The Religion of Panphobia
There seems to be a truism that the masses are most easily controlled by the powerful through the tool of fear.
Organized religion figured this out long ago. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife or thou shall suffer eternal damnation in the pit of hell plus all the other little chestnuts to be found in the Bible, Koran, and the other holy writs. For Krishna’s sake, don’t step on a worm or your karma will be screwed up!
The important bit was the ephemeral nature of the reward or punishment. The carrot that enticed the unwashed masses to this religion or that was the beautiful Heaven beyond the Pearly gates or the promise of the 72 virgins to slake your eternal lust. The stick involved the fire, devil, and pitchforks for eternity. The more sophisticated religions even threw in the concept of purgatory where the ‘white collar’ sinners could spend a century or two before moving on to salvation.
The key to the grand religion scam was man could never prove what exactly happened to your ‘soul’ when a person went to the great beyond. Coincidentally, the powerful figured out this was an excellent way of controlling their populations other than through brute force. Face it, when the major religions of today started their ascendancy, life for the average person was brutish, hard, and short. Pretty much, people didn’t have much to lose and someone was smart enough to hoodwink the common folk into self-policing themselves. Tell the narrative of thou shall not murder, steal, commit adultery, and especially the one about no other Gods but me and the populace constructs their own morals. It makes the job of the elite much easier and conveniently leaves them in the positions of power.
Then came the age of enlightenment and Western world organized religion started to collapse. We went and started educating everyone and settled on a democratic system of government. People’s lives got better, longer, and easier. They stopped buying in to the brimstone and damnation arguments.
But the old motivator of fear as an effective tool to rule humanity did not disappear. It only morphed into another form.
At no time in history has humanity had such access to knowledge. Literally every fact, theorem, or event is a Google click away for a sizeable chunk of our world’s population and more so every day. But what do we all focus on? Is it MIT studies of their latest engineering feats? Are we reading the collective works of Shakespeare or the other literary giants? Nope, we’re hooked on cat videos and Twitter feeds of vacuous celebrities.
And what are the high-tech power mongers selling to the hooked in, Internet surfing, Netflix watching masses? Fear!
The granddaddy of the latest scheme with their Gore, Suzuki, & DiCaprio prophets is of course the climate. It has been a brilliant strategy. Pick a cause with religious overtones, Mother Nature, Gaia, The Great Mother, toss in the ‘think of the children!’ argument, some Indigenous props, and showcase a hockey stick graph that describes how we’ll all burn and/or drown. Then throw in a few bogeymen like CO2 from burning fossil fuels or methane emissions from cattle and you have convenient strawmen for the masses to rail against and stick their pitchforks into.
During the 1800s, the Western world began to rightly separate church and state. This was done because science was starting to dispel religion’s dogma that hitherto been accepted fact. For example, despite the contemporary Flat Earth Society’s contrarian arguments, the world is indeed round(ish) and is easily proven to be so. Oh, and despite the Catholic church’s objections, the Earth is not the center of the Universe because Galileo used a scientific instrument (ie. A telescope) to determine that moons orbited Jupiter.
But Western society is undergoing a reintegration of the Church of Environmentalism/Progresive Liberalism/Political Correctness and the state. The faithful dutifully go about separating their refuse into the correct blue boxes, recycling bags, and composters. Diversity is our Strength. #MeToo. Governments push ‘green’ technology and to phase out dirty CO2 emitters. There are compulsory tithes (Carbon taxation) from all the sinners. Everyone should just get along and banish all borders. LGBTQQIP2SAA. Kumbaya!
Paradoxically, the truly faithful decry and denigrate actual facts contrary to their accepted tenets. In Canada, the actual recycle rate of plastic, despite decades of Blue Box campaigns, is only 11%. Clothing in North America is only recycled on the order of 1%. Solar and wind power, electric cars, and other ‘green’ technologies are turning out to be massive, expensive, tax paid failures. But the true believers turn a blind eye to contrary facts and call them heresy. Hey, as long as you separate your bottles and tin cans, ban plastic straws from your Starbucks latte, and use reusable grocery bags, why can’t you continue to enjoy running around in your gas guzzling SUV?
Of course, if you want to commit true blasphemy then call into question any of the accepted climatic change ‘facts’ and you’ll soon find out how many Facebook friends you’ll lose. The Arctic ice is melting and the polar bears are dying! Well, explain how there are more polar bears than ever and the Antarctic ice shelf is growing as confirmed by NASA. CO2 is a pollutant and is killing the planet! Well, CO2 is a vital building block for plants and they’re greener and more productive than ever. We’re all going to drown due to rising ocean levels. Oops, gotta keep moving those goal posts because as the decades go by on some of these claims, the facts don’t actually line up with reality.
But the real trick is to keep your population in that constant state of fear. This is accomplished by keeping your claims vague and shrouded in pseudo-science that can’t be easily disproven. How else would outfits like ‘Moms Across America’ be able to convince you that a few parts per billion of glyphosate detected in your bowl of Cheerios is going to cause your children to grow cancerous tumours. Despite thousands more in the bun, it will be the few extra hormones in your burger that are going to result in your daughter having breasts at the age of eight. The antibiotics in the chicken feed will create pandemic super-bugs. Gluten is bad for you. GMOs create Frankenfood. Vaccines cause autism. Animals should all be freed from their human enslavers and we should all be eating bean curd. Monsanto, Big Pharma, and government are all in on the ‘Big Conspiracy’. Of course, throw in Neo-Nazi, gun wielding, immigrant, white cops are going to kill us all, especially the Blacks. Shout your narrative long enough and even if it can be disproven, the converted won’t believe your claims anyways.
Life expectancy has dramatically risen with modern medicine but the fear tactic that garners the best results still involves death, usually by the dreaded disease of cancer. Not surprisingly, the most fervent of the faithful are women. It could be characterized by any one of the Brothers Grimm fables where the aging beauty fears the loss of their youth and vitality. Young, hot women instinctively know that their appeal has a short ‘Best Before Date’. Hence, the target market for the organic industry, celebrity fads, and ‘snake oil’ merchandise is female. Absurdly, after many decades of empowerment and equality, women have been sucked into supporting these flim flam movements. What sane individual would ever believe that sticking a jade egg up their twat was a good thing? Gwyneth Paltrow was laughing all the way to the bank.
This constant bombardment of fear mongering has created a neurotic, mis-informed, maladjusted population that is easily distracted and can be led around by the nose by the oligarchy who have tapped into this new religion.
Humanity does not move forward with ever increasing enlightenment and progress. Rather, the banal masses succumb to whoever shouts the loudest from the fanciest and best of soapboxes.
Blair is a personification of a ‘Jack of All Trades and Master of None’. He has held several careers and has all the T-shirts. Time to add the title Blogger to the list.