Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

I have spent a massive amount of time wondering why people have such a distorted view of reality, and are so adamant about it - even though they have zero first, second or even third hand experience.

I honestly believe it's caused by the 24-hour "news" spin-cylce in America.

Those "news" stations discovered long ago they need sensationalist stories to continually hook people in. They need shock value, they need over-the-top. And so it goes that when they report on "Africa" they report about some war. Then a month later it's Ebola on the other side of the continent. Then a month later it's famine in some other distant part of the continent. Never mind that in the mean time hundreds of millions of warm, kind, generous people are happily living their lives, smiling, partying and loving life. The picture mass media paints simply does not include 99.9% of what actually happens here, because it's not sensationalist enough for their ratings. And so the average American sitting at home is told that "Africa" is war/disease/famine, which is only a tiny percentage of the whole picture. The "news" stations are not actually lying, they're just painting a fraction of the overall truth. And it's the fraction that gets them good ratings, not the fraction that everyday people need to know about to be well informed about the world.

Exactly the same thing is true of the reporting of Australia in America. Australia is actually a very stable place, nothing much really happens (no civil war, no prime ministers assassinated, little violence etc.) Of course, the media looks for something sensationalist, and now a massive number of people think Australia is "full of deadly animals waiting to kill you". The first time I saw a report of a shark attack in Australia on TV in America I was gob smacked and thought 50 people must have died by the way they were carrying on for 5 hours. In fact one person had a small bite on their leg that needed a few stitches. Having lived there for 23 years I can tell you the majority of Australians have never even seen a deadly animal, but that doesn't stop the American media painting that false picture and the false story continuing.

In the case of Australia it's mostly funny/harmless, and characters like Steve Irwin even played up to it really successfully. Obviously in the case of Africa it's extremely harmful.

I think it's terrifying when the outlet a society relies upon to receive information about the world is so utterly biased and wrong. When 330 million people don't know the truth, how can they make good decisions?

It's not a leftover, it's a survival mechanism. If fear were stripped away from a person or a society, it wouldn't last long. It's easy to think that rational thought would keep people from dancing on the edge of a cliff but rationality can be undermined through persuasion, self-delusion, and lack of conscious attention. The limbic system evolved as a attempt to keep us safe prior to logical thought and it still does the job.