A State of Fear

Napoleon Hill was one of Franklin Roosevelt's advisers in preparing his speech with the famous lines 'there is nothing to fear but fear itself', a remark that resonates only too strongly in our own time with the 'politics of nightmares', the war on terror and now the new invisible viral enemy. The term 'nudge' was invented by Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, whose book I reviewed in these pages: 'by knowing how people think, we can make it easier for them to choose what is best to them, their families and society.' It is the experts who decide what is best for people, so there is at least an inbuilt paternalism that was partly a response to criticisms of the Nanny State. The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) – the Nudge Unit - was set up in 2010 and has since wrong more than 750 projects as well as being present in 10 government departments. The unit really came into its own with the Covid crisis.

The central question raised by this highly readable and informative book is the relationship between the weaponisation of fear through behavioural psychology techniques in the context of ethics and democracy. People were not consulted, nor did any even realise that they were being covertly manipulated by what the author calls psychocrats in a technocratic command and control system. The UK Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) recorded in March 2020 that the perceived level of personal threat needed to be increased using hard-hitting emotional messaging, which has also been reflected in media headlines as fear sells well as news. One member of the team said that propaganda is all about behavioural psychology manipulation to ensure compliance, and while 'not all persuasion is propaganda, propaganda is manipulation and it is not democratic.

This comes directly out of totalitarian playbooks and the original work by Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, also the originator of PR. Bernays wrote in 1928 that 'the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country… it is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.' In the current situation, the author notes that 'the suppressed fear of death is supremely powerful combined with the rationally imposed ideas of solidarity and conformity and protecting others.' (p. 244) In a recent essay on mob morality (https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/mob-morality-and-the-unvaxxed), Charles Eisenstein brilliantly dissects the powerful dehumanising psychology of scapegoating, showing how this has been strongly activated: 'Scapegoats needn't be guilty, but they must be marginal, outcasts, heretics, taboo-breakers, or infidels of one kind or another. If they are too alien, they will unsuitable as transfer objects of in-group aggression. Neither can they be full members of society, lest cycles of vengeance ensue. If they are not already marginal, they must be made so.' This is what has transpired with the 'anti-vaxxer' label where such people are also 'anti-science', anti-social and totally uncaring and irresponsible (the in-group is caring and responsible).

Eisenstein observes that unconsciously, the public recognises and conforms to the age-old program of investing a pariah subclass [Untermensch] with the symbology of pollution. When asked "What is the word that comes to mind to describe unvaccinated people?" The responses were things like "filth," "assholes," and "death-eaters." This is precisely the dehumanisation necessary to prepare a class of people for cleansing.' He continues: 'the pro-vaccine camp has a powerful nonscientific ally in the collective id, expressed through various mechanisms of ostracism, shaming, and other social and economic pressure. It takes courage to defy a mob. Doctors and scientists who express anti-vaccine views risk losing funding, jobs, and licenses, just as ordinary citizens face censorship on social media.' Indeed, Eisenstein himself has for the first time been deplatformed and accused of antisemitism as a result of this article!

Jung called this phenomenon a psychic epidemic in the 1930s, and it is one that threatens to destroy hard-won enlightenment values in the name of risk aversion and safety while at the same time producing a divided and intolerant society. Censorship of deviant views has been unprecedented, and open scientific debate stifled in the name of 'settled science' when the essence of science is to challenge, debate and criticise on the basis of evidence. The author notes how high cycle positive PCR tests were classified as cases regardless of symptoms, and deaths from Covid were conflated with deaths with Covid (average age 82.3) featuring two or more comorbidities in over 90% of cases. The book also contains many insights into the experiences of ordinary people.

At the end, the author asks if this is a prequel of things to come. Recent polls show a huge residue of fearful attitudes, with over 50% supporting a policy whereby unvaccinated people would not be allowed to fly. Coercive and exclusionary measures against the unvaccinated are being strengthened almost worldwide while the FDA has just given full authorisation to the Pfizer vaccine with no public consultation or mention of the thousands of reported deaths and serious injuries – dismissed by 'fact-checkers' as unproven when the function of such reports has always been as a cautionary red flag.

The EU was already planning vaccine passports in March 2019, so the 2021 digital health passes are right on schedule, and can potentially contain all kinds of other personal records linked to the Cloud through the 5/6G Internet of Things and Bodies. The technocratic direction of travel is in my view towards a Chinese social credit system enabled by pervasive surveillance technology. The WEF ('build back better') is explicitly transhumanist in outlook, advocating biodigital identity convergence; and the US has just launched its new Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA rather than DARPA) to merge health security with national security, arguably a step towards digital dictatorship. It is up to us to prove that The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov was wrong when he told the returning Christ that people do not want freedom but the security of being told what to do. Complete security and certainty are both unattainable in an open, creative and uncertain world.