Being Afraid
Many people seem fearful today. At one level, they are concerned about personal safety. They are worried about the person sitting next to them on the bus. They are scared to walk out in the dark. But they are also fearful of bigger things, like losing a job, the rapid rises in the cost of food or utilities, and the prospect of higher mortgage rates. They are frightened of immigrants, of people from strange religious backgrounds, of cults, and of terrorists. They are terrified of travel, especially flying, scared that the school bus will crash, or a lunatic will drive into them on the freeway. They are frightened of guns, knives, or being attacked and strangled by rapists or the psychologically disturbed. Behind these specific fears, they are also concerned, or at least uncomfortable, about vaguer threats like climate change or war.
Is it natural to be fearful? I can remember when I was a teenager and well into my twenties, it all seemed different. Instead of feeling fearful, life seemed positive, people were optimistic. Growing up in a post-war era, everything was good. You looked forward, believing life would continue to be rewarding. Economically, these were the boom years coming after rationing and the privations of wartime: my mother was able to buy things she had missed out on in the decades before. However, she was also cautious. Our family was always putting a little aside ‘for a rainy day’. Oh, how I longed for more of those rainy days!
Perhaps my recollections of ‘the way things were’ is an age-related phenomenon. Like many children in comfortable homes, I had toys, books, and my weekly Eagle comic to read. We were among the last on our street to get a television, but it didn’t seem important. Although I didn’t, I could have changed over the years: many show a cycle in their expectations, with the optimism of youth replaced by the pessimism that often appears to come with getting older. Is that the case today, and nothing has changed, just the same process of early hopes set aside by crabby old age? Millennials are not especially optimistic. Looking at surveys and studies, while they are better educated than earlier groups, the gap between the well-educated and the rest is getting wider. Many are concerned about finding a job, about having a sufficient income, about being able to afford a house or even a small apartment. Unlike my generation, these younger people do seem cautious, more pessimistic, or just more realistic.[i]
Certainly, the economic environment must play a part. The two decades from the early 1950’s to the early 1970’s were a time of slow, steady growth, bracketed at the beginning by the end of the Korean War, and at the end by the final stages of the Vietnam War (although that war had run throughout almost the whole of the twenty-year period. Those golden years were especially true of the US, but the same pattern, in less exuberant style, was seen across Europe, as well as it being the period that marked first phase of the growth of the Asian economic tigers. However, beneath the surface, and largely escaping the attention of most of us, trouble was slowly bubbling away, ready to emerge.
Future discord began in 1960, when several oil producing countries met in Baghdad, and formed the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The plan was clear: the major oil companies operated as a cartel, setting the price for crude oil and its products, effectively ensuring the countries with reserves were under their control. With OPEC established, battle lines were drawn up between the ‘seven sisters’ and the countries of the Middle East (although countries from other areas joined OPEC over the next few years).
To begin with, negotiations were relatively straightforward, but in 1967 there was a failed attempt to set up an oil embargo against the USA and other countries supporting Israel in the ‘Six Day War’. Undeterred, in October 1973 OAPEC, consisting of the Arab majority of OPEC plus Egypt and Syria, introduced major production cuts and an oil embargo against the United States and other industrialised nations supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. This time the embargo worked, the price of a barrel of oil increased fourfold (and thereafter OPEC was able to push the price up much higher, especially in 1979-80 when the Iranian Revolution deposing the Shah of Iran, and the Iran-Iraq War began). Oil became a key element of conflict on the ground, not just in price battles between companies and suppliers.[ii]
The golden era had come to an end, and the economic environment returned to cycles of growth and slow down (or even recession). The underlying political tensions that had been created by the establishment of Israel in 1947, and the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, became swept up in battles over access to crude petroleum. Here we are in 2019, and economic instability and tensions of the Middle East have remained almost unchanged: Israel is belligerent, buoyed by the support of the US; Palestine is disenfranchised and marginalised; and the rest of the area is locked into tensions over Islamic sectarianism, religious intolerance, access to oil, and fitful attempts at democracy. Yes, being afraid today certainly has part of its source in the economic volatility that broke out in the middle of the 1970’s.
These cycles of downturns, Global Financial Crises, recessions and other dramatic changes engender fearfulness. Invest in buying your own home, and then a recession wipes out its value, banks foreclose, and you could be staring at poverty. You can never be confident that some crazy events ‘over there’ won’t wipe out your savings. We live in volatile times.
But despite all this and for a long time, many of these issues remained ‘over there’, making it easy to believe we would be safe. Something else contributed to fearfulness, as the growing sophistication of the mass media brought events from overseas right into our living room. Initially, the sense of being in a global village was driven by an apparently harmless form of entertainment, television. Television was enjoyable in the early days, but when the broadcasting business became competitive, each station sought to grow its share of audience. Advertising was the driver: the more people watching, the more attractive the station for advertisers, and the higher price they would pay to reach their intended market. The program mix was critical; programming for attention led to various strategies. Long running serials with identifiable characters, either like the people on your street, or the people on whose street you would like to live. Serials needed drama, and slowly infidelity and casual affairs blossomed into violence, murder and rape: serial killers are way more compelling than a bored housewife thinking about a casual liaison. While serial killers are frightening, they are even more so when they look just like you and me. From there, it is a small step to invaders of one kind or another: aliens, zombies, and lifelike killer robots.
However, perhaps a more surreptitious influence comes from ‘current affairs’. What is newsworthy is seldom a happy story: much better is news about challenges, even disasters, and they can be brought home by interviews with the people involved. Death on a highway, a shooting, a fire, a building collapse: anything can be made vivid by seeing a crying mother or angry father, who looks just like you or your neighbour. The clever step, of course, was to go beyond ‘news’ to ‘commentary’: talking heads in a studio can analyse anything and everything, drawing out complications and concerns that most viewers would not have seen at the time. What looks like a problem has a great deal more to be revealed by experts! They explore new aspects and concerns in events, and as a panel of commentators and academics dig in, they tease out complications, speculating about horrible possibilities. Then came the final blow, the day terrorism became local, in our cities, not in distant parts of the globe.
It is not all about news and world events. Small but also important in this never-ending series of opportunities to invoke anxiety are the game shows. We live each participant’s hopes and worries, we feel their tension, and we worry that they are about to make a mistake. Sitting on the edge of our seats (well, metaphorically, anyway), our anxiety matches theirs, and an unfinished challenge will draw us back a week later. The borderline between anxiety and fear is a tenuous one. A frisson of fear makes what we are watching, whether it is events in the real world or drama in the quiz show, even more exciting. In so many ways, television keeps us on the edge, and as time passes programs must become more frightening, more violent, to keep us in a tense state, eyes gripped to the screen, unable to tear ourselves away.
Of course, in exploring the impact of television, I am using it as a reference to all kinds of media. Newspapers (there are a few left), online news sources, blogs and other websites offering commentary, Facebook, Twitter, and so many others all jostle for attention, seeking enough viewers (or ‘eyeballs’ – the rather gruesome sounding media measure) to encourage advertisers, build recognition, or achieve some other kind of fame, all trading on anxiety.
Another theme in the manufacture of fear and foreboding is the political environment. In Australia before the recent general election, the candidates out on the hustings were talking about politics, but the task was to make tangible reasons as to “why you should elect me”. To be more accurate, while there were promises, the promises were quickly followed by threats: if you elect the other candidate, jobs will be lost, taxes increased, the economy will go bad, as they all followed the same pattern of garnering support by growing fear we see globally.
Promises are often part of another problem. There is a long and well-documented history of politicians making promises and failing to meet them once elected. At one level, this is simply further evidence that you can’t trust politicians, who now seem to be even less well regarded than bank managers! In the US, PolitiFact’s Trump-O-Meter tracks Donald Trump’s performance against his campaign promises.[iii] You won’t be surprised that he has failed to keep some promises and equivocated on many others. He didn’t defund sanctuary cities, build ‘the wall’ (which was to be paid for by Mexico), he’s still not ended Obamacare, he hasn’t released his tax returns (are they still under audit?), or balanced the federal budget (well, he did say quickly, not immediately), and so on. No wonder politicians are reviled!
It’s the same everywhere. Prior the Australian election, the Prime Minister told low- and middle-income earners they would have just over $1000 extra in their 2018-19 tax returns if the Coalition was re-elected to Government. But just days after the election, he faced the prospect of having to break that promise to some 10 million taxpayers. Since he is unlikely to be able to recall parliament before the end of the financial year, he won’t be able to pass legislation for the promised tax cuts. “So that really does make very narrow that opportunity to do it before June 30, and I think that is very unlikely with the advice I have received.” [iv] Scott Morrison is arguing this is about events out of his control. Did anyone suggest he should assess the feasibility of his promise? Of course not. No one really believes pre-election promises, do they? After all, they are being made by politicians!
Time to step back. Why this focus on playing on our fears? Once again, I am drawn back to one of my favourite writers, Niccolo Machiavelli. In that wonderful practical guide, The Prince, he devotes a whole section to love and fear. He concludes his commentary with a typically brief and clear statement: “I conclude, therefore, with regard to being feared and loved, that men love at their own free will, but fear at the will of the prince, and that a wise prince must rely on what is in his power and not on what is in the power of others, and he must only contrive to avoid incurring hatred, as has been explained.” [v]
The sting is in that succinct observation that the prince creates a climate of fear through what is in his power to control, avoiding relying on the promises of love from others. Who are these princes today? Keeping his power by scaring the population, Narendra Modi is an ideal example. Trump is another, constantly spinning stories to frighten the US public. They (the mysterious ‘they’) are going to take your guns away, they are going to kill your babies, they are going to creep over the border and rape you, they are going to impose their inhuman laws, they are going to take away you livelihood, your home, and everything else you hold dear.
Perhaps not. Surely Trump is just a puppet, dancing to tune of big business, the NRA, and the religious right. He will say whatever he can to ensure his chances of re-election, since getting back in is his only goal; he has no clear and meaningful set of policies. With no evidence of commitment to a clear agenda, he must sustain the state of fear in the hope this will deliver his second term. He can see the populist approach is continuing to succeed, ever since he used it in 2016. Now leaders around the world have adopted the same playbook: frighten the electorate by showing the dangers of voting in people who will raise taxes, allow immigration to increase again, and curtail your freedoms. It isn’t MAGA but MTGA; not Make American Great Again but Make Trump Great Again. And the real leadership loves it. Keep him there, ensure he keeps everyone off balance, so they can keep on with their main preoccupation, which is to become even richer, exploiting and controlling more and more of the country.
Is there only one prince to identify? No, we are living in an oligarchy, with several princes. Today they are happy to sit behind the throne (the Iron Throne?!), content to go about their business in the shadow of what they know is a plastic throne, filled by a vain and self-important nobody. As in any oligarchy, the real concerns among the gaggle of princes are ensuring that no one of them manages to get more than a fair share of the rewards. At the same time, they all need to sustain the pretence that the person on the throne matters, which can be tricky if the occupant believes he does! A Rupert Murdoch know how to do it well.
If we live in a world where the very rich are determined to become even more wealthy, they need a president to do what they want. Sadly, that is where Machiavelli was right. Power comes from creating dependency through fear, but fear rather than hatred. Trump is kept in place by fear of those richer and more powerful than himself, and they must make sure he remains subservient, while simultaneously pulling off the trick that he creates fear in the population. Fear at the will of the ‘prince’ while keeping the prince in place: Machiavelli would have enjoyed examining today’s circus, adding yet another twist to his dry-eyed and analytical account of how princes seize and hold on to power. Meanwhile, we remain afraid.
[i] The Pew Research Centre collects valuable data on these and other groups. See for example: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/millennial-life-how-young-adulthood-today-compares-with-prior-generations/
[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC
[iii] Politifact is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies and is a not-for-profit national news organization.
[iv] https://www.news.com.au/national/federal-election/scott-morrison-could-let-down-10-million-taxpayers-over-tax-cuts/news-story/e26ce31561ade882a40c7381f4794a3c
[v] Machiavelli, The Prince, Section 17, Of Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether It Is Better to Be Loved or Feared
