what will be presented to us, or how our favorite series will end.
Experiments show that we work with great enthusiasm if the size of the reward is not known to us in advance. But the unknown is only tolerable in small doses: hardly anyone will be satisfied with a job in which the exact amount of salary will not be indicated for years.
How the fear of the unknown is used in politics
To justify the US invasion of Iraq, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that "lack of evidence is not proof that something is missing." He hinted that if intelligence did not find chemical weapons factories in Iraq, this does not mean that they are not there.
On another occasion, he conceptualized this idea in an expanded form: “Reports that something has not happened always fascinate me, because, as we know, there is a known known that we know that we know it. We also know that there is a known unknown: we know that we do not know some things. But there is also an unknown unknown about which we do not even know that we do not know it. " No, really, it sounded like this:
At first glance, Rumsfeld's thought may seem like banal nonsense, with which another politician is trying to cover up another crime. Of course, in many ways it is. But there is a deeper problem in these words: the feeling that the unknown is fraught with danger, with which something must be done now, otherwise it will be too late.
The threat is hidden, and even if we do not know about it, it still exists. Therefore, competent persons must do something about this threat, and the public, for the most part, meekly listen to their guides and be afraid.
But even worse, as the eminent German sociologist Ulrich Beck argued:
But how do we determine what we are afraid of in a world where, as we are told, even a bar of soap can disrupt the endocrine system and lead to the emergence of super-resistant killer bacteria?
Replicated fear is the worst
We are most afraid of what is easier for us to imagine and remember.
This perceptual feature is called the availability heuristic: we measure the frequency or possibility of an event by the ease with which examples come to mind. Therefore, replicated fears with vivid images scare us more and more than just statistically probable threats.
For example, many people are afraid of sharks, which we have repeatedly seen in films as cannibals, while tens of thousands of times more people die every year from mosquito bites.
The media feeds our imaginations with memorable negative images: we evaluate reality based on them, and not on real facts. For example, despite the fact that the crime rate in the United States has been falling every year since the mid-90s and is now at a historic low, almost three-quarters of Americans believe that the crime rate is only growing!
Good old "external enemy"
Fear of an external enemy has always been one of the key tools in the hands of politicians who want to start a war.
One of the main figures of Nazi Germany, Hermann Goering, said that nothing is easier than mobilizing people for a war that none of them needs: just tell them that they are being attacked and condemn the pacifists for their lack of patriotism and for exposing the country danger.
In our time, the external enemy has acquired almost supernatural features in the face of terrorists, and modern society is in a permanent state of war against this invisible threat.
After the 9/11 attacks, the US government launched an international military campaign called the Global War on Terrorism. Under its auspices, hostilities were and are being conducted in different parts of the world, for example, military operations against the Islamic State. It is noteworthy that in English this concept of combating terrorism in all its manifestations is abbreviated as "War on terror", which can be translated into Russian as "war on terror", or even "war with terror (fear)".
American political scientist and politician Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote about the War on Terror as follows: “This phrase is meaningless in itself. It does not define the geographic context or our perceived enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy, but a military technique: political intimidation through the murder of unarmed people."
The War on Terror has created a culture of fear - fear that "cloudes the mind, intensifies emotions, and allows political demagogues to easily mobilize the public in the direction they need for their political goals."
The "War of Terror" provoked not only a series of hostilities, but also an expansion of surveillance programs on citizens in an attempt to identify and suppress any terrorist threats in their infancy. The threat of terrorist attacks is a mandatory argument in strengthening monitoring of the private life of citizens in the United States, China, Russia and other countries.
How to defeat a culture of fear with the power of reason
Franklin Roosevelt, in his inaugural speech in 1933, uttered the legendary phrase: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." He described the fear of fear as "nameless, unreasonable, unreasonable horror that paralyzes the necessary attempts to turn a retreat into an offensive."
Modern culture has succeeded in trying to give fear a separate essence, to turn it into a feeling of insecurity and anxiety hanging over everyone.
The fear of the unknown and the inability to do anything to avoid unknown future threats cause pathological anxiety in people: in America alone, anxiety disorders affect 40 million people, or 18% of the total population. Research shows that anxiety causes indecision in people, which makes us tend to interpret the unknown in a negative way. In order not to fall prey to this indecision and anxiety, it is necessary to find effective protection from fear.
The worst thing that happens during a dispute between the parties about what we should fear most is intolerance to the arguments of the other side, the position "either with us or against us." It leads to a completely unscientific censure of critical thinking and requires faith rather than understanding.
One of the key mottos of the Age of Enlightenment was the Latin dictum of Horace sapere aude - “dare to know”. Immanuel Kant translated this as "have the courage to use your own mind."
This idea is relevant now more than ever, because with such an abundance of information about threats, risks and impending global catastrophes, only rational thinking and one's own opinion can protect a person from painful anxiety and confusion. If we stop being led on assessments and opinions, then we will learn to look at the facts and independently decide what conclusions should be drawn from them.
Besides rational and critical thinking, the obvious antidote to fear can be the cultivation of courage. Winston Churchill said that courage "is not in vain considered the highest virtue, since this quality guarantees the existence of all other virtues." Another master of aphorisms, Mark Twain, said that "courage is resistance to fear, not its absence."
There is a version that the word "risk" comes from the 17th century Italian term "riskare", which means "to dare": courage allows you to see in the risk opportunities for growth and prosperity, and not a threat to the existence and health of the riskier, as is customary in our time.
Roosevelt's phrase goes back to a similar statement by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, who advised at the beginning of our era:
Niccolo Machiavelli, Italian thinker of the Renaissance, arguing about what is more reliable support for the ruler - love or fear of subordinates, wrote: “They say that it is best when they are afraid and love at the same time; however, love does not get along well with fear, so if you have to choose, then it is safer to choose fear ... for love is supported by gratitude, which people, being bad, can be neglected for their own benefit, while fear is supported by the threat of punishment, which cannot be neglected. "
The term "Machiavellianism" has steadily entered the vocabulary of political scientists and psychologists: it denotes manipulative behavior and politics that disregard moral norms, relying on cold calculation and the cult of strength. In our time, such an approach and an appeal to fear began to be used not only by pathological individuals and cynical politicians, but also by fighters for justice.
How fear entered liberal discourse
American philosopher Judith Shklyar in 1989 put forward the concept of “liberalism of fear". She argued that in our time, fear is the best tool for uniting people, a force that can establish solidarity between people in the fight against the threats of terrorism and violence:
Sociologist Margie Kerr argues that because of the speed at which we receive news, people are much more frightened today than they were 200 years ago: “We start receiving disaster alerts on our smartphones as soon as they start happening. This creates a false sense of involvement that was not there 150 years ago. "Research shows that people react faster and more vividly to negative information, which is why words like "cancer", "bomb" and "war" grab our attention more than words like "baby", "smile" or "fun."
And while Judith Shklyar has spoken out against the government's abuse of power and advocated for the preservation of citizens' rights and freedoms in a democratic society, the methods by which she wanted to unite people relied on the fear through which the authorities traditionally control people.
At the end of the twentieth century, philosopher Hans Jonas, one of the most prominent ideologues of the environmental movement, wrote that in order to avoid an ecological catastrophe that threatens our planet, it is wise and ethical to use the tools of fear:
For the sake of pursuing noble goals - that is, saving the Earth - "in special circumstances, it can be useful to have a false opinion: if the truth is too difficult to bear, then a good lie can serve us," the philosopher asserts.
Instead of fear of the Lord - "scientific" phobias
For many centuries, religious teachings have shown people what is worth and should not be afraid, and fear of God was considered an unconditional virtue of a believer.
One of the first authors of the theory of fear as the main source of religion is the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus. He suggested that people were afraid of thunder and thought that the gods are the sources of this phenomenon.
Fear of evil - demons, evil spirits and eternal torment in the afterlife restrained and directed the followers of various cults to a good, righteous life, for which salvation, bliss and eternal life were promised.
With the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, Western culture began to criticize religion, which was opposed to rationalism and free thinking. French philosopher and educator Denis Diderot wrote: "Religion prevents people from seeing, because under pain of eternal punishment it forbids them to look." Advanced thinkers pinned more and more hopes on science that could replace blind faith with knowledge and free people from the shackles of irrational fears.
In the twentieth century, British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that fear, and especially fear of the unknown, lies at the heart of any religion. And Albert Einstein wrote that "the path to real religion lies not through the fear of life and death, and blind faith, but through the pursuit of rational knowledge."
Science has indeed solved many of our problems: it has increased the life expectancy of people, protected us from epidemics that claimed millions of lives of our ancestors, and reduced infant mortality.
But if religion promised eternal life, bliss and protection of higher powers, then science is in no hurry to endow our being with a meaning that goes beyond survival and the transfer of its genetic makeup to the next generation of mortal beings.
She coldly states the facts: we are a vulnerable biological species, which is threatened by literally everything around, from small to large, from giant asteroids from space that can destroy our planet, to microscopic bacteria, superviruses that can kill people from the inside.
Science itself is aimed at human prosperity. But in the hands of the media and politicians, it has become another effective means of intimidating people. If earlier, to legitimize terrible predictions it was enough to say: "It is written in the Holy Scriptures", but now, to justify any threats and fears, it is enough to assert that "scientific research shows." People will be disarmed.
How science is used to instill panic
In the media environment (with the participation of politicians and scientists), “competitive alarmism” has become popular.
One and the same phenomenon is viewed by different groups from opposite sides, a dispute flares up, and the one who can more frighten the layman wins. For example, one group of scientists and journalists argue that children should never be left in the open sun due to the risk of skin cancer. Another group is sounding the alarm: due to insufficient sun exposure, children suffer from vitamin D deficiency, which leads to severe health consequences.
On the one hand, they talk about the problem of adolescent obesity, due to which modern adolescents will live less than their parents, and on the other hand, they frighten adolescents with stories of anorexia, eating disorders and unhealthy diets.
Or, for example, the issue of global warming. Some journalists suggest equating climate change denial with Holocaust denial and pursuing such doubts at the legislative level. And President Trump says that he is not going to take any serious action towards climate protection: “I am not going to sacrifice the economic well-being of the country for the sake of something that no one knows for sure. There are scientists from two sides in this matter. And I agree that the climate is changing, but it changes in one direction, then in the other, then in one, then in the other. So let's see. "
At first glance, it might seem that such a polarization of opinions should lead to a moderate position: do not overeat, but also do not starve, sunbathe a little, sort your garbage, but do not panic about global warming. This may be the case in some cases, but for most people the sense of truth is blurred. The bottom line is a feeling of insecurity, danger and helplessness. And often such elusiveness of truth and an appeal to fear leads to the birth of new omnipotent demons of our time - belief in the apocalyptic outcome of a technogenic civilization.
Apocalyptic expectations from nuclear threat to machine uprising
Apocalyptic discourse has become the norm of our time. Moreover, it comes not so much from believers, for whom the expectation of the end of the world is the norm of life, but also from atheistic technocrats, scientists, journalists and, of course, politicians.
For example, in the British newspaper the Guardian alone, the word “extinction” appeared 93 times in 1988, 207 times in 2007, and a whopping 602 times in 2016.
Global warming, according to scientists and eco-activists, is no less a threat to humanity than an all-out nuclear war. Artificial intelligence and robots, according to technocrats, pose an existential threat and promise us unprecedented economic upheavals.
In 1947, the University of Chicago magazine Bulletin of Atomic Scientists launched a project called Doomsday Clock. Every few years, a clock appears on the cover of the magazine, showing a few minutes before midnight.
The arrow moves depending on the tension of the world situation, and midnight itself symbolizes the moment of a nuclear cataclysm. The hand is moved by a council of experts, including 18 Nobel laureates, and now the clock shows two minutes before midnight.
This is the worst indicator since 1953, when the USSR and the United States first tested thermonuclear bombs.
Against this background, the issues of nuclear war are constantly raised in world politics and the media. Countries like Iran and North Korea threaten to develop nuclear weapons and destroy Israel or America. The United States responds with threats of preemptive nuclear strikes. Russia demonstrates videos in which atomic bombs are flying at the United States and says that in the event of mutual nuclear annihilation, "we, as martyrs, will go to paradise, and they will simply die."
As a result, 51.6% of Americans and 40% of Russians experience constant fear of a new world war.
Elon Musk expressed the idea that humanity is a carrier of a virus: it stimulates us to develop cybernetics and the exact sciences in order to quickly create robots, which are the purpose of our existence. And when the robots come, even if they don't kill us, we will become for them what the monkeys are for people now. And we can only be comforted by the fact that, perhaps, they will not pay special attention to us - as we do not particularly watch chimpanzees.
This is another media image, from which it follows that humanity is unable to stop its suicidal progress. Science appears as an inert, accelerating machine that inevitably carries us to the end of time.
Although technology industry leaders like Elon Musk often act as high-profile alarmists and paint the future dangers of robots brightest, they do not think to stop developing them, because if not they, then their competitor will certainly do it.
Scientists are not to blame for their dangerous inventions, businessmen and financiers are not to blame for world economic crises, politicians are not to blame for wars.
Or at least that's what they claim. Nevertheless, they all continue to scare us with these "beyond their control" circumstances.
How to scare correctly
Appeal to fear Is a well-known practice. It is used in marketing, psychology and propaganda to modify human behavior and includes three key factors:fear, the threat and perceived effectiveness...
In other words, the victim of the fear appeal must first be convinced that the threat exists and is exposed to it, and then offer it a way out.
For the fear appeal to work, you need to be in precise proportions. If the victim thinks that the proposed measures to avoid the danger are too complicated or for some reason unavailable, he will also be unable to do anything. Bending over with the fear component can lead to a stupor and dysfunctional anxiety.
How fear of the unknown affects the brain
The fear of the unknown is often referred to irrational fear... According to some scholars, it is at the root of all other fears.
A meta-analysis of studies shows that exposure to unknown factors increases the heartbeat, activates the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Moreover, studies show that during the primary cognitive processing of environmental stimuli, we automatically define something as dangerous or safe, based on whether we know this stimulus or not: the unknown is regarded as a danger. Such fearfulness in relation to the new is balanced by other biological mechanisms, for example, our tendency to learn, and largely depends on upbringing and social environment.
An overabundance of unknown factors, for example, in a war zone, and insecurity lead to nervous system disorders, panic attacks and other disruptions.
In unusual and unpredictable situations, the brain looks for things in the environment that, according to past experience, are associated with danger or safety. Of course, not all uncertainty and unpredictability causes fear or anxiety in people: we do not want to know in advance what will be presented to us, or how our favorite series will end.
Experiments show that we work with great enthusiasm if the size of the reward is not known to us in advance. But the unknown is only tolerable in small doses: hardly anyone will be satisfied with a job in which the exact amount of salary will not be indicated for years.
How the fear of the unknown is used in politics
To justify the US invasion of Iraq, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that "lack of evidence is not proof that something is missing." He hinted that if intelligence did not find chemical weapons factories in Iraq, this does not mean that they are not there.
On another occasion, he conceptualized this idea in an expanded form: “Reports that something has not happened always fascinate me, because, as we know, there is a known known that we know that we know it. We also know that there is a known unknown: we know that we do not know some things. But there is also an unknown unknown about which we do not even know that we do not know it. " No, really, it sounded like this:
At first glance, Rumsfeld's thought may seem like banal nonsense, with which another politician is trying to cover up another crime. Of course, in many ways it is. But there is a deeper problem in these words: the feeling that the unknown is fraught with danger, with which something must be done now, otherwise it will be too late.
The threat is hidden, and even if we do not know about it, it still exists. Therefore, competent persons must do something about this threat, and the public, for the most part, meekly listen to their guides and be afraid.
But even worse, as the eminent German sociologist Ulrich Beck argued:
People are willing to pay a heavy price to avoid a state of insecurity. Experiments show that we prefer to be accurately hit by an electric shock now, rather than survive a possible electric shock. Our nervous system is more excited if we do not know exactly when we will be electrocuted than if we know exactly when it will happen.
But how do we determine what we are afraid of in a world where, as we are told, even a bar of soap can disrupt the endocrine system and lead to the emergence of super-resistant killer bacteria?
Replicated fear is the worst
We are most afraid of what is easier for us to imagine and remember.
This perceptual feature is called the availability heuristic: we measure the frequency or possibility of an event by the ease with which examples come to mind. Therefore, replicated fears with vivid images scare us more and more than just statistically probable threats.
For example, many people are afraid of sharks, which we have repeatedly seen in films as cannibals, while tens of thousands of times more people die every year from mosquito bites.
The media feeds our imaginations with memorable negative images: we evaluate reality based on them, and not on real facts. For example, despite the fact that the crime rate in the United States has been falling every year since the mid-90s and is now at a historic low, almost three-quarters of Americans believe that the crime rate is only growing!
Good old "external enemy"
Fear of an external enemy has always been one of the key tools in the hands of politicians who want to start a war.
One of the main figures of Nazi Germany, Hermann Goering, said that nothing is easier than mobilizing people for a war that none of them needs: just tell them that they are being attacked and condemn the pacifists for their lack of patriotism and for exposing the country danger.
In our time, the external enemy has acquired almost supernatural features in the face of terrorists, and modern society is in a permanent state of war against this invisible threat.
After the 9/11 attacks, the US government launched an international military campaign called the Global War on Terrorism. Under its auspices, hostilities were and are being conducted in different parts of the world, for example, military operations against the Islamic State. It is noteworthy that in English this concept of combating terrorism in all its manifestations is abbreviated as "War on terror", which can be translated into Russian as "war on terror", or even "war with terror (fear)".
American political scientist and politician Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote about the War on Terror as follows: “This phrase is meaningless in itself. It does not define the geographic context or our perceived enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy, but a military technique: political intimidation through the murder of unarmed people."
The War on Terror has created a culture of fear - fear that "cloudes the mind, intensifies emotions, and allows political demagogues to easily mobilize the public in the direction they need for their political goals."
The "War of Terror" provoked not only a series of hostilities, but also an expansion of surveillance programs on citizens in an attempt to identify and suppress any terrorist threats in their infancy. The threat of terrorist attacks is a mandatory argument in strengthening monitoring of the private life of citizens in the United States, China, Russia and other countries.
How to defeat a culture of fear with the power of reason
Franklin Roosevelt, in his inaugural speech in 1933, uttered the legendary phrase: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." He described the fear of fear as "nameless, unreasonable, unreasonable horror that paralyzes the necessary attempts to turn a retreat into an offensive."
Modern culture has succeeded in trying to give fear a separate essence, to turn it into a feeling of insecurity and anxiety hanging over everyone.
The fear of the unknown and the inability to do anything to avoid unknown future threats cause pathological anxiety in people: in America alone, anxiety disorders affect 40 million people, or 18% of the total population. Research shows that anxiety causes indecision in people, which makes us tend to interpret the unknown in a negative way. In order not to fall prey to this indecision and anxiety, it is necessary to find effective protection from fear.
The worst thing that happens during a dispute between the parties about what we should fear most is intolerance to the arguments of the other side, the position "either with us or against us." It leads to a completely unscientific censure of critical thinking and requires faith rather than understanding.
One of the key mottos of the Age of Enlightenment was the Latin dictum of Horace sapere aude - “dare to know”. Immanuel Kant translated this as "have the courage to use your own mind."
This idea is relevant now more than ever, because with such an abundance of information about threats, risks and impending global catastrophes, only rational thinking and one's own opinion can protect a person from painful anxiety and confusion. If we stop being led on assessments and opinions, then we will learn to look at the facts and independently decide what conclusions should be drawn from them.
Besides rational and critical thinking, the obvious antidote to fear can be the cultivation of courage. Winston Churchill said that courage "is not in vain considered the highest virtue, since this quality guarantees the existence of all other virtues." Another master of aphorisms, Mark Twain, said that "courage is resistance to fear, not its absence."
There is a version that the word "risk" comes from the 17th century Italian term "riskare", which means "to dare": courage allows you to see in the risk opportunities for growth and prosperity, and not a threat to the existence and health of the riskier, as is customary in our time.
Roosevelt's phrase goes back to a similar statement by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, who advised at the beginning of our era:
Let's try to tear off the mask of fear that our contemporaries stubbornly put on it - and stop being afraid of it.
