Posted by
John Caile on Friday, January 02, 2009 3:19:11 PM
In an age when life expectancy has soared to levels undreamed of just a century ago, it is rather amazing how many people find an endless stream of things to fear.
I suppose it shouldn't be surprising - almost daily, we hear about some automotive recall, invariably described as a "potentially dangerous" condition (even if not a single person has yet been harmed, nor is likely to be).
Every Christmas season, we are guaranteed to be treated to some news talking head, ominously going over the list of "most dangerous" toys. We have "Warning" labels on virtually every product sold in America. And a staple on morning TV talks shows is the oh-so-concerned member of this or that "consumer advocacy" group, wringing their hands over the latest threat to life and limb.
This phenomenon is not new - when microwave ovens first came out, we heard all sorts of dire warnings about how children in the womb would be genetically damaged, and men who stood too close could become sterile. And we are still being warned of "brain cancer" from cell phones, even though decades of science has shown little correlation with cancer, let alone any causal relationship.
Such groundless fear is the very reason that we still do not have widely available the most effective means of keeping meat and other foods bacteria-free: Irradiation. Never mind that irradiation has been used safely for more than 50 years (the waves pass harmlessly through the food, affecting only the bacteria, and leaving no residual radiation - zero, zip, nada). Ignoring science is bad enough, but what makes this situation so laughably ironic is that while the populace today is terrified of "food-borne illness" they are even more afraid of the most effective preventive measure to fight it!
Of course, there certainly are real threats in the world, but the most interesting aspect of our cultural paranoia is how many of the things people fear today are NOT real, or at least not to the extent they seem to believe. And even more disturbingly, the very people who refuse to recognize threats that actually do exist (international Islamic terrorism), are the same folks who will accept without question a "threat" that is either exaggerated to outlandish proportions (second-hand smoke) or virtually created out of whole cloth (global warming).
As a matter of fact, the entire "Green" movement is predicated on acceptance of a whole series of groundless fears. One recent commercial referred to carbon dioxide as a "pollutant." Apparently they were asleep in science class when carbon dioxide was discussed - CO2 is the substance plants use to turn sunlight into energy...and in the process producing oxygen, a gas that most humans find somewhat useful. Far from being a pollutant, CO2 is a vital component of all animal life on Earth.
But fear is the greatest weapon in establishing and expanding a ruling bureaucracy's control over your life - therefore, in the absence of a real threat, it is necessary to create one.
Thus evolved the "Dragon in the Woods" - give up some of your freedoms (and your money, in the form of taxes), and the King and his knights will protect you from the dragon.
Now, even genuine threats can be used to encroach on freedoms - for instance, care must be taken in fighting terrorism that innocent citizens are not subjected to unreasonable constraints and/or harassment.
But the sad reality is that most of the things that people fear today border on the comical, if not downright silly.
Yet the cumulative affect of piling little fear upon little fear is a populace willing to let "the Government" take more and more control over their lives.
But, hey, at least we'll be safe from the latest "Dragon in the Woods" won't we?