John Lees

It's just sad watching modern politicians and their chums manufacture one pointless crisis after another.
We need to invade Afghanistan and wage a war on... wait... bail out the banks with trillions to prevent global economic... wait... flatten the curve to defeat ... wait...stop sea level rise and climate chaos... no, no, forget that - the real enemy is inflation and rising gas prices....
It's all a load of tosh!!! Very very expensive tosh.
And how amusing that they tend to start one crisis just as the last one ends. What a funny coincidence.

Tim responds:

Michael Crichton explained this. It's a "state of fear".

When I was in college I took an anthropology course and our teacher (a big leftist) talked a lot about social control. She argued that agrarian societies used shame for to control the populace; if you or your family broke the unwritten rules you would be ostracized and shamed.

Then, after industrialization, the tool was guilt; people followed the rules out of a sense of guilt. She hated that; said it caused depression and suicide and other horrible things, and it was clear she wanted a different social control mechanism.

While I took everything this woman said with a huge grain of salt I think she was at least partly onto something with this. And, as Michael Crichton observed, they have replaced these things with a new social control mechanism - fear. People no longer feel shame for even the worst behavior, nor guilt. What people respond to now is fear, and the universities generate a constant stream of it with one disaster looming after another. The media picks it up and runs with it, then the government enshrines it into law. But it's all a mirage. The disasters promised never materialize. But the powers that be get what they want by panicking the public with endless horror stories.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:33 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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