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2020-

2020-03-15
Beware the Ideas That March

Some ideas have legs, lots of legs. Those ideas hit the ground running and never look back - until they are supplanted by other ideas. The ideas that are embraced by armies of academicians, bureaucrats, corporations, dilettantes, entertainers, foundations, governments, intelligentsia, media, philanthropists, politicians, and universities are special. Those ideas are imposed from above. There is no organic or popular groundswell behind them. They are as organic as a Twinkie or a box of Velveeta.

They march to the sounds of money and power. They are imposed from above for the benefit of those above. Those ideas are costly, dangerous, and wrong. The susceptible masses believe them because they are repeated incessantly by all the organs of mass media. Repetition does not make something true.

On a lark, to while away idle moments in the last ten days, I have reread three books by Michael Crichton: The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and most crucially, the novel, State of Fear. If you think The Andromeda Strain was the most appropriate novel to reread, considering the panic and pandemonium, you would be wrong. Far and away, State of Fear is the most relevant.

The orchestrated hysteria of the moment is out of proportion if we dispassionately study the COVID-19 statistics from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. The usual subtle process of persuasion employed by our betters has gone full Monty Python. The herd mentality of the sheeple is on full view at any grocery store or warehouse club. The comical hoarding of toilet paper gives an unflattering Freudian insight into the mentality of the residents of the land of the fragile and home of the afraid. The American hive-mind has been incapacitated to such a degree that recovery might be impossible.

The manufactured sense of insecurity will create an insatiable desire for protection and safety über alles. Compliance and cooperation might become mandatory.

However, drastic penalties for dissidents will not deter those who value the truth.
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In his bibliography, Crichton highly recommends the following books:

Beckerman, Wilfred. A Poverty of Reason: Sustainable Development amd Economic Growth. Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2003.

Chase, Alston. In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the Myths of Nature. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001.

Huber, Peter. Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists; a Conservative Manifesto. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Lomborg, Bjorn. The Skeptical Environmentalist. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002

Wildavsky, Aaron. But Is It True? A Citizen’s Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Wildavsky, Aaron. Searching for Safety. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1988.
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Throughout this blog post, all page references from State of Fear are from the first edition (ISBN 0-06-621413-0), the version in my personal library. While most of the novel is about eco-terrorism and the fallacious idea of carbon dioxide as villain, In his Appendix I, Crichton covers two other notorious ideas that gained wide currency: eugenics, and Lysenkoism.in the former Soviet Union.
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Quotations from State of Fear, beginning on page 450, being an extended conversation between Dr. Norman Hoffman and Mr. Peter Evans, Esq.:

450
“I study the ecology of thought,” Hoffman said, “And how it has led to the State of Fear.”

451 - 452
“Within modern culture, ideas constantly rise and fall, For a while everybody believes something, and then, bit by bit, they stop believing it. Eventually, no one can remember the old idea, the way no one can remember the old slang. Ideas are themselves a kind of fad, you see.”

452
“But just as ideas can change abruptly, so, too, can they hang on past their time. Some ideas continue to be embraced by the public long after scientists have abandoned them. Left brain, right brain is a perfect example.”
…
“Similarly, in environmental thought, it was widely accepted in 1960 that there is something called ‘the balance of nature.’
…
“However, by 1990, no scientist believes in the balance of nature anymore. The ecologists have all given it up as simply wrong. Untrue. A fantasy..
…
“But they now understand that nature is never in balance. Never has been, never will be.”

453
“If you study the media, as my graduate students and I do, seeking to find shifts in normative conceptualization, you discover something extremely interesting. We looked at transcripts of news programs of the major networks – NBC, ABC, CBS. We also looked at stories in the major newspapers … We counted the frequency of certain concepts and terms used by the media. The results were very striking.”
…
“There was a major shift in the fall of 1989. Before that time, the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague, or disaster. For example, during the 1980s, the word crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word budget. In addition, prior to 1989, adjectives such as dire, unprecedented, dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper headlines. But then it all changed.”
…
“The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its use double again by the year 2000. And the stories changed, too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty, panic.”

"Why should it have changed in 1989?”

“Ah. A good question. Critical question. In most respects 1989 seemed like a normal year:”
…
454
“A year like any other. But in fact the rise in the use of the term crisis can be located with some precision in the autumn of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should coincide so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Which happened on November ninth of that year.”
…
Evans said, “I’m sorry, Professor, I don’t get it.”

“Neither did we. At first we thought that the association was spurious. But it wasn’t. The Berlin Wall marks the collapse of the Soviet empire. And the end of the Cold War that had lasted for half a century in the West.”
…
“I don’t see where you are leading.”

“I am leading to the notion of social control, Peter. To the requirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile. To keep them driving on the right side of the road – or the left, as the case may be. To keep them paying taxes. And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear.”

“Fear,” Evans said.

“Exactly. For fifty years, Western nations had maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the other side. Fear of nuclear war. The Communist menace. The Iron Curtain. The Evil Empire. And within the Communist countries, the same in reverse. Fear of us. Then, suddenly, in the fall of 1989, it was all finished. Gone, vanished. Over. The fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something had to fill it.”

Evans frowned. “You’re saying that environmental crises took the place of the Cold War?”

455
“That is what the evidence shows. Of course, now we have radical fundamentalism and post-9/11 terrorism to make us afraid,”
…
“My point is, there is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us. Before terrorism we feared the toxic environment. Before that we had the Communist menace. The point is, although the specific cause of our fear may change, we are never without the fear itself. Fear pervades society in all its aspects. Perpetually.”

"Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western society really is? Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them. They are in a particular panic over things they can’t even see – germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants. They are timid, nervous, fretful, and depressed. And even more amazingly, they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like the belief in witchcraft, it’s an extraordinary delusion. – a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear. Amazing.”

“How has this worldview been instilled in everybody? Because although we imagine we live in different nations … in fact, we inhabit the same state, the State of Fear.”
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Manufactured fear creates real stress. Stress creates disease. Disease shortens our lives.

This is why I never view television news programs. In fact, we have had no way to watch TV at home since over-the-air TV broadcasts switched to digital. We eventually hear about the important stuff. The rest is trivia. What we do not see on TV cannot stress us nor hurt us. You may taunt me all day, claiming I have my head in the sand. Are you any better keeping your head in a boiling, roiling cauldron?

You can tell from this blog that I am well-informed. However, I am not stressed.

The Ides of March, 2020

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