Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? This is the result of the race to the bottom for eyeballs and attention - the appeal to fear. Does this ever resolve?

We spend so much time lamenting the demise of journalism, the sensationalization of media, the fear-mongering, etc... But it's not like distinct "bad choices" led to this state - it's the simple consequence of TPTB (well, anyone, really) having the ability to engage wider and wider audiences (and ultimately everybody) in increasingly real-time creating such fierce competition for attention that we must eventually use our most powerful emotional appeals for even the most trivial messages.

I mean, look at me, being all fatalistic - I'm guilty too. But I'm legitimately curious where we go from here, or perhaps more accurately, where do people think the bottom really is, and what will happen when we get there?

Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist, sociologist, psychologist or any other -ist, so I'm not saying this from a quantitative place. This comes from a place of observation on my part. Take it for what it is.

I think fear is a natural human attribute left over from an earlier time in human existence, I really do.

From a young age, if we're lucky enough to have parents, we flock to them because we perceive that the monster under the bed will get us.

In our teenage years, we fear the next steps of our lives and I'd dare say that even the most introverted kid wants to fit in.

In our twenties, we fear being successful or not.

These are gross oversimplifications, but I think the point is illustrated. I think there are two parts to this fear thing. I think we humans are naturally fearful due to thousands of years of biology, and I think we look to leaders out of fear, there's certainly enough evidence of this if you just look at society as a whole and how we behave. Time and time again, societies throughout history look to leaders to placate our fears. The Stanley Milgram experiments touch on this too.

Now for what I perceive to be the dark part of this whole thing. Our leaders have learned that we can be controlled through fear. I say learned, but I possibly mean that this is biological too. If you look back throughout societies, all great societies either were, or eventually became autocratic. We live for someone else to make the scary monsters go away.

Sadly, I think we need fear. Have a look at the Universe 25 experiments to see what happens when a society has all needs met. Spoiler: It appears to end in death and mentally ill behavior.

There might be some kind of homoeostasis for anxiety. If you're not facing serious threats, anxiety gets amplified, and if you're facing serious threats it gets reduced, so it doesn't vary too much. It would be similar to how some say there is a happiness set-point.

The development of behavioural science (i.e. not modelling people as rational beings, but exploiting human psychological biases, see R. Cialdini, D. Ariely, D. Kahneman) is a new phenomenon.

Also is the shift from mass broadcasting to targeted messaging. The degree of information available to exploit you, your weaknesses and biases is a new phenomenon.

The erosion of social loyalties and ties, which can be linked to one century of neoliberal policies, is also a change (although it happened in the past: see the Corruption and decline of Rome: http://www.historytoday.com/stephen-williams/corruption-and-...)

That makes some sense to me. Similar to the physical "gain control" features of eyesight and hearing.