This was an interesting read during the during the Covid pandemic when fear was quite deliberately deployed to gain compliance to some of the most egregious, draconian attacks on our human rights perpetrated by our governments. This is not Furedi’s first foray into this subject – his first book looked at the alarmist responses to AIDs, satanic ritual abuse, pollution, crime, etc.. Furedi believes that we haves become much more inclined to embrace the rhetoric of fear than even twenty years ago. We even have competitive fear-mongering such as the need to protect children from the sun to prevent cancers vs the impact of reduced time in the sun on vitamin D deficiencies.
I’m writing this against a backdrop of a shortish heatwave which has created warnings & nanny advice from government which rather supports Furedi’s argument about the constant inflation of the range of activities deemed to be ‘risky’. We seem to have health alerts on a regular basis, often contradicting an earlier alert. I loved the stat that 40 out of 50 common ingredients picked randomly from a cookery book has an article reporting on their cancer-causing properties! Whilst one can laugh at some of this fear-mongering, t has serious implications. The increasing trend in our universities is to protect students from hearing anything that might upset them or challenge their beliefs – surely the point of the university experience. In wider society, the level of infantilisation of people who seem to have lost their powers of common sense and sense of agency whether it is how to behave during a heatwave or a pandemic, how to assess risk, etc is deeply concerning. Self-reliance seems to have been replaced with extreme risk aversion and an underlying sense of uncertainty allied with a tendency to inflate threats into potential catastrophes. He cites as an example the warnings about the dangers of barbecues by university professor in 2006 – everything from the possibility of salmonella poisoning to cancer from barbecued meat to the environmental hazards of barbecue coals. Fifteen years later in our current minor heatwave we have people admonishing us not to light barbecues for fear of starting fires which will become uncontrollable and getting skin cancer because we might be out in the sun. It is a wonder any of us get into our cars given the multiple dangers that holds!
The future, and the fact that it is necessarily uncertain, is also a cause for alarm and a place where existential threats abound. This gives scope for ‘potentials’ to be blown out of all proportion. There are some interesting comments about the use of fear to change behaviours to achieve societal ‘goods’ e.g. a climate activists who justified distorting information in order to capture the public imagination. I suspect the same could be said of the Covid pandemic but the fear-mongering can have adverse consequences too; I see many older single people who are now frightened to go out even though there is a proven benefit to their health from socialising with others. Be careful what you wish for.
Overall, this is a sober analysis of how the insidious culture of fear is penetrating our lives. It makes particularly good reading now, in the aftermath of two years of restrictions on our lives than would have seemed inconceivable at the beginning of the pandemic, and also with the climate warriors ramping up fears about global warning & climate change against a very mixed body of evidence. The danger, of course, is that the fear culture backfires and cynicism kicks in because of rampant scare-mongering – next time we might really need to be concerned but because of confected hysteria last time, no-one believes it.
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