Fear is the most powerful of all human emotions because it requires an almost instantaneous response. You can linger with love and hold your hate. But humans are hard wired for an immediate fight-or-flight response. The animal that freezes in the headlights of an oncoming car usually winds up as road-kill.
When a strange looking bug lands on our arm, we make a quick response rather than taking the time to look it up on the Internet to find out if it is friend or foe. That is who we are.
And because our response to fear is so predictable, fear is the weapon of choice to control another person. Fear is as much psychological as it is real. The threat of violence can be even more manipulative as the violence itself. A raised fist is most often just as powerful as a thrown punch under the right circumstances.
We speak of an “irrational fear” and rarely an “irrational love” although we know that people do love for all the wrong reasons and at the wrong times. But being afraid of something does not require any common sense or reasonable justification. All it requires is the near-total acceptance that there is a threat to our well-being.
Virtually every culture/society has a basket of derogatory terms to describe an outsider or foreigner.
In the Middle East and North Africa, the term for Black African people is “abid,” Arabic for slave. The Ancient Greeks used the term “barbarian” toward those who did not speak Greek. The Brazilian Portuguese word “Polaca” (meaning “Polish woman”) is synonymous with “prostitute”. Persians call Arabian people Soosmar-khor, Persian for “lizard eater.”
These scornful terms “soften” the fear of the outsiders. Something you can insult becomes less powerful.
However, fear can become debilitating if it is allowed to grow too powerful. A child that is constantly reminded to be afraid of strangers can eventually lose the ability to sensibly socially interact. Likewise, caution should be used with domestic animals but not necessarily miserable fear.
The pandemic has created millions of people who are borderline—if not past the border—of near psychosis about the virus. “A resident of Madhepura district, India has taken 11 vaccine shots in the past 10 months.” “A Texas judge ruled Thursday there was no probable cause against a mother who allegedly put her son in the trunk of the car to avoid being exposed to Covid-19.”
Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, has probably been unfairly criticized. But she was quoted as saying, “If all adults were vaccinated who were offered it, [the] pandemic would be over.” However, would the pandemic be over if the last 18.7 percent of over-18s in England were vaccinated?
According to UK government data, infection rates in over-18s are currently higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated, and 73 percent of total infections in the month ending January 9th were in the vaccinated. The latest data also shows that 63 percent of hospitalizations and 70 percent of deaths with Covid in the month ending January 9th were in the vaccinated (one or more doses).
People need to be vaccinated although it is not a guarantee of immunity. But how much of the “no vax and you are going to die” is fear-mongering? When potentially irrational fear is used as a public sector manipulative tool, it helps destroy sensible thinking and action, and that can be worse than the disease.