Fear Mongering for Fun and Profit

Imagine a world without Harp Seals and Polar Bears. Imagine many of your favorite vacation destinations permanently under water, the pristine beaches of the Caribbean islands given way to the rocky hilltops, billions of humans dead or displaced. Imagine Miami Beach inundated by category five hurricanes not once a century but once or twice a year.

When the polar ice caps melt and flood the world, where will you live? Will there be enough dry land for us all? Maybe the movie "Water World" was a portent of things to come, where barbarians control oil tankers and dry land just a myth. But imagine yourself as the hero; imagine that there was something you could do to stop it all from happening in the first place, would you do it? What if I told you that all it would take is one dollar a day to stop global warming, the price of a cup of coffee? Would you pay your fair share to protect the fragile planet? Would you become the hero?

You've heard impassioned messages like this before. Thousands of organizations (for profit and not-for profit) have sprung up in response to such pleas for help for the environment. Companies large and small have positioned themselves nicely to cash in on the entire "green" movement. And as long as humans respond to scare tactics, there will be money to be made. Look, the last time I checked, polar bears eat people. They are the meanest, nastiest of all the bear species. When you see the pictures of polar bears that environmentalists put on TV, you see the cute and fuzzy, pure white cubs following the momma bear as she evidently forages for berries and nectar that can seemingly no longer be found in the arctic ice fields. You seldom see the polar bear with his facial fur stained red with the blood of innocent seal pups, or any other scavenging mammal trying to get by in a hostile climate. You don't see scenes where the polar bear has attacked a group of Inupiat hunters, massive paws snapping bones like toothpicks and giant fangs ripping the human flesh from the bones. Polar bears are fucking killers' man, why would humans want to save these things? Sure, the pictures of polar bear cubs are cute, until you actually get between one of them and the mother. Let's see how cute the little bastard is when you are being mauled by a protective mother bear. The fact is that these massive killing machines have to go the way of the dinosaurs. Any animal that can kill humans with just the swipe of a paw needs to be extinct. It's a "kill" or "be killed" world and don't forget it.

Big companies with their sights on controlling your money along with the planet's natural resources have waged a campaign of fear in order to separate you from your money, plain and simple. Why not get in on the game? Everyone has fears, lots of people are afraid of snakes, maybe you can start a snake wrangling service and charge people ten dollars for each snake you remove from their yard (including the ones you brought with and turned lose the night before). It's no different than what Al Gore and his ilk are doing.

Look, who's to say what the truth is anymore? Oscar Wilde was once quoted as saying "The truth is never pure and rarely simple" and he was dead right. We've got scientists who can't agree on climate change, some say it's all because of man and some say it's a natural cycle that the Earth goes through every couple hundred thousand years or so. What is the truth? The sad reality of our society today is that "the truth" is exactly what you are told it is and nothing more. None of us has the time or expertise to study things like climate change for ourselves and come to a conclusion as to the reality, do we? So we take what scientists tell us (scientists whom are often only loyal to the highest bidder) for granted.

Truth is sold to us as a "bill of goods" each and every night on the news, we are told exactly what the owners of the media outlets want us to be told. The "truth" is concocted by people like Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch who have agendas. I could write a whole other book on what those agendas might be, but for the purposes of this manuscript it would be counterproductive to elaborate. The point is the "truth" in our current society is relative.

It is tragically ironic that in this "information age", where knowledge and truth seem only a mouse click away, it actually becomes more difficult to find the real truth about anything.

Many sources of information are credible but many are not. Lots of people get their "facts" from websites like "Wikipedia" but fail to recognize that manufactured facts can be posted on this site by anyone wanting to dupe the reader. And the fact of the matter is that most people choose their sources of "truth" based on what they already believe the "truth" to be. For instance, a liberal democrat might obtain their facts solely from sources such as NPR or CNN whereas conservatives may limit their information intake to sources like the Drudge Report. The success of CNN News demonstrates the fact that there is a profit to be made from mostly telling people things that fit their mindset. Remember this: Empirical evidence is only "empirical" because the empire says it is. And according to Mo Udall, If you can find something that everyone agrees on, it's wrong.

Before we get to how you can pig out at this money buffet, let's look at other examples of exploitation of fear for profit. A mother's love isn't enough...every day your child risks 20 million germs (cut to microscopic close up of animated germs dancing on a toilet seat). Well with X-brand toilet cleaner, you can rest assured that little Johnny is protected! REALLY? Your product can destroy all of the ubiquitous and omnipresent germs? No it can't. Germs are everywhere, all the time and there's nothing that can be done about it. Some cleansers can make you a little safer but the message from advertisers is one of fear, fear for little Johnny or Suzie (who will still catch a cold at school because you haven't taught them to wash their hands and not touch common surfaces.

If you are old enough to remember the movie "Reefer Madness" you will recall the terribly horrific message that if you even think of smoking the dangerous and addictive marijuana plant, you will become an instant stark raving lunatic, raping nuns and worshiping the devil. You might even listen to "rock and roll" music...gasp! Oddly enough, this scare tactic worked on millions of people. But it also backfired in that the movie tempted others to try the drug, and those whom had already used marijuana before the film saw it for what it was.

Advertisers do it, the anti-drug movement does it, the federal government does it. We now have "The Patriot Act" because of fear mongering about 9/11, an act that overrides the constitution of the United States, our most sacred document. But if you speak out against the "Patriot Act" you are not acting "patriotically" now are you?

In defense of the United States, fear mongering and exploitation has gone on for centuries. Indeed, in the times of Jesus (and before), many corrupt clergymen would preach fire and brimstone messages stating that unless the believer made donations of cash or goods to the church (the clergyman himself), he or she would not be guaranteed salvation & entrance into heaven. Fear of hell was a palpable thing, exploited by many in those days. And indeed the fear of burning in hell is still exploited by organized religions around the world today in order to control people and garner tithes (cash for the church).

One common church in contemporary America preaches that 144,000 human souls will be raptured (escape the earth while the devil takes over and enslaves the rest of the human race) no more, no less. This really promotes a hell of a competition to be good if only 144 thousand are getting in. To be sure, to rank among one of those lucky few, you had better behave in a certain way.

The elites everywhere use fear to control us all the time. We are programmed to want to maintain a certain way of life, to keep up with the Joneses next door, and for that we must work our asses off and be good consumers. We pay our taxes and mind our own business and maintain the status quo. They keep us divided through our brainwashed desire for more goods.

If you speak up against the government to an extent that it makes them nervous, you can bank on getting audited by the IRS and intimidated by the police or by the airport Gestapo. Heaven forbid if you engage in a little civil disobedience in order to prove a point, no one in this country can be passionate about a cause, because no one can afford to miss work, or risk any bad press and lose our jobs. They have us right where they want us.

Maybe the most fear mongering that I've seen is the whole 2012 movement. Go to any book store and you can find shelves of books on the 2012 end of the world thing "Surviving 2012". The ancient Mayans created several very accurate calendars based on cycles of the stars. Their long count calendar ends on 12/21/2012, so naturally on that day at 3:00 p.m. (GMT) the world will stop turning, the sun will blink out and all life will be wiped from existence...unless you are prepared!

Buy the book and buy the supplies and then you and your family can survive 2012 and go on to repopulate the world in what will play out to be a post-apocalyptic orgy free-for-all. No one has bothered to think about what we do each year on December 31, when our own calendar "runs out"...we flip the damn page and it starts over again at January 1. Why would the mayan calendar be any different? It ends on 12/21 and starts again on 12/22 duh...but there are people out there dying to spend their hard earned money on survival goods.

CASH IN! Start a web site and sell "100% organic survival seeds" - enough seeds for a 2 acre garden (corn, beets, whatever)... $29.95 plus shipping and handling and who cares if the seeds are really bird seed, they will never be planted because the grocery stores will all be open on 12/22/2012.

Get into the bunker design and manufacturing business. Build survival bunkers for people in their yards, at hyper inflated costs

How about offering $29.95 home inspections, where you go in and tell people what they need to do to keep their homes safe from solar flares and ionic sun particles and zombies that will destroy 90% of life in 2012?

Re-label a bunch of bottled water. Make the new label say 2012 survival water and sell it for $2.00 per bottle...tell them it's from a special spring in Austria where the water has been proven to fight infection and increase sperm count.

Not into the 2012 thing. How about fear mongering for bird or swine flu? Sell hand sanitizer and masks in a kit or offer home disinfection services. Maybe you can become a "contingency planning" consultant for businesses and help them develop a plan saying "wash hands" & "if sick, say home" & "disinfect surfaces" & "no unnecessary meetings" & "allow work at home", etc. Then charge the company $12,000 for consulting services.

Maybe you could design and market a line of "green" products like extension cords, batteries or fuel additive. Not an engineer or petro chemist? No problem, 90% of the people buying this crap are soccer moms and college kids, and they don't know what in the hell they are buying anyway. They trust you! And if they do happen to do a little internet research on your product, you will have your web-page posted claiming that your products are the greenest on the market (in small print, you can state that "green" refers to the color of the product, not its impact on the environment).

Find out what people fear and develop a creative way to alleviate those fears. It's simple and the trail is already being blazed for you by millions of others. Be creative and get cracking, you have people to help and a planet to save!