Fear

Fear
Type	psychological
A mental state which is not only unpleasant but demonstrably damaging to body and mind. I

Physiological effects

Acute fear is an emotion which promotes the release of stress hormones such as adrenaline, cortisol and norepinephrine. These increase heart rate and muscle strength by diverting resources away from longer term survival needs such as reproductive drive, immunity, digestion and growth. While this facilitates the body's natural "fight or flight" response system which facilitates handling of immediate threats. These stress hormones are a natural but maladaptive response to the sort of chronic stress endemic in most parts of the world.

War on Terror

Full article: “War on Terror”

The "war on terror" - which less disingenuously could be called a "war of terror" - is a strategy of tension which aims to subject a population by promoting fear of terrorism. While the number of direct fatalities of the war on terror is relatively small, approximately 0.25% of the number of people killed by road accidents the unlikeliness of being personally affected does not stop people's fear response being engaged, especially when the commercially-controlled media give saturation coverage of terrorism. The number of direct victims need only be a tiny fraction of the victimised population.

Illustrations

In 2015 in the USA the pervasive climate of fear has lead adults to call the police after noting a 4-year-old playing alone at an outdoor playground, less than 50 metres from his front door. When he refused to go home as he wasn't finished playing, neighbours called the police and his mother faces months in jail. As her lawyer noted, had the incident happened 20 years ago, no one would have been charged and the police would not have been called.

Fear of crime

A 2015 A Gallup poll showed 70% of respondents believe crime has gone up since 2014, with 63% reporting crime had risen from 2013 levels.

 

Examples

Page name	Description
COVID-19/Panic	COVID-19 has seen the largest mass hysteria in living memory
Death anxiety
Death threat
Paranoia	Feeling they are out to get you
Phobia	An irrational, sometimes overwhelming fear

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
"War on Terror"	“The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized.”	Bruce Schneier	August 2006
Bureaucracy	“Having worked briefly in the Canadian bureaucracy, I have observed that bureaucratic debate where power is involved tends to favor paranoid or worst-case analyses, especially those that justify budget and bureaucratic growth. Today's bureaucratic paranoia has indeed been institutionalized by what has been popularized as Vice President Cheney's 1% doctrine:- Even if there is just a 1% of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about our analysis, as Cheney said, it's about our response. Justified or not, fact based or not, our response is what matters. As to evidence, the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply. If there was even a 1% chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction, the United States must act now as if it were a certainty. This doctrine is a license for untrammeled expansion of the secret deep state.”	Peter Dale Scott
Holger Münch	“The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action. Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”	Holger Münch	21 June 2017
Political party	“the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”	Henry L. Mencken	1918
Michael Rivero	“Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants, it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants. A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished.”	Michael Rivero
Strategy of tension	“It is probably fair to say that of the roughly seven billion people who live on our planet today, far less than one percent has ever heard of the "strategy of tension." And only a very few of these could illustrate the strategy with specific historical examples. It is indeed a strategy of a shadow world, known only to a few military and intelligence officers (and some criminals) who have carried it out, a few police officers and judges who fought against it, and a handful of journalists and academics who have written about it. In its essence, the strategy of tension targets the emotions of human beings and aims to spread maximum fear among the target group. “Tension” refers to emotional distress and psychological fear, whereas “strategy” refers to the technique of bringing about such distress and fear. A terrorist attack in a public place, such as a railway station, a market place, or a school bus, is the typical technique through which the strategy of tension is implemented. After the attack — and this is a crucial element — the secret agents who carried out the crime blame it on a political opponent by removing and planting evidence. It must be noted that the targets of the strategy of tension are not the dead and the wounded of the terrorist attacks, as many might assume. The targets are the political opponents, who are discredited through the attack, and those who remain unharmed but learn of the attack, thereby coming to fear for their lives and those of their loved ones. Since the aims of the strategy are to discredit opponents and to create fear, the real targets are not the people who were killed, whether they number in the dozens or even thousands, but the millions of people who survive physically unharmed but emotionally distressed.”	Daniele Ganser	May 2014
UK/Army	“The British army operated rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan that at times allowed soldiers to shoot unarmed civilians who were suspected of keeping them under surveillance, a Middle East Eye investigation has established. The casualties included a number of children and teenage boys, according to several former soldiers interviewed by MEE. Two former infantrymen allege that they and their fellow soldiers serving in southern Iraq were at one point told that they had permission to shoot anyone seen holding a mobile telephone, carrying a shovel, or acting in any way suspiciously. The rules were relaxed, they say, in part because of concerns that unarmed individuals were acting as spotters for militants, or were involved in planting roadside bombs.<a href="#cite_note-4">[4]</a>”	Ian Cobain	4 February 2019

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Fleeced by Purveyors of Fear	article	1 October 2010	Simon Jenkins
File:The Politics of Fear and SCADs.pdf	paper	February 2010	Kym Thorne Alexander Kouzmin
The Power of Nightmares	film	2004	Adam Curtis	A some-holds-barred look at how fear has come to dominate politics in America, Britain and around the world — which observes that much of that fear is based on an illusion.

 

Official examples

Name	Description
Brabant Massacres	A set of murders between 1982 and 1985, in which 28 people died and 40 were injured. It became Belgium's most notorious unpunished crime spree.
Marco Polo incident	The official start of the Asian theatre of World War 2, and chronologically, World War 2 as a whole.

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References

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