Living in fear

A lot has been made lately of the dangers of stingrays after the sad death of Steve Irwin. Like most creatures, its sting is a defence mechanism and not an attack device. Steve Irwin was plainly very unlucky. I’ve swam with stingrays, watched a diver feed them and were encouraged to touch them. Many people on some forums that I’ve come across are now questioning the safety of stingrays. This irrational panic is sadly all too predictable from a western population that is encouraged to live in fear.

Fear is the method that our governments use to control us. We are constantly reminded about terror threats from one dissident group or another, almost everything we eat or drink is bad for us. Our cars are killing the world and there is not enough water to go round. Anyone that doesn’t look like us is obviously evil personified, especially if they’re on a mode of transport. Flying today? Better be careful, that toothpaste has been banned as it could be an explosive.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some anti-establishment anarchist that believes in the destruction of Government. The plain facts are that less people die in terror attacks today than they did 30 years ago, and flying is still the safest form of transport. As for the food, everything is so mass produced and sterilised today that our natural resistence to many illness is at an all time low. I would place a fairly large sum of money on the fact that we all know someone that is allergic to one thing or another. “Oh, I’m dairy intolerant.” you’ll hear. Rubbish! Mankind simply could not have survived for this length of time with the countless allergies and intolerances we seem to have developed.

This is all rooted in a fear culture, and it’s not a modern phonemenon. A few hundred years ago, a group of sailing ships left England for the fledgling America. Why? Because they were afraid of religious persecution back home. On arrival, everything should have been hunky dory in their new homes; after all they are all like minded people. The local rulers then discovered that without fear they couldn’t exercise any control over the population. So there were witch hunts, after all we can all be scared of witches can’t we. Nothing gets a town more scared than the thought of little Ellie May turning the residents into frogs. Skip forward a couple of hundred years and you can swap the word “witch” for “communist”. People’s lives were runined across the United States by the mere suggestion that they might be a “commie”.

Escape the modern world for a time, and you discover that we are essentially all the same. Look at the smiles of children in poor countries, free from corruption or fear, and they could be children anywhere in the world. It’s only as we get older that the fear is placed in us. Our parents start to manage us by fear. “If you don’t get good exam results you won’t get a good job and you’ll end up living in the bad part of town.” is a line that in one form or another is all too familiar. The fear factor is being installed in you already. Perhaps if we started living by motivation we might live in a better world. “Do well at school and you can live anywhere you want.” echoes the same sentiment but focuses on the reward rather then the punishment.

We don’t trust our politicians when they tell us that there will be no new taxes, yet when they tell us that terrorists are everywhere we all agree. Look at George W. Bush for example. Without the “war on terror” he would have no purpose and the world would be discussing his failings and the way the rest of the world sees him. But more on dubbya on another day. As Douglas Adams once said;

“Those that want power are those least suited to it.”

This entry was posted on 20/06/2007 at 08:17 am and is filed under Random stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.