# 51. Fear is the enemy ## 51.1. Definition Fear is used to manipulate people by inducing victims to alter their behaviour with threats of potentially unpleasant consequences. These threats and fears may be for something which is real, imagined or fraudulent. Fear is one of the few innate human emotions and it has an extremely powerful influence on our behaviour. A basic survival mechanism, it is the human reaction when danger is detected or pain is felt. Fear can cause many reactions, such as a desire to hide or flee to avoid a danger. However, fear can be conditioned into human behaviour by traumatic experiences and it can also be learned and taught by people or institutions. Religions teach fear to reinforce moral concepts by implying the existence of hell and Satan, for instance. In a similar way, theocratic or militaristic regimes can also induce fear in their populations as a means of control. There are many ways in which fear in a population can be used in a manipulative way, as part of a conditioned response by a regime or political elite. Fear can be counter-productive for the victim when it is artificially conditioned by a manipulator. A victim can made paranoid, irrationally afraid of the most mundane circumstances or even whole classes of other human beings. For example, a victim can be conditioned to be frightened of black people or Muslims. Such unfounded fears benefit neither the victim nor the subject of the fear. They benefit only the manipulator. There are many forms of fear, each of which has its own potential for manipulative use against a victim or group. ## 51.2. Persistence Short to Long. Fears can last for just a few seconds or for generations. ## 51.3. Accessibility High. Everyone is subject to some fears. ## 51.4. Conditions/Opportunity/Effectiveness Fear can be an effective manipulative tool to use against individuals, groups and even against the whole of society. Politicians, regimes and the media use fear to induce secondary emotions in their victims, which they then channel into actions to achieve some pre-planned manipulative objective. Here are just a few examples: - **Xenophobia in war**: During the Second World War in Britain, the British government used various propaganda channels to induce a fear in the general population that the Nazi government of Germany had sent many spies and saboteurs to Britain. This created a climate of general suspicion, convincing people to keep an eye on their neighbours and any strangers in their area, and to report anything remotely suspicious to the authorities. This induced paranoia, causing some unpleasant and occasionally absurd and hilarious incidents. - **Death and Religion**: The Roman Catholic Church (and other religions) has created a hugely elaborate system of religious and social rules which members must strictly adhere to in order to achieve eternal life, and thus avoid the inevitability of mortal death. The rules are strictly exclusive, meaning that only members of the faith will be allowed to enter heaven. This would generally act as a powerful recruiting tool, was it not that every other religion also uses a similar exclusive condition, thus making the consumer's choice of which religion to join a difficult decision! - **Frightened Nation**: In the United States, there is a general fear of a whole range of possible threats such as invasion, terrorism, the federal government, murderous neighbours, "crazies", Muslims, socialists, alien invasion etc. This has given rise to the highest gun ownership rates in the world and some of the highest murder rates in Western society (600% higher than Germany, for example). The media and language of the US is highly militaristic, over-burdened with a mandatory patriotism. The murder by a woman of a young Indian (Hindu) man pushed under a subway train in 2012 seemed to personify the attitude of some members of the public. The murderess said she "had hated Muslims and Hindus ever since the 9/11 attacks". Her reference to "Hindus", who are not even remotely implicated in the 9/11 attacks, makes her action even more tragic, but it also makes the pervasive use of fear by the US administration even more shocking and dangerous. - **Social Exile for non-conformity**: Many of the liberties which allow European citizens to live more freely or in alternative ways have been gained since the advent of democracy in Europe. But these freedoms are gradually being eroded by increasingly right-wing and intolerant governments, insisting that we conform to a pattern of behaviour and economic productivity. Social welfare systems are now designed to keep citizens in regular employment as "productive units". Failure to conform means expulsion from society into a sub-class of poverty and exclusion. Whilst in past centuries, the poor or eccentric were just a normal part of every village or town, and indeed often a large percentage of the population, now they are ostracised to the very margins of our society. They are "non-people", invisible to the rest of us, except when seen crouching in the shadows or being pursued by our police for begging or busking. ## 51.5. Methodology/Refinements/Sub-species *See Child Pages:* - [[Existential Fears]] - [[Fear of Death]] - [[Fear of Pain]] - [[Fear of Supernatural]] - [[Social Fears]] - [[Fear of Examination]] - [[Fear of Failure]] - [[Fear of Intimacy]] - [[Fear of People]] - [[Fear of Public Appearance]] - [[Fear of Rejection]] - [[Phobias]] - [[Xenophobia]] ### 51.5.1. Examples of emotions and potential actions which can be manipulatively induced by fear *Refer to Child Pages referenced above for these examples.* ### 51.5.2. How do politicians use fear to manipulate people? According to a study which has appeared in a recent issue of the American Journal of Political Science, politicians are very likely to try to use fear as a mechanism of social conditioning to oblige members of the public to agree with decisions that they would normally reject. This conditioning is very obvious during elections in many parts of the world, but especially, some say, in the United States, where fear is constantly in use to persuade the population to vote for one party or the other. In contemporary US politics, the population is constantly being frightened and bullied into accepting breaches of their constitutional and civil rights and the human rights of others without any possibility to protest at judicial oversight (such as Guantanamo inmates, torture victims and kidnap victims of the CIA). The best examples of this are documents such as the Patriot Act. The levels of manipulation achieved by this dystopian bill are truly astonishing. They severely limit the average citizen's right to privacy on the very vague basis of protecting their security. This is the equivalent of saying that we have to lock you up in order to protect your freedom! And what's even worse is that individuals sheepishly allow these breaches of their basic human rights, hoping to gain the illusion of security. If before 9/11 the government had proposed such a measure, then all groups protecting individual rights would have had a field day, calling the measure unconstitutional and abusive. But, in the context of "9/11" and "the war on terror", protest has become muted. The protestors themselves are frightened by their own government. Nowadays if a person or an organisation objects to the Patriot Act, they are immediately labelled as "un-American", a term that seems to be used more and more in the US, although not many people know exactly what it means. And therein lies the problem with the manipulation of fear. Because politicians on TV after September 11, 2001 kept repeating the word "terrorist" and "terrorism" time and again, the population started feeling at risk; well, more at risk than they did before 9/11. And sociological studies have shown that there's no better moment to deceive the public if you're a politician, than when it's scared to death. It was in such times that the Patriot Act was passed, whilst the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were taking place, without many people knowing exactly what was really going on, just trusting blindly in the government, like frightened children clinging to their parents. The bottom line resulting from all these developments is that US and other citizens are now deprived of many of their constitutional and human rights; they can be arrested and held without charge, treated like common criminals, and body searched at airports as if they are murder suspects. "A greater understanding of when fear can and cannot be used to scare citizens into supporting bad policies can help journalists and scholars more effectively interpret important historical events. It can help them think about whether, and to what extent, elite manipulation of citizen emotions contributed to initial public support for these kinds of government actions," Arthur Lupia and Jesse O. Menning, the authors of a new study of the subject, argue. When the public is not afraid and knows exactly what the politicians are talking about, they are much less likely to fall for these political tricks. But, by keeping people in a state of fear, telling them that attacks are inevitable, the population ends up supporting decisions they would otherwise dissent against. And America is starting to look more and more like a police state with every passing year. This country is no longer the beacon of democracy in the world. Fear has truly become the enemy. ## 51.6. Avoidance and Counteraction Fear is an important mechanism of survival when allowed to operate in a natural way. However, when fear is used in manipulative ploys, it can rapidly become more dangerous to the victim than the threats themselves. Actions are curtailed by fear, freedoms may be lost by fear and violence may result from the manipulation of fear. Fear can truly be an enemy of the people. We should never accept fear of an external threat unless we can rationally determine that it is a real threat and that it may actually harm us. We need to realise that the more generalised the threat, the less likely is it to affect us. For instance, the chances of someone living in Europe or the USA being killed by a terrorist are infinitely smaller than the risks of being hit by lightening or being shot by one of our gun-toting neighbours. When one puts these risks into proportion, the fear and the potential for political manipulation disappears.