Culture of fear

I’m tired, and nothing works at the office today. I like Fridays though, I tend to be productive on Fridays, much more so than on Mondays. Mondays don’t work for me. Anyway, I was reading the news yesterday, and came across that tidbit in the warning ahead of Hurricane Ike: “Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single family and one or two story homes will face certain death.” Somebody went overboard at the National Weather Service, apparently. Maybe they are inflating the language just to make sure people get scared and evacuate. Then this morning I heard a report on NPR about Ike: in a dramatically raspy voice, the reporter was saying “if you wanted to hit the US where it hurts the most, you couldn’t choose a better spot”, talking about the oil refineries in the path of the hurricane. I guess you needed some forward looking imagination to try and come up with something scary that time: Ike is now only a category 2, after all. I think we live in a culture of fear. On CNN, in between news about hurricanes and other disasters, they now have segments about survivors of various tragedies: how Mrs X. survived a shark attack, how Mr. Y spent two months on a drifting iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic, whatever, as long as you get scared next time you board a plane or a ship. In fact, cultivating fear in the audience is a bona fide genre on TV, with series on mega-catastrophes, and ads that tell you (in black and white) that you could suffer from disease X or Y in the future if you don’t (buy now! and) swallow (in color) their drug. Culture of fear and culture of violence too actually, where some make the argument that if everybody was armed, nobody would get hurt. That will be the topic of another posting. In the meantime, I’m canceling my cable TV subscription, and I’m very careful about how much radio I listen each day, even NPR. It’s on the Internet too, but it’s easy for me to discriminate there and not be taken by that culture of fear. I’m wondering what it says about the country in terms of psychology and sociology. And who benefits from that climate of fear? Is it the various merchants who peddle their drugs in the ads? Ah, I know! Yes, fear sells. Probably because it suppresses thinking. The only good consumer is the non-thinking consumer. If fear suppresses thinking, let’s use fear to turn the masses into good consuming masses. Or is there something deeper? Well, I have to watch out not to fall into meaningless generalities. Not everybody is afraid all the time, for sure. But it’s in the media, that’s for sure too.