Updated February 2015
An interesting research
article on the Independent Institute's website looks at the role of fear in the
government's arsenal of ways that they control the masses. This is particularly pertinent in this time of the seemingly endless global war against terror which continues, despite governments' assurances that they have the situation under control.
In case you
weren't aware of it, The
Independent Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan scholarly
research and educational organization that sponsors in-depth studies of
critical social and economic issues. The organization seeks to advance
peaceful, prosperous and free societies that are not grounded in partisan
interests. Dr. Robert Higgs, the
author of "Fear:
The Foundation of Every Government's Power", has a degree in
economics from John Hopkins University and has been a visiting scholar at
Oxford University and Stanford University and a fellow for the Hoover
Institution and the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Higgs begins by
noting that all animals experience fear and that some level of fear is
essential to survival. Fear alerts us to dangers. That said,
governments understand this basic instinct of humans and both exploit and
cultivate it to secure submission, compliance and co-operation with the
government and its dictates. Without fear, governments would not survive.
There is a long history
of fear and government. The earliest governments used warfare and
conquest to advance their empires, what we might call the warrior element.
The losers in a battle were destined to live their lives as subjects of
the dominant group, fearing for their lives. Often the losing side was
forced to hand over their material wealth to preserve their lives. This
handing over of one's material possessions evolved into taxation.
Conquered people naturally resent the imposition of government and
taxation and, throughout history, there are many examples of a subjugated
populace overthrowing their masters. Even if outright rebellion doesn't
take place, the masses take action to avoid the laws imposed by their political
masters or do what they can to sabotage their ruler's government.
In both the past and
present, rulers have augmented their powers with religion using what we might call the religious element; in an ancient
example, Egyptian Pharaohs were thought to be gods and in a modern times, the Emperor of Japan was deemed to be descended from the gods and the current Supreme Leader of
North Korea is third in his family's line of god-like figures who are believed
capable of controlling the weather and who have no need to urinate or defecate.
In the evangelical Christian world, one verse in the New Testament is
often quoted as found in Romans 13:1 "Let
everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority
except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been
established by God." That verse has long been used by the
church to force Christians to subject themselves to the whims of government, no
matter how bad or unfair that government may be.
Through the use of both
the warrior and religious elements, people are in fear for both their lives and for
their eternal souls. It is this combined fear that has propped up
governments around the world for the past few thousand years.
Governments have refined
their use of fear, fostering an ideology that emphasizes our vulnerability to
both external and internal dangers and that only the government can provide us
with protection from these threats. Government leads us to believe that
only it can protect us from both internal dissent and external threats. Sometimes bad governments actually do protect their people for a time; the Nationalist Socialist Party
(NSDAP) of 1930's Germany is an example. The NSDAP helped the German
people by returning Germany to a place of prominence in the world after the
humiliating defeat of World War I and brought the German economy back to its
feet after a period of crippling hyperinflation. Much of this
"Thousand Year Empire" was built on the fear of both insiders and outsiders, including
Jews and the Slavic population. On the other hand, when defeat at the
hands of the Allies looked to be certain in early 1945, the Nazis thought
nothing of sacrificing hundreds of thousands of its own people in a desperate
attempt to win what was clearly a lost cause. The author notes that when governments fail to
protect their own people, they often blame scapegoats, a current example would be unpredictable Muslim terrorists whose actions cannot be discovered in advance.
Modern-day governments,
particularly in the developed world, have convinced us that only government can
protect us from all sorts of fear-inducing threats including unemployment, hunger, illness,
lack of income in old age, toxins in food, contaminated water among others.
This has led to the formation of the "welfare" or
"nanny" state. It is the fear of all of these and other
"threats" that has allowed government to control us.
While fear is a popular
motivator, governments have often learned the hard way that fear has a shelf
life. Successive doses of fear-mongering propagated by governments result
in lowered levels levels of actual fear. Like the boy who cried "wolf",
the populace grows weary of constantly being on guard for their lives. We
need look no further that the United States Department of Homeland Security and
its multi-stage, colour-coded threat level assessment that looked like this:
It has now evolved to the
National
Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS), a sample of which looks like this:
The Department of
Homeland Security is even so kind as to supply a Terror Alert widget that looks like this:
How many of us now even
pay any attention to these "terror alerts"? Even Tom Ridge,
former Homeland Security czar admitted that fear is a depreciating asset as
shown in this
article:
"The Bush administration periodically put the
USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security
chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the
threat level, Ridge now says.
Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often
disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level
to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.
His comments at a Washington forum describe spirited debates
over terrorist intelligence and provide rare insight into the inner workings of
the nation's homeland security apparatus.
Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his
agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded
system he unveiled in 2002.
"More often than not we were the least inclined to
raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the
intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was
good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). There were times when
some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?'
"You have to use
that tool of communication very sparingly," Ridge said at the forum,
which was attended by seven other former department leaders.” (my bold)
War is the great friend
of governments around the world. Bureaucracy builds on itself as the war
apparatus takes shape. Governments know that they can get away with
raising the tax burden, rationing goods, borrowing huge amounts of money (think
of the trillions spent on the War on Terror since 2001), enacting the draft and
other measures that they would never be able to undertake under peaceful
conditions. Few people would dare to complain publicly during wartime for fear of being
branded "traitorous". During war, people are willing to
surrender their wealth, privacy and liberty to governments far more readily
than they might otherwise be inclined. We see prime examples of this
since 2001; the revelations of Edward Snowden have made us realize that, in
this time of the War on Terror, our privacy means absolutely nothing to
governments around the world. Since September 11th, 2001, there
has been a marked resurgence in the "Warfare State". We
have been pulled into two wars and now possibly a third that is a direct
offspring of the mishandling of the war in Iraq because of the fear mongering about a remote
possibility of a domestic attack by an ISIS-related terrorist.
Here is the closing
paragraph of Dr. Higgs' commentary:
"Were we ever to stop being afraid of the
government itself and to cast off the phoney fears it has fostered, the
government would shrivel and die, and the host would disappear for the tens of
millions of parasites in the United States—not to speak of the vast number of
others in the rest of the world—who now feed directly and indirectly off the
public’s wealth and energies. On that glorious day, everyone who had been
living at public expense would have to get an honest job, and the rest of us,
recognizing government as the false god it has always been, could set about
assuaging our remaining fears in more productive and morally defensible
ways."
We have to be certain that when we listen to what governments tell us that they aren't using their version of the "truth" to further their agenda, particularly their war agenda.
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