Sum of all fears

What is the world’s biggest industry? Oil, at $135 a barrel and going up? Armaments? Religion? Terrorism? All of these, in one way or another, are subservient to one single industry which since the dawn of civilisation has been humankind’s biggest motivator and money-spinner: fear.
It is fear (of hellfire and damnation, or karmic rebirth as a cockroach or a Dalit, whichever is more scarifying) that gave rise to religion, with all its vast booty, from the wealth of the Vatican to the treasure troves of Tirupati. Fear is the obvious instigator of wars and the arms industries they have spawned. The booming health industry — or, more appropriately disease industry — is also fuelled by fear.
While the world’s health prognosis continues to be grim in reality — particularly in countries like India, where to take just one index, infant mortality rates are an appalling 32 per 1,000 — fear of actual or imagined disease acts as a spur to huge resource mobilisation (and almost equally huge misappropriation), as in the case of the international campaigns against AIDS which critics claim is one of the biggest and cruellest con games in history. Or take the panic caused by Asian bird flu. Fearmongers prophesied horrifying death tolls exceeding those of the great influenza epidemic of 1918 if the avian virus transmuted so that it could be transmitted through humans. In the event, there have been less than 103 confirmed human deaths caused by avian flu worldwide.
Fear is often a self-fulfilling prophecy, as in the case of inflation, and rising oil prices: anticipatory fears of further price rises by themselves ensure those rises, thanks to overbuying, hoarding and blackmarketeering. Fear sells an awful lot of ancillary products, from climate change to murder. Though climate change is still a hypothesis (not a proven fact) which many reputable scientists (and not just exploitative commercial interests) remain sceptical about, man-made global warming has become a fear-driven industry, affecting everything from automobile design and manufacture to international air travel (which has gone up thanks to jet-setting experts whizzing to far-flung environmental conferences).
Crime, particularly violent crime like murder, becomes a saleable commodity — an object of voyeuristic gloating rather than a bestial aberration to be shunned — marketed by fear. The Aarushi case — which has become a national cause celebre — is a deplorable example. As has been pointed out by a sensitised minority, the child victim has been murdered not once but repeatedly, thanks to a sensationhungry media and callously inept police investigators. But the media couldn’t have ‘sold’ Aarushi unless it intuited that, in us, it had ready, indeed eager, buyers. We want to know the gory details, to feel the frisson of vicarious violence: what must it feel like to be murdered, or to murder? Aarushi has been made a sacrificial victim on the altar of the savage god of fear that rules us.
Why is fear so endemic to humankind? Obviously, in that it promotes self-preservation (don’t go into that dark cave which might contain a sabre-toothed tiger), it has evolutionary value. But with equal validity it could be argued that fear can also be counterevolutionary: if you resign yourself to fearing dark caves, you’ll never invent fire to light them up; if you fear falling over the edge of the world you’ll never discover that it’s round by sailing across it.
Like any other major industry, the industry of fear (as represented by governments, religion, economists, health and environment experts, and, last but far from least, the media) requires regulation, with periodic cost-benefit analyses. How much should you really be scared of contracting AIDS/bird flu? How much real risk do you run of being murdered? Does global warming really spell inevitable doom for the planet (it doesn’t; the planet will survive, it’s only we as a species who’ll die out)? In short, we need to figure out just how influenced we are by that final sum of all fears:

THE FEAR OF FEAR ITSELF.

http:/timesofindia.com