Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself
The Covidians are addicted to fear and are desperate to force you to share their fear.
It is interesting how the left used the rapidly changing information to go from "go on a cruise, go to the cultural festival, don't worry about going to Disneyland" in early 2020 to the 2022 Chinese perspective of "OMG. Spin up the National Guard to keep the unvaxxed locked in their homes! They must be excommunicated from society!"
That last part was said out loud in the Pravda of Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune, on this past Saturday and I know (unfortunately) people who took it seriously enough to agree with the Trib's position.
They used the "the science is changing" ruse to implement mandatory masking policies (which, to date have no statistical support from almost two years of data), mandatory vaccination programs (which to date are not being proven to be the panacea of protection they were promised to be) and mandatory restrictions on behaviors and freedoms (which have not proven to be effective (social distancing fell apart when people at a Belgian Antarctic science station came down with the omicron variant).
Once they saw with what they could get away, they dialed the oppression and authoritarianism up to 11, but now that the information is changing in a way that does not support their orgy of control, they can't even find that knob to dial it back down.
Not that they really want to turn it down even if they could find that knob.
Some people get a charge from being afraid and more than that, they seem to find safety within groups of people who share that same addiction to fear.
There are a number of reasons people enjoy fear – they get to experience with a safety net, they experience the “fight or flight” reaction and the concordant rush of adrenaline and release of endorphins and dopamine (they get a “natural high” and feel good), they enjoy a sense of self-satisfaction for pushing their personal envelope, they get a feeling of belonging with people who experience the same fear, and they can indulge their curiosity about danger.
This is not just my opinion, I know the left worships at the altar of Faucian styled SCIENCE!, so here’s some science - in a very interesting 2007 study of the popularity of horror films and horrific videogames conducted by Eduardo Andrade (University of California, Berkeley) and Joel B. Cohen (University of Florida), they noted that:
“We believe that a reevaluation of the two dominant explanations for people’s willingness to consume ‘negative’ experiences (both of which assume that people cannot experience negative and positive emotions simultaneously) is in order. The assumption of people’s inability to experience positive and negative affect at the same time is incorrect.”
In other words, Andrade and Cohen argue that horror movie viewers are happy to be afraid, that people experience both negative and positive emotions simultaneously and people may actually enjoy being scared, not just the relief when the threat is removed. As the authors put it, “the most pleasant moments of a particular event may also be the most fearful.”
Like the horror movie loving subjects of the aforementioned study, the Covidians have become consumers of fear. They don’t feel courage and confidence, at least in the sense most do, because they seem to draw some sort of perverse comfort from being afraid. When people are satisfied to be happy in their fear, the future is meaningless, and people are willing to be ruled by any person or government that promises to at least spread the fear equally rather than to end the fear itself.
And as the current re-implementation of policies and practices (that did not work the first hundred times they were tried) indicate, these people will continue to go back for those experiences hoping for the same exhilaration they experienced the first time.
What the Covidians fear most of all is that people will wake up to the fact that the situations causing the fear can be compartmentalized and controlled and that one of the enemies of any pandemic is time. The only rational fear they harbor is the fear that people will come back to logic and reason and grasp the concept that managing risk is more effective than hiding from it.
In short, the more we experience an event without experiencing catastrophic personal loss or damage, the less power it has over us.
That’s why they are desperate to force you to share their fears.
Such cowardice on a national level has rarely occurred. If America was bordered by truly competitive nations, it would be openly under attack right now. Attempting to base a life on an addiction to fear is not a good way to approach things that are falsifiable.
To simply fear when the fear is irrational is a mental illness.
Democrat icon FDR famously said:
“…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance…”
This phrase from FDR’s first inaugural speech exhibits a high degree of applicability to the current gestalt that exists in the Covidian controlled society of today.
Fear mongers are the worst type people to manage a crisis. By every measure.