Fear Mongering

Life can often be frightening just by itself with natural disasters, of which we have seen plenty recently, major illness, economic duress and the like. But added to this is bullying on an individual scale and on the level of entire nations. This has been going on for as long as we can uncover history and where ever we chance cast our gaze. The basic idea of control is a two pronged approach of ignorance and fear mongering. On one side, power and control relies on the ignorance of the majority of those being controlled. The other is about creating a conditioned of sustained fear so as to keep most people in a perpetual state of imbalance. Various tactics have been used in history and before the advent of science, the main agent of creating fear in the ignorant, was religion.

Religion is in the material context, based on astronomical events that are observed in almost periodic fashion. Many among the proponents of religion will flatly deny this and cite their proofs, but if we examine the more ancient sites around the world, we will find them oriented to the skies and crucial annual events such as the equinoxes and the solstices. In certain locations, other crucial dates will be incorporated and described in the myths. Calamity born of nature of all types would be accounted for by the interference, intervention or the wrath of displeased gods. These gods had to be appeased in order to allow for recovery of prevention of these. As most people throughout history were illiterate and tied strongly to the land and/or sea, they had to rely on a specialized individual to guide them through life. This was the norm in every region and throughout history until relatively recent times.

All specialization requires the existence of surplus value that allows for the freedom to specialize beyond hunting gathering and hand to mouth existence. This surplus frees some people to specialize in areas that are not directly hunting, gathering or agriculture. Some people specialized in making pottery, some in the development of arts and writing, some in raising large constructions and others in observing the sky and linking it to earthly life. The first great religion was linked to the heavens; that is the sky and this was used in the pure sense to make forecasts and to time important events like planting and when fish and animals would show up during migration times to provide food sources. Sometimes, things would not work out according to what was expected. Crops would fail, fish and animals fail to show and the like would unexpectedly occur. In addition their might be a calamity like a hurricane, earthquake, flood, drought, freeze or firestorm. This explosion of the unpredicted and unknown into the lives of the people inspired great dread and they sought a reason. Sometimes, outsiders would come in raids and take what little was left. These events in of themselves would inspire dread and fear. The unscrupulous would exploit this and fan it for personal gain and the gathering or power. These would become the priests, the shamans and the kings and in some cases, such as the Maya warrior city states, there was the shaman-king-warrior all in one. They would provide the reasons why and what was required by sacrifice to make things right.

The paths of history are complex and torturous, hard to follow, especially when conquerors would make every effort to wipe the region clean of all traces of earlier civilizations and supplant it with their own. This brings in the military and warrior influence, that was another specialization that evolved out of hunting. During hard times that hit some regions harder than others in a combined and unequal manner, warriors would raid those peoples who were better off, taking what they wanted, killing any who were a threat and taking the rest as slaves and a concubine. The conquest by warriors was accompanied by fear that was often magnified by the combatants who made every effort to appear more fearsome with every imaginable type of regalia and uniform. Every device to inspire fear was accomplished in some ways by signs of painful self mutilation, tattoos, various types of armor, specialized weapons evolved out of hunting tools and designs to inspire the fear of the unknown. Advances of all kinds were also incorporated to add to the fear.

From that time to this, the inheritance of power either by family lineage of through conquest or revolution has been kept intact through threats, intimidation and shows of power. Fist is was priests, then kings and now the plutocrats who do this. They rely on an ignorant and malleable populace in order to maintain and continue to gain in power and wealth. To make a long and complex story of wealth gathering short, we can sum up by saying the power is tied to wealth and that wealth had its foundation through conquest, robbery and trickery.

Today is not much different than the past except for quantity. Fear mongering is accomplished with all the lessons learned of history, plus a lot of new techniques. The ignorant have been that way and kept that way since time immemorial, many of whom live in poverty. Knowledge has also been passed on since time immemorial to bear rule by various means including the jurisprudential use of fear. The weapon of fear has been sharpened and refined to include ideas of misinformation, false flag operations, fostering of xenophobia, the use of the unknown such as potential end of the world cataclysms, invasions from space and the like.

Some of this has been inspired from great natural tumults of the past that are kept in the record and for which we have now found substantial evidence. We also know that we can live to see another such age of chaos inspired from either a comic, and earthly and now even a man made source. All of this is played up by fear mongers who actually sell us on their visions of hell to come. For the manipulative and unscrupulous, this becomes bullying on a mass scale for profit. How many ends of the world have we live through? There must be dozens and we are still around, a little more tattered, tired and cynical and coming to be more resistant and resilient against a new prognostication of doom. There are some where we have come close to real destruction, specifically the October 1962 super power crisis played out in Cuba. During that time, we came withing 30 seconds of mutual assured destruction (MAD) in global thermonuclear war.

One of the chief ways we have been bullied since the 1940s is through the possibility of nuclear war and its follow up of radiation and nuclear winter. This has been an effective deterrent causing a host of responses in the masses such as the wild “duck and cover” era, to the buying and consumption for fallout shelters, to “art nuking” in endless atmospheric tests and the detente of deterrent. Nuclear power was first used to develop a weapon of mass destruction and the peaceful use came later. But the peaceful use has caused dread and loathing of its own with a plethora of accidents and meltdowns over the last few decades.

Since the rise of the power of the oligarchs from the days of the money changers to the tycoons, the periodic manipulation of whole economies has given rise a new form of fear mongering, the fear of everyone being too poor to survive due to an imploding economy. This fear now drives whole economies. In addition to this, manipulation of economies has been mediated through war, torture and the deliberate meddling in the market. The move away from fixed capital such as gold, to the more volatile fictitious value of floating script currencies has added a lot more uncertainty to those who rely on the script in order to procure a living. Script is subject to a host of abuses behind the scenes such as a mass printing of more, interest charges, inflation and devaluation. Each of these inspire fear in those who know no other way than to pursue this kind of money in order to run personal economics. Virtually the whole of the civilized world now functions through a host of floating currencies that are loaded with fictitious capital as one script jockeys against all the others to come out ahead in the never ceasing shifting of wealth and the power that goes with it. Behind the fog of confusion in all of this are those who secretly profit at every turn of the economy and on all sides of wars.

Mass bullying is universal today and millions forfeit their lives as a result of expropriation of resources that should be shared by all equally. We have lost the vision of living in respect of one another and of the earth. We have substituted a world of illusion for the one that is real. In our continued mad dash for the brass ring, we have lost our vision of the real thing. As the way we do things today is not sustainable for the long term, we rely more and more on mass control through world level bullying and make a tidy profit on selling fear scenarios.

Question what you read and hear no matter what it is. Do not accept anything as the ultimate truth unless you can scientifically establish it yourself. Faith is one of those things that needs to be substantiated and not given to the untrustworthy. Do not yield to unreasoning fear without actual cause and above all don't give ground to bullies of any kind.