The fear economy

Not too long ago, I saw a billboard near a hospital in Albuquerque that epitomized the artificial nature of the declining American economy. It read, in part, “Heart burn, or a heart attack?” and implied that you’d better get to the hospital immediately to find out for sure, never mind that you’d had a stack of onion rings for lunch.

Here was some PR genius’s idea of scaring drivers half to death to sell a medical product to innocent passers-by in America’s struggle for profits in an economy that shipped its manufacturing jobs so far away that most of what we have left to sell to each other is fear.

In fact we have what anthropologists might call a fear culture and an economy based on selling people products and services they don’t need based on inducing demand through an advertising world that fuels our economy by something akin to psychological terror, scaring people into debt on a regular basis.

How can we get hoodwinked into buying products, medicines, services and politicians based on having our fear responses stimulated by the very people who sell us the products we’re told will relieve the fears they artificially created in the first place?

The fear economy creates a consumer culture of saps who are supposed to ask their doctors about medicines for diseases they didn’t know they had, who buy huge SUVs, not only for status, but because they’re supposed to be safer when the 18-wheeler crashes into the them, who buy homes in heavily fenced, gated communities that any nimble kid could climb into, paying huge amounts of money for so-called security they don’t need and which is a scam to begin with.

But there’s another side to our culture and economy of fear that’s just as pernicious and even more baffling. It’s called commercially or politically-driven overt denial of real dangers.

It takes many shapes. Recently it forms itself as a virulent attack on something called the precautionary principle.

If something’s potentially dangerous – like drinking water with plutonium in it — the precautionary principle would have us be cautious and not do it. But demanding that businesses and government, especially the military, take precautions not to harm the environment is looked upon as unnecessary restraint on free enterprise and national security. Do it now, worry about it later.

And real dangers are simply brushed aside by PR and media flacks who tells us that nukes in our water, or the toxic chemicals in our air, are in such small quantities that they are no danger to public health, as if they had really done serious research to prove their assertions. Which, of course, they rarely, if ever, have.

The weird twist is that one side of our culture of fear uses scare tactics to inflame an in-built common sense precaution, methodically scaring us into buying products and services to prevent problems that don’t exist, or to protect us from ills and accidents that can’t be avoided. And the other side of our culture and economy of fear uses PR just as effectively to keep us unconcerned about real problems that are, on the face of it, infinitely more dangerous than the boogy terrors that keep our economy chugging along providing services for which there is no inherent demand, if it weren’t for the scare-baiting ads.

We’re more than happy as consumers to be convinced that semiconductor manufacturing in Rio Rancho, at Intel, may produce some fumes and toxic emissions, but that their danger to our health is all our heads, despite many hundreds of people in Corrales with very real illnesses. Those people weren’t ill before the big factory moved in. So precaution be damned, and the sick people are aren’t really sick, they’re crazy, the PR line implies.

We’re more and more happy as political consumers to be emotionally swayed by attack ads against candidates, ads that are so blatantly biased and so clearly designed to scare us out of our wits that, even when we know what’s going on, they leave us unsure and unsettled.

Fear causes us to shell out bucks to buy things we don’t need and to financially support candidates who we know to be little better than swindlers and con-men, judged by their advertising alone.

Is the fear economy growing in America all the time because we don’t make much in our country anymore? We don’t make cars people need, or clothes, or fabric, or furniture, or electronics, or much else of what we need. We no longer have a feeling of our own competence to take care of ourselves.

What else is left? A health “industry” that is so expensive and so fed by fear-based false demand that hardly anyone can afford it even though everyone’s made to want it; a political industry that has become so wrapped up with money that even good candidates have too many strange bedfellows for anyone’s peace of mind; an insurance industry that’s always been fear based, but that now has a hard time paying off claims when real disasters happen, real disasters our fear economy did not take the precaution to prepare for.

No wonder our economic engine is falling apart.