by Ryan Jung

There is nothing to fear but fear itself; this quote, once a source of empowerment, has become negative base code for modern American society.

With the faceless identity of fear, many have acquired a haunting necessity to fear something, but they are not quite sure what. This has become integrated into almost every facet of American life. It affects not only their thoughts and emotions, but actions as well. The government and the media have refined this to a science of manipulation. The very machines that serve to inform and protect have evolved into a paradox hiding behind the idealistic perception of what they should be.

The proxy identity of law has become fear. This is to keep their path to a utopian society on track; it is not about coexisting, it is about control. What started out as a constitution to insure rights is now an array of behavior code. Fear is the power behind this code: fear of punishment, fear of guilt, and fear of abandonment… Follow them and there is nothing to fear. That is, until you pick up a newspaper, turn on a television, or step outside.

The government attempts to link the negative flaws in American society to the media. What people fail to realize is these messages are not the cause of the social state of the country, rather an output of it. They understand the power of the media; harness it, and mass media becomes mass control. It has reached the point where the war has become more obvious.

Rules of social behavior are distributed in the media in such great frequency that it has become standard; acting under social and psychological parameters, control increases with each exposure of the message. With politics on most people’s mind at the moment, one of the most powerful of these messages is a Michael Moore movie.

His movies are a perfect example of this fear-based war; fear is his number one tool and theme. He implies that the government used fear to start the war with Iraq and passed antiterrorism laws under false pretenses. He actually details so many instances that one might fail to notice the veil of fear as he presents the information. Moore has an agenda and it is not just to enlighten his viewers. Regardless, he has made the cycle of fear more prevalent to the mass of American culture.

This does not happen simply through media conveyance, but, more importantly, through interaction with those also affected. The awareness of those previously reached evolves into conviction. New members of American society are reprogrammed to follow this thought pattern. Fear spreads like a virus; deemed trivial when in small numbers, but devastating if the greater part of society is infected. Yet, the function of fear is often underestimated in social structure and over actualized in the mind of the individual.

The human mind is constructed to understand the code of stimuli. Emotions, thoughts, and actions are the output or response caused by them. Their identity is hard to define, but the presence and functionality can easily be seen. When it comes to fear stimuli, neither the trigger nor the result is constant. Finding the format to receive the message’s desired reaction requires a decoding of the social network.

Fear is not a substantial object, but a code. It is contextual; a system defined by social structure. It is constantly rewritten by time and state of its environment. New fears come into existence and evolve. As long as there is a new fear to learn, the fears of the past are discarded or overshadowed. In any environment, there are codable fear stimuli. Concern is raised in objects that affect the group as a whole.

The majority of fear is learned behavior. It is conditioned into the system through various forms of encoding. As an adolescent, the fear of snakes is not placed by the experience of being bitten, but the exposure of verbal or reactionary response from social interaction. Much of fear works off of generalized principles. Some snakes are dangerous, so it is safe to assume this for all types. Whether it is rational or not, it all seems logical once the code is present. It is reinforced either by social environment or the mind’s own hypertextualization of the stimuli.

Let’s focus on object oriented (phobic) fear. There has to be a clear distinction made between fear designed to insure survival and a phobia. Actual danger is present and understood in the environment via interaction. Experience and trauma are not normally the cause of phobias. When a learned behavior is conditioned, exposure without reinforcement can result in extinction of a phobia. Of course, reactions such as flight or escape are a form of reinforcement. It becomes difficult for the human mind to discern between the two. This creates a platform for a fear/response environment to be easily manipulated.

Anxiety and dread are undefined fears within this environment. Anxiety is a painful or apprehensive uneasiness of mind usually over the impending or anticipated. Dread is an extreme uneasiness in the face of a disagreeable prospect of thoughts or actions. These are created in the mind when there is no actual object to fear, just possibilities of the future. They can be twisted in society because they stem from it. The emptiness can be filled at will be the government and media. This is truly when there is nothing to fear but fear itself. It has now become a quote for fear to unite us socially.

To maintain a fear requires support. Messages from mass media are designed reinforcement, and the reaction to the conditioned stimuli is the patterning in social behavior. The fear code within the system is only strengthened through each individual response. The programming encoded by the fear-based message is potent and becomes necessary. There is reliance in fear by the social structure. The need is there, it just has to be utilized. It is not what you fear, but how you fear it.

Discussing the subject matter of fear is, to an extent, trivial. To properly send out a message, attention must be paid to the context over the content. A fear formatted message is usually the strongest. Given the construct of fear in the human mind and the social environment, it appeals to a wider audience and delivers greater results.

In American Society, people have become numb to stimuli. They create a wall to protect themselves from messages either not pertaining or unimportant to them. Due to the media’s hyper-actualization of reality, most are unresponsive to the world around them. Yet, they still strive for stimulation.

Like a search engine, the human mind sifts through information presented to it in everyday life. With the use of fear as a metafilter disguise, any message can slip through this mental barrier. It then becomes not a matter of what individuals in society choose to notice, but they will not ignore.

Free vibe is an organization that displays a perfect example of this. Their content is the stopping of teenage drug use. Their context is fear; a hypertextualized form of dread through actions. They exhibit the worse possible scenarios when choosing to use drugs. Their education is extreme, but could be considered necessary.



This is one of the latest sections. The information given states nothing about marijuana involved in the collisions. The presentation implies that it is responsible. This campaign could save many teens from using drugs. Never the less, fear of an accident becomes prevalent in the mind.

It is this structure of fear that is commonplace in the code of the government and the media. Bush used fear to gain support for the war. This was clear, but the theorized nuclear weapons were not found. The power of fear is simple; it is a basic process in humanity. It has always evolved with us and has become a dominating tool of the social system.



Source Material:

1. Gray, Jeffrey Alan. Problems in the Behavioral Sciences: The psychology of fear and stress. Cambridge University Press, New York. 1971
2. Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear: why Americans are afraid of the wrong things. Basic Books, New York. 1999
3. Bamber, J. H. The Fear of Adolescents. Academic Press. London 1979.