In the days following the London bomb attacks of July 7 last year, a website sprung up where Londoners posted pictures of themselves with the tagline: “I’m not scared”. It summed up their bravado. Londoners had survived the blitz during World War II and had gone on as normal when the IRA subjected them to a campaign of bomb attacks — it would take more than four men with back-packs to terrorize them.
Within a week a counter website had been uploaded: “I’m f*** terrified”, the pictures said. It summed up the mood on the street and on the trains and buses.
Yes people went to work as normal, took the underground and rode the buses but they did it because they had to. You could physically sense the anxiety, the worried looks over bags and luggage, the unease at the presence of anyone looking remotely Pakistani or Muslim among them.
It was a perfectly normal reaction, but what I find more striking is the way in which politicians, with some help from the media, have worked to keep the momentum of fear going. No sooner does the danger of terrorism feel less clear and present in people’s minds than they are told of a new and more lethal terrorist plot or reminded by politicians and policemen that the terrorists are still out there and that an attack is imminent.
When people are terrified they switch to survival mode. They willingly give up rights and freedoms — note the patriot act in the US, the prison camp at Guantanamo, detentions without trial in the UK — and give politicians a “the-ends-justify-the-means” kind of carte blanche. Democratically elected leaders end up with powers that are the envy of military dictatorships.
When history is written, the 21st century, or at least its opening decade, may well be summed up as a time when anxiety and fear ruled. This goes further than terrorism and the so-called war on terror; it has become a defining feature of the way we live, and the way we are governed.
Start with the most basic of needs: Food. There was a time when feeding your family was simple.
You bought food, you cooked it, you ate it. The challenge lay in balancing the household budget and goading children to eat their vegetables. Now even the language of nutrition has taken on the trappings of a fight for survival. For example we are urged to eat anti-oxidants to fight the free radicals in our bodies. We worry about foods being potentially carcinogenic and about meat or chicken being infected or laden with hormones. Food is in the frontline in our fear for our health. Deep down we worry that the food we are sold is not safe. There was BSE, there is still bird flu.
The hysteria over bird flu is typical of this modern malaise. We were terrified out of our skins with predictions of flu pandemic. Of course the risk is real, bird flu exists and has already killed.
But a flu pandemic it is not, for this to happen the virus would have to transmute into a form that can be transmitted from human to human. Something that we are told is not a matter of if but of when.
There have been times in the last year when it looked as if a campaign of terror was being waged on us. Officials told us that an outbreak was “imminent”, that “millions will die”, that the world was in “grave danger”, that the world is now “overdue” for a flu pandemic. We were fed elaborate scenarios of death and disease, details were released of who would have priority over vaccines, of how the disease would spread, of the little we could do to protect ourselves because no matter what steps governments took millions would die.
What did this hysteria achieve? A run on sales of Tami flu and a fall in sales of chicken. It is not that the risk of a pandemic does not exist; it clearly does. It is that we already live in fear of something that has yet to happen over which we ordinary citizens have no control.
Fear works. The environmental lobby was among the first to understand its political power. We are now regularly fed doomsday scenarios about the destruction of the planet. CO2 emissions, the hole in the ozone layer, global warming — these terms were banded about for years without much effect until the green lobby succeeded in installing in us the guilt that our actions were bringing about destruction on an unimaginable scale. Much of the discourse on environmental issues is laden with emotive terms and can be summed down to one mantra: We are destroying our children’s future.
And here we touch on the great anxiety of our century: We worry about the future so much we become unable to live in the present. Listening to conversations on the street — any street, be it the proverbial “Arab street” or the Champs-Elysées — you pick up the same underlying fears. You hear sentences such as “when I see what the world is turning into, I regret bringing children into this world”. There is a very real sense that the world is turning from bad to worse and that we are under constant threat. Insecurity has become the norm.
Mother Nature has given a hand. There is the perception that natural disasters are occurring at a faster and more destructive rate. We watch them in real time on our television screens, a real drama unfolding before our very eyes.
The tsunami was devastating not just in its huge loss of life but in its psychological impact. Would it have been as devastating had it not also hit the holiday haven of Phuket? Would we have been as shocked had we not seen the devastation live on our screens?
Whenever you pick up a tabloid paper or listen to a politician look out for the politics of fear. Whether it is immigration, security or poverty, the language is the same: There is a “time bomb” waiting to explode. And just like sheep, those of us with the right to vote will vote for those who promise us the golden elixir of protection.
