Do you feel safe? Are you and your family at risk? Almost anyone who watches television, reads a newspaper or consumes social media has repeatedly heard that teaser or asked themselves the question. At one time the answer might mostly have been no. Not anymore.
Now such questions have the power to provoke widespread panic response and a rush toward the latest “miracle” cure or charismatic demagogue.
In 2016, Donald Trump revealed his basic strategy to journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
“Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear,” he explained.
It was, for example, at the core of his advice to a friend who had acknowledged bad behavior toward women. Never show weakness, he advised. You always have to look strong. Fear is the key to real power.
For more than 20 years, I’ve been fascinated by what Marc Siegel has called “free-floating communicated fear.” When Siegel, an internist and frequent TV talking head, first labeled the phenomenon, he was worried mainly about the tendency of his patients to personalize risks that were often remote. In his book, “False Alarm: The Truth about the Epidemic of Fear,” he made the point that we often worry about the wrong things and fear itself could pose a greater risk.
Franklin Roosevelt apparently thought so when he said, during his first inaugural address, that
“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
That may have been an overstatement, although the popular interpretation is that it’s best to face problems than become captive to doubt and fear. In any case, it is fair to say misinformation that provokes unreasonable fears is too often a tactic of political opportunists, unscrupulous businesses and irresponsible media. Today we are seeing the drastic, long-term impacts.
Part of the problem lies in our brains, specifically the amygdala — the central station for processing emotions like fear, hate, love, and bravery. Once it detects a threatening situation, it pours out stress hormones. But if the stress persists for too long, it can malfunction, overwhelm the hippocampus (the center of our “thinking” brain), and be difficult to turn off.
Most animals tend to react only to real, direct threats. In humans, however, chronic fear can be triggered by words and symbols — the perception of danger that may stem from hype, fragmented information, uncertainty, or misunderstanding. Repetition is a high-powered weapon that can turn this into a mass movement.
Siegel’s book attacked the situation in three parts. First, he looked at how our “fear biology” can wear us down rather than protect us, inducing paralysis and even making us susceptible to diseases — including psychosis — that we might otherwise resist. He linked the reaction to the “war on terror,” charging the government, media, and drug companies with encouraging people to be unreasonably afraid.
At the time, the media’s obsession with the bug du jour — that moment’s big scare — was already leading to misinformation and diverting attention from real dangers. Malaria and AIDS were killing millions every year, but receiving relatively little publicity. Instead, public health resources were focused on the latest potential threat. The public was urged to obsess over bacterial and viral warfare, while there was no training for radiation poisoning, the Coast Guard was understaffed, and seaport security was neglected.
As a strategy for making money, fear-inducing propaganda can be traced back to the early 1980s, when pharmaceutical companies began advertising heavily to convince us that their drugs were essential to good health. At this point, it’s a constant assault.
Siegel told the story of Ira Lassiter, a popular journalist whose arthritis made him eager for the latest cure.
“The pendulum swung from panacea to panic, and drugs that were misperceived as lifesavers instantly became villains,” Siegel wrote.
Lassiter became a self-proclaimed arthritis drug addict. What finally gave him relief was aspirin, which he initially took to deal with a cold. He discovered that it also worked for his sore hips.
Siegel called aspirin an “antifear drug,” mainly because it is highly useful without being misperceived as a panacea. The Greeks found it in the bark of the willow tree. Centuries later, a chemist isolated sodium salicylate and, in 1897, Bayer employee Felix Hoffman found that acetylsalicylic acid could be effective in reducing pain.
But even aspirin couldn’t counteract the universal fear epidemic that arguably began with the anthrax scare that followed the 9/11 attacks. Government and media repeatedly colluded to convince people to fear something “that didn’t truly threaten us,” wrote Siegel.
“Then, once we were worried, we saw that our federal agencies weren’t functioning effectively, which worried us further.”
It was one step in a gradual decline of trust in both government and science.
During the West Nile virus scare, the possibility was raised that the US blood supply wasn’t safe. But “blood supply” was a misnomer, suggesting that a bug could move from one donor into all our transfused blood. The truth was “one donor, one recipient,” and no large-scale pooling of transfused blood.
In 2003, when the focus turned to chemical weapons and a possible Iraqi nuclear attack (a hype in itself), scam companies pushed potassium iodide pills, claiming that they would prevent thyroid cancer. But a thyroid filled with potassium iodide won’t protect the heart, lungs, and bone marrow, so such pills were like “going out into a snowstorm wearing only a scarf.”
What followed was misinformation associated with public health alerts about anthrax, smallpox, SARS, influenza, Mad Cow disease, avian flu, and eventually Covid. In some cases, the government was a greater danger than the supposed threat, mishandling evidence and building high-security labs that provided an opportunity for bad actors to gain access to human pathogens. One study found that most germ attacks were conducted by former or current researchers.
In early 2004, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal took the lead in warning of a possible avian flu epidemic. As a precaution, more than 100 million animals are slaughtered. Later in the year, a shortage of flu vaccine sparked a national panic. The first victim was an elderly woman who fell while waiting in line for her shot.
Today fear is a highly contagious virus, and the most effective superspreader since 2015 has been Donald Trump. He began by blaming immigrants for most of the nation’s problems and claimed that a “big beautiful wall” would protect us. His basic technique was crude but effective labeling, adding more false threats as the campaign proceeded. It became a major weapon in his “culture war,” along with attacks on anyone who challenged his delusions and lies.
Fear is also central to his negotiating approach.
“The only way to get a good deal is to blow up the old deal,” he told Gary Cohn, the Goldman Sachs investment banker who became Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council.
As Bob Woodward explained in Fear, a book on Trump’s first administration,
“Cohn realized that Trump had gone bankrupt six times and seemed not to mind. Bankruptcy was just another business strategy. Walk away, threaten to blow up the deal. Real power is fear.”
It’s the same thing he’s doing now, frequently combined with unpredictability as a tactic to threaten the entire country and the world. Traditional allies have become enemies who are “raping” us with unfair trade, setting off a global trade war that could spark recession.
His latest move is executive orders aimed at “investigating” critics Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs, two members of his first administration, to promote fear among his opponents as well as his current staff that any opposition can lead to presidential charges of treason. Even if this turns out to be unconstitutional, it serves as a grim illustration of the high legal price of defiance.
The good news is that it’s possible to neutralize Trump’s weaponizing of fear and heal ourselves. To start, it involves effectively deconstructing the fire hose of false assertions, something his opponents and media have found it difficult to accomplish. For some, simply holding on to hope and faith helps. But as Siegel warned, many religious folks have “become overloaded with today’s obsessive worry.” And some have served as accomplices in promoting mass fear and hate.
Another approach is to take an occasional break, simply turning off the media. This is easier said than done, especially with the addictive algorithms that are central to most social media’s business model, but worth the effort.
Another strategy is reeducation that puts risks in a realistic perspective. That includes less focus on the unlikely, less acceptance of the rhetorical exaggeration of potential impacts and, with the help of people who have real knowledge, a psychological purge of the high-pressure misinformation that is being shot into our brains.
Other suggestions are just common sense. Get regular sleep, eat healthy food, exercise, and enjoy some entertainment. Perhaps even more important at the moment, question or ignore those who compulsively push threats that appeal to prejudice rather than logic and leave out obvious facts, or worry us even more by bungling the response. Replace unreal fears with self-discipline and some courage.
I would also add the importance of maintaining a sense of humor. More than 20 years ago, in the midst of the SARS scare, I posted a notice in my house calling for entries to a list of “101 things to be afraid of.” As the responses accumulated, we found that the sheer number and diversity tended to make each one look less threatening. From asbestos, mosquitoes, and dengue fever we moved on to losing your keys, barcodes, drunk drivers, being impaled, Tammy Faye Baker, and indifference. Everyone is afraid of something, but laughter can help to trip the amygdala’s off switch.
Overcoming fear isn’t easy, of course, especially when oppressive states, autocratic leaders, compromised experts, and soulless businesses like Big Pharma engage our instinctual apparatus for their own purposes and profit. Our fear triggers have already led us well down the road to mass manipulation.
The first step toward liberation is to realize we are being conned and relearn how to realistically assess risks, to distinguish between illusion and reality. After that, every move away from misplaced worry is a step in the process of recovery.
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Greg Guma is a Vermont writer, former editor, and author of 15 books, including Managing Chaos: Adventures in Alternative Media. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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