Inhale.
Take as much air in as you can.
After you give up television and newspapers, the mornings are the worst part: that first cup of coffee. It’s true, that first hour awake; you want to catch up with the rest of the world. But my new rule is: No radio. No television. Cold turkey.
When the newspaper comes I just recycle it. I do not even take off the rubber band.
You never know when the headline will be: “Third World War broke out!”
Or: “
Where the television used to be, there on the counter, I put an aquarium with the kind of animal inside which does not make waves, suites the wallpaper of the living room and matches the décor. An aquarium which when you turn on the heat lamp, does not tell you that the rainforest is felled, does not mention the increase in nuclear armament, nor the fact that new terrorist attacks are expected or that London’s crime rate has peaked a higher level than ever before.
You get all this anyway by just glancing at a newsstand or getting into a cab with the radio turned on too loud…but if you buy a glass tank filled with water instead of the TV and all you get is a bunch of illuminous guppies.
It is called Cocooning, when your home becomes your whole world.
Prehistoric man used mass panic as a weapon when hunting animals, especially ruminants. Herds reacting to unusually strong sounds or unfamiliar visual effects were directed towards cliffs, where they eventually jumped to their deaths when cornered.
Humans are also vulnerable to panic and it is often considered infectious, in the sense one person's panic may easily spread to other people nearby and soon the entire group acts irrationally.
Maybe, in a society which surrounds us with panic triggers, we all should get aquariums instead of TVs and radios or throw away our newspapers to make this world a better place?
Now you can take a good deep breath.
Because I still have not.
Further reading:
Neil J. Smelser's, Theory of Collective Behavior
Can panic and the threat of danger be used to trigger peoples opinions and emotions and can this be used to influence the views and ideals people have?
ReplyDeleteIn present times we are warned against so much that may do us harm. Terriost attacks, illnesses such as cancers, climate change ensuring permanent and dangerous effects being put on our children to name a few. These all potentially have the capacity to directly alter our life or people close to you Does all this ensure that we become more concerned in how we approach life and the things we buy or is this much more direct result of people being generally scared by these prospects make them think in a more irrational way?
A great example of this is during the recent aftermath of 9/11. As it has been well publicised many think this was used as a way of creating a direct link with terrisom and Iraq. It has been proven that no such link was ever established. So how have people been taken in and let the events of recent times be able to dictate them to the outbreak of war in Iraq. This is not an argument that terrisom doesn’t exist but the confusion and panic created has been used to governments advantages enabling wars to be started without legal reasoning. An example of the way that governments have encouraged the panic are such things like introducing a system of lights with the same concept as the dooms day clock. Telling the public how close to terriost attack we really are. In truth the system has been fluctuating over the most dangerous ranked areas for years never quite giving anyone a settled feeling. In the USA public have been warned by FBI announcements about exploding cows, poison tipped pens, ferry hijack and model aeroplanes carrying explosives. A little over the top? Or just being cautious. By linking terriost activity to Iraq there has there been less opposition and a more accepting approach to the war?
further reading- Fahrenheit 9/11,
I agree with Zara’s opinion that threat, fear and panic can be used as powerful tools in the manipulation of world society.
ReplyDeleteFrom ancient times religions have manipulated their congregations with fear and guilt, only offering redemption and salvation by following it’s chosen paths and beliefs.
Governments behave like demigods, instilling fear in their congregations by designing and pushing panic buttons, such as potential nuclear capabilities of Iran, weapons of mass-destruction, axis of evil and numerous other hyped fear-evoking threats.
But the exaggeration of the danger is fundamentally to participate the funding of various government departments such as the military and secret services due to the lack of funding they could justify after the end of Cold War.
One of the examples of the panic propaganda that I witnessed was the deployment of tanks at the entrance of Heathrow airport after the 7/7 London Bombings.
Clearly tanks would be of no use for any air threat or passenger threat for that matter… unless the fleet of enemy aircraft landed, cleared passport control and customs and than made a ground attack, taking care not to damage any of their duty free…
Climate change is one of the latest panic buttons being used to manipulate the public. Governments ignored the danger for years, dragging their feet with the Kyoto agreement until the public fear and concern became so overwhelming that besides being a vote winning ticket it was a potential resource for taxation.
Green tax, the tax of conscience, the good tax, the tax that could save us from damnation.
In this case it is not only the fear of the climate mad future that is a potentially great tool of manipulation but also the guilt. Let’s all better change our bulbs to energy saving ones, invest in double glazing (which would have been a sensible idea from the very beginning…), and not forget NOT to leave the electrical appliances on stand-by, to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, which apparently are killing the planet.
Interestingly there are a lot of scientists who believe that the theory of global warming is false. In the “Great Global Warming Swindle”- a documentary by Martin Durkin it is said that YES - the global warming is happening but NO – it is not caused by us and our emissions, as “the Sun is driving climate change and CO2 is irrelevant”. And in fact according to the program- we can’t do anything about it.
So what should we believe in, in a world, which bombards us with designed panic?
I believe that the “panic buttons” give the ones in power an ultimate control. The more scared we are the easier it is to control us.
And sadly whether it is about weapons of mass destruction, climate change or any other “scary” issue, we – the Public are not equipped or fully informed to make rational decisions and are led blind by panic.
I believe that governmental prophecies in some sense are very close to religious prophecies… as surely it couldn’t have all started with a bite of the apple in the Garden of Eden…
So let’s not hit the panic button about the panic button… it all might be just propaganda…!