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Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

425 points by oblib 9y ago

oblib 9y ago
Lapham’s Quarterly is an absolute treasure. This issue is especially timely and informative (to say the least).
hi1234567890 9y ago
I would make the argument, with increase in taxes, regulations, and limitation on speech; coercion is the top-selling consumer product. Just my 2 cents.
- kmicklas 9y ago
  Libertarians never cease to amaze me with their amazing ability to spot coercive relations in civil liberties and their complete blindness to the economic coercion inherent in capitalism.
  - lend000 9y ago
    Not to validate the nonsensical and off-topic comment to which you are responding, but yours makes an equally broad and nonsensical generalization.
- infogulch 9y ago
  How are the tax increases, added regulations, and new limits on speech justified? Because for as powerful as politicians are, if they royally piss of their jurisdictions they can still be voted out of office. So how is it they can keep getting away with eroding away these rights? Fear.
  - hi1234567890 9y ago
    Ok, you got me there.
- yequalsx 9y ago
  You haven't made an argument. You've just stated an opinion without providing evidence or reasons that your opinion ought to be considered. The article, by comparison, is well written and provides cogent reasoning.
  - hi1234567890 9y ago
    I acknowledge your comment. I didn't have time to go into the level of detail to merit a full argument. Think of it as "manner of speaking".
uptownfunk 9y ago
Brilliant magazine.
erikb 9y ago
I wanted to complain about the title not really making the right distinction, that fear is not a product but a sales method. However, the author actually understands that distinction and really talks about fear being the product. That also implies that people desire fear and that fear is produced with industrial efficiency. Interesting thought.
- rednerrus 9y ago
  This is what makes horror movies sell, right?
  - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
    For most of them, yes. But horror is (or at least can be) distinct from fear. "The Silence of The Lambs" is horrifying, but not necessarily considered a horror movie. Likewise "Apocalypse Now", which is mostly about the emotion of horror, but not designed to frighten in any way.
- rfrank 9y ago
  >That also implies that people desire fear and that fear is produced with industrial efficiency. Or, that what people consume and what they desire aren't always the same things.
  - tinym 9y ago
    At the very least: * What people buy * What people want * What people say they want * What people would actually enjoy * ...
- pier25 9y ago
  What is most interesting to me is that people do not know what they want or what they are really consuming.
  - erikb 9y ago
    Yeah, I also often think about that. We act based of a set of needs. But we don't even need to know what these needs are to continue trying to satisfy them.
lutorm 9y ago
Funny, I just watched this: https://youtu.be/JrBdYmStZJ4?t=22s https://youtu.be/JrBdYmStZJ4?t=22s Seems pretty apt.
fl0wenol 9y ago
I got excited for just a split second on the off chance the author meant the Monolith Productions title back in 2005.
mxfh 9y ago
A not so convincing conservative (counter) narrative that lumps up the arguably questionable nature of trigger warnings with a russian imposed nuclear doomsday scenario? That assumption that a russian bomb was merely a copy of the the American effort, spying helped it speed up, but mostly prevented costly mistakes for the soviets is just another example of american exceptionalism. Would rather watch Adam Curtis' Power of Nightmares again, blaming the culture of fear rightly and mostly on the rise of neoconservatives.
- Ygg2 9y ago
  > A not so convincing conservative (counter) narrative that lumps up the arguably questionable nature of trigger warnings Conservative? Can trigger warning exist without fearing something? I think the author describes evolution of fear.
  - mxfh 9y ago
    I wouldn't call this fear, but a, yet to be proven effective, strategy to avoid retraumatization. The motivation, as I understand it, is actually to enable and prepare more people reading things they would be otherwise afraid of, so quite the opposite of fear. Besides some right wing people seeing this as one of the horsemen of the end of free speech, this relatively obscure and confined practice simply doesn't warrant mentioning it on level akin with national doctrines like MAD.
- amalcon 9y ago
  The narrative didn't seem all that conservative to me -- it attacks conservatives at least as much as liberals, and concludes that the election of DJT is the present culmination of the trend. I do take issue with pulling trigger warnings in here (though, in fairness, that was a minor part in the article), just because it's re-enforcing a very negative trend. Trigger is a term of art in psychology, related to post-traumatic stress disorder. It specifically refers to a stimulus triggering a fight-or-flight response in a situation where it would not be called for in someone without PTSD. We should be giving this clinical issue the respect it deserves, and not conflating it with the things we are more abstractly afraid of.
rc_kas 9y ago
Upvoted! I don't even know what is in the article. I just love the headline and I totally agree with it.
amelius 9y ago
Also: "Fear of missing out" It's essentially what our culture seems to be based on nowadays. Thanks Facebook, thanks Google.
- United857 9y ago
  I'd say FOMO has been the primary technique used since the dawn of advertising. Not unique to Facebook or Google, although perhaps more prominent.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  That's the luxury version. For a lot of people it's fear of going under.
- komali2 9y ago
  Why do you thank facebook and google for this?
coldtea 9y ago
The 2nd top-selling consumer product: the first is anxiety (for your body, social status, income, career, etc.).
alecco 9y ago
Playing devil's advocate, all this fear and anxiety (as @coldtea properly states) is an engine of the economic machine of the western world. What I'd argue is that is all twisted for idiotic reasons. For example, it would be good to have fear of death used to push society towards things like cures for cancers. And anxiety used to push ourselves to reach our potential instead of seeking validation in superficial things expressed in Instagram pictures. But we humans like the quick fix and the advertising lobby delivers. We have 50% of the blame here. Same with the unhealthy foods and drinks we take all the time. To improve our behaviour we need incentives like most animals.
aleyan 9y ago
This is not this essay's first time[1] making it to this front of hacker news. And I am glad for it, because Petrified Forrest essay is great, and Lapham's whole issue[2] on fear is fantastic. Unfortunately two pieces I found most relevant for HN crowd from this issue so far aren't available on Lapham's Quarterly website. They are a moralistic Japanese 17th century account of an entrepreneur in "All the goodness gone from tea"[3] and Joseph Heller's bit on "Corporate Welfare" in "Something Happened"[4]. Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14589087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14589087 [2] http://laphamsquarterly.org/fear http://laphamsquarterly.org/fear [3] https://books.google.com/books?id=ux89AAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA93&ots=_0XDTIXhUw&dq=%22all%20the%20goodness%20gone%20from%20tea%22&pg=PA93#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=ux89AAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA93&ots=... [4] https://books.google.com/books?id=b2AiWB98p5sC&lpg=PT14&ots=GTXIjffuIu&dq=_&pg=PT14#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=b2AiWB98p5sC&lpg=PT14&ots=...
- oblib 9y ago
  When I entered the link I kind of expected to be notified it had be posted already, but no such notice came up. I was revisiting the site today and couldn't remember seeing that article linked here so I thought I'd give it a try. Nice to see it get around some more. It really is a high quality site and one I look forward to each update with real anticipation.
ethn 9y ago
I think it's quite ridiculous that any author can get away with the obscure clairvoyant claim that people are really irrational and desire to be fearful——it's a claim contrary to primitive animal and human psychology alike. The motivation to go buy products associated with fear has nothing to do with fear itself even when you explicitly define fear as an uncomfortable uncertainty. The reason to want to know fear, why fearful subjects are even discussed, is the quite natural rational thirst for information about uncertainty. Thus, you would expect them to purchase services that provide information about and that mitigate uncertainty. Much of the financial economy is purposed as a mitigation to uncertainty, because uncertainty causes an inherent inefficient allocation in resources in order to prepare for the uncertain event. If there is uncertainty, the rational agent is forced to prepare for it with capital (be it financial or physical). This causes there to be an unused buffer of resources that cannot be allocated to more pressing utilizations. Instead, the rational agent is obliged to maintain a buffer, and even incur more transactional costs in maintaining that very buffer. Uncertainty is expensive, and the rational agent thus seeks to understand all disturbances to mitigate the cost of uncertainty. tl;dr The author is actually engaging in the cheap literary trope where the general population lacks rationality and the author is the exception for pointing it out.
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  No, I don't think the desire to mitigate uncertainty explains it. The reason is simple: fear is about overplaying and exaggerating the risks and uncertainty. Fear of terrorist attacks is a great example. If you live in the US, that means that over the past 15 years you have been more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than a foreign terrorist attack. Yet a lot of people shit their pants with regards to, say, Islamic terrorism.
  - ethn 9y ago
    Terrorism is a real threat to interests abroad and test on the ability of the US to mitigate small risks. If they can't mitigate small risks how would they be able to mitigate a large risk? Every single human created disturbance (i.e. war) begins with a small group of people cascading into a larger force, with governments it happens with leaders, but it's greatly more unpredictable when it is propagated by an unknown people–especially when that group is in a region which produces 81.5% of the worlds oil supply. You would be quite irrational to not be interested in the domestic and foreign affairs of your own government. Even more irrational to say it's not a problem.
komali2 9y ago
I'm slowly trimming away the means I acquire news, because it's all becoming so editorialized. Twitter is bombarded with bots and flamewars, reddit is a lost cause, and news.google.com is mainly driven by larger syndications that have mastered the "Big Headlines Sell" strategy. That leaves HN and my little local papers, Mountain View Voice and its ilk. Great for local stories and tech news, but I feel like I'm missing out on what's going on in the world. Every time I dip my feet in global news, it's screamed at me, dripping in panic: "Trump DID A THING!!!" "Cops Shoot a Guy AGAIN WHY DID THEY DO THAT?!!" Are there any good general global news sources that don't try to manipulate my emotions as I read them? Paid or free.
- eloary 9y ago
  Business news sources tend to be clear headed, because they are in the space of news you can put a dollar value on, and hence will pay for to make more accurate. That doesn't make them perfect, since they still tend towards an editorial agenda favoring "business as usual" power centers over disruptive forces, but I don't feel like I'm being fed outrage most of the time.
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    >Business news sources tend to be clear headed, because they are in the space of news you can put a dollar value on, and hence will pay for to make more accurate. It also pays to put out dishonest hit pieces against competitors, or dishonest reviews of your own products to make them seem better than they really are.
    - eloary 9y ago
      We get to see those because they're advertising. That's the whole point of "you have to pay." When I read a hype story about a company someone else is paying. Really good, cheap or free info about the present and future tends to lie not in a consumer paper but in dense, wordy PDFs that are cast offs of internal researchers at major multinationals and government bureaus. Those documents are often released to tell investors and taxpayers "here is how we view the situation and why" and their structural mission is to get the assessment right so that they make correct moves. There is little storytelling or human interest to these documents, but they are valuable for the same reason that knowing about the weather is valuable.
microcolonel 9y ago
Don't watch cable news, your life will be better. If you're not already convinced that most cable news is editorialized for political gain, then surely you're convinced that is unhealthy to rubberneck at every problem in the world.
f4rker 9y ago
this is pretty stupid and blatantly false.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
- mathiasrw 9y ago
  > I'm no joke starting to see the value of Chinese, Singaporean, etc. and maybe even North Korean (!!) censorship - people can't be fucking idiots and destroy the country over stuff on the news if it's not on the news. Sounds like you assume that state based censorship will remove/limit fear from the news. States are the main beneficiary from a fear-based population. It's a tool to direct anger away from relevant areas that could threaten established structures towards areas that has little or no significance (or even better: other parts of its own population) If you don't fear anything, there is no reason for a state
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
    - rbehrends 9y ago
      > All I can do is look at Singapore from the outside and be in awe (look at their neigbhours.. then look at Poland's or USA's neighbours and compare the amount of fear). I look at Singapore on the Press Freedom Index (rank 155 out of 180) and am not in awe at all. It scares me that people who grew up in liberal democracies find something to admire about its model. Perhaps it's just that our life experiences are different. I grew up in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. My mother's family fled East Germany shortly after WW2. My father's home was within a couple of miles of the inner German border. I got to visit East Berlin before the Wall came down. My memories of explicitly government-regulated speech are negative, through and through. All I can say is that I never want a government to have that much control over speech. The hypothetical use of that power for good does not offset the damage it can cause in the wrong hands, and in an authoritarian country, there is no way to peacefully remove the government from power if it chooses to abuse that power. > Freedom of speech has really come to mean outright lies, slander, fear mongering, FUD, bullshit, conspiracies and so on. What value does speech have if the only defense is "it's not illegal" and not "it's right". There are a number of fallacies here. * One is the assumption that in order to restrict harmful speech, it has to be ordered from above. (Seriously, Hobbes's idea that you need an authoritarian ruler to protect liberties is a bit dated.) * Another is that having an authoritarian government would fix this. The worst offenders when it comes to speech aimed at undermining liberties are people already in power. An authoritarian government would exacerbate that issue. Whatever side "won" would also get the power to suppress any speech they don't like. * We don't protect potentially harmful speech because we like it, but because of the dangers if we open up speech to government censorship. While one can argue that maybe Brandenburg v. Ohio went a bit too far, the underlying idea – to keep the government at a safe distance from regulating individual expression, even expression that you strongly dislike – is sound ("freedom is always the freedom of dissenters"). If there's a role for government, it would be to ensure that valid opinions aren't squeezed out (Fairness Doctrine and such), not to ban harmful speech.
nathan-wailes 9y ago
Hey all, I'm interested in this topic and created several summaries for my own use (below). Since this article is somewhat long and isn't as easy to understand as it could be, I figured other HNers might find these summaries useful: ----------------- Short plain-English summary of the major things he says in the article: People in the US are generally much safer than in the past, but they also seem to be more afraid than in the past, and it seems to be because there are powerful groups that benefit (or believe they benefit) from this state of affairs: those associated with or members of the news media, the military and its private-sector suppliers, politicians, the very rich, and the police. This shift to having the public generally fearful seems to have started in 1949 when we in the US learned that the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. Consensus in Washington became that the Soviet Union was a more immediate and serious threat than it probably really was, and the news media sold papers by stirring up fear of WW3. In the 1960s the news media made people afraid of the possibility of an actual armed revolution within the US by leftists. With the fall of the Berlin Wall the news media and politicians shifted to fear of drugs, and since 9/11 it has been terrorism. ----------------- The main ideas / questions discussed, in his words: [Motivating problem:] In no country anywhere in the history of the world has the majority of a population lived in circumstances as benign and well-lighted as those currently at home and at large within the borders of the United States of America. And yet, despite the bulk of reassuring evidence, a divided but democratically inclined body politic finds itself herded into the unifying lockdown imposed by the networked sum of its fears—sexual and racial, cultural, social, and economic, nuanced and naked, founded and unfounded. [Main questions:] How does it happen that American society at the moment stands on constant terror alert? Why and wherefrom the trigger warnings, and whose innocence or interest are they meant to comfort, defend, and preserve? Who is afraid of whom or of what, and why do the trumpetings of doom keep rising in frequency and pitch? ----------------- Paragraph-by-paragraph-ish main ideas (as far as I could tell), in his words: Fear [is] the oldest and strongest of the human emotions. [There is] real fear and neurotic fear, the former a rational and comprehensible response to the perception of clear and present danger, the latter “free-floating,” anxious expectation attachable to any something or nothing that catches the eye or the ear. I’m old enough to remember when Americans weren’t as easily persuaded to confuse the one with the other. I was taught that looking fear straight in the face was the root meaning of courage. [After] August 1949, when the Soviet Union successfully tested a [nuclear] bomb, my further acquaintance with fear was for the most part to take the form of the neurotic. The Cold War with the Russians produced the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. For the everybodies whose lives were the stake on the gaming table, [this] didn’t leave much room for Teddy Roosevelt’s looking real fear straight in the face. Expectant anxiety maybe weakens the resolve of individual persons, but it strengthens the powers of church and state. Fear is the most wonder-working of all the world’s marketing tools. Used wisely, innovatively, and well, it sells everything in the store—the word of God and the wages of sin, the divorce papers and the marriage certificate, the face cream and the assault rifle, the grim headline news in the morning and the late-night laugh track. [He tells a story of working as a reporter in NYC in 1962, receiving a press release from the Russians about new weapons tech, and having the editor of the paper mold it into a front-page fear-soaked story, presumably motivated by the desire to sell more papers.] Expectant anxiety sells newspapers. The Cold War was born in the cradle of expectant anxiety; so were the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The innovative and entrepreneurial consensus in Washington resurrected from the ruins [of Russia post-WW2] the evil Soviet Empire—stupendous enemy, world-class and operatic, menace for all seasons, dread destroyer of American wealth and well-being. Fattened on the seed of openhanded military spending (upward of $15 trillion since 1950) the confederation of vested interest that President Eisenhower identified as the military-industrial complex brought forth an armed colossus the likes of which the world had never seen. The turbulent decade in the 1960s raised the force levels of the public alarm. The always fearmongering news media projected armed revolution; the violent fantasy sold papers, boosted ratings, stimulated the demand for repressive surveillance and heavy law enforcement that blossomed into one of the country’s richest and most innovative growth industries. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 undermined the threat presented by the evil Soviet Empire, and without the Cold War against the Russians, how then defend, honor, and protect the cash flow of the nation’s military-industrial complex? The custodians of America’s conscience and bank balance found the solution in the war on drugs. The stockpiling of domestic fear for all seasons is the political alchemist’s trick of changing lead into gold, the work undertaken in the 1990s by the presidential campaigns pitching their tents and slogans on the frontiers of race and class. Like the war on drugs, the war on terror is unwinnable because [it is] waged against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun. [The War on Terror] is a war that returns a handsome profit to the manufacturers of cruise missiles and a reassuring increase of dictatorial power for a stupefied plutocracy that associates the phrase national security not with the health and well-being of the American people but with the protection of their private wealth and privilege. Unable to erect a secure perimeter around the life and landscape of a free society, the government departments of public safety solve the technical problem by seeing to it that society becomes less free. The war on terror brought up to combat strength the nation’s ample reserves of xenophobic paranoia, the American people told to live in fear. Given enough time and trouble over the last sixteen years, their collective fear and loathing collected into the cesspool from which Donald J. Trump became the president of the United States.
arkis22 9y ago
I would have thought it was sex
mancerayder 9y ago
Without a doubt the business news has a greater interest in delivery of facts on the ground than your typical national newspaper. To that end I pay for (and only pay for) the Financial Times due to their attempt to seek out truth. For example, on controversial issues they'll have editorials from both sides, long articles, and they publish letters criticizing and correcting articles. As it's investment-minded and British owned, there's more of an international focus. The sad thing about the FT is how expensive it is. Investors tend to care about facts more than feelings, so objectivity becomes a worthwhile pursuit. When you're investing in a commodity, foreign currency and so forth, you're going to read everything with squinted eyes, looking for the facts.
- richev 9y ago
  > The sad thing about the FT is how expensive it is. Real journalism costs money, and ad revenues aren't what they used to be.
  - colejohnson66 9y ago
    Partly because of ad blockers. But ad blockers became popular due to the rise in obnoxious ads. It’s an endless cycle that advertisers and publishers aren’t working at all to fix.
yuhong 9y ago
It is funny how the US focuses on "intellectual property" over selling actual goods. We have been running a trade deficit since the 1980s I think. This reminds me of patent trolls for example.
NumberCruncher 9y ago
Evergreen: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews Tl,dr: None of these stories [the news] have relevance to my life. Reading them may be enjoyable, but it’s an enjoyable waste of time. They will have no impact on my actions one way or another.
richev 9y ago
Article needs editing for length and clarity.
avs733 9y ago
In some sick way I am a little impressed with Fox News...the comments in this thread seem to indicate they have effectively won the battle they chose to fight by making everything seem biased. Nihilism isn't intended as a political strategy but it is an effective one.
colanderman 9y ago
Maybe I'm dumb, but I can't glean the meaning of this partial (verbless) sentence? > Not the outcome envisioned by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but the one raising the question addressed in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. Lapham’s Quarterly is highly regarded, so I would expect such non-sentences – especially at the start of a paragraph, complete with a drop-cap – to be culled by the editor (or author, who is in this case the same person). Or am I just not intelligent enough to understand this style of writing? (Even inserting a well-placed “is” does not clarify this sentence for me.) Aside, I’m surprised the article doesn’t touch on why fear is so delectable to the American palate. I suspect it’s that humans expect fear, like how we expect work, pain, hierarchy, and other objectively unpleasant things which we seek out when lacking, to restore balance to an otherwise saccharine existence. Americans in fact have very little to rightly fear, thus our lizard brains instinctively latch on to anything to fill that void in our lives.
known 9y ago
AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
Hasknewbie 9y ago
"Fear itself these days is America’s top-selling consumer product" Isn't that the point Michael Moore was making in Bowling For Columbine all those years ago? We are only rediscovering what we already knew.
apexalpha 9y ago
The joy of your country having a neutral public broadcaster...
DanielBMarkham 9y ago
The internet promised to make every man a publisher, and it has succeeded. The problem is that most professional publishers shouldn't be publishers, much less the average person. There's simply too much money to be made with eyeballs. A press with no overhead is a race to the bottom with a cast of billions, many of whom would fight to the death over pennies. I tell my friends to monitor and severely cut their intake of news. Ingesting news today is a profoundly emotionally unhealthy thing to do, and to the degree people ingest it, they are usually over-the-top in their fear of various things, the vast majority of which are no threat to much of anybody. We've always had this situation with small publications. As a former freelance journalist, what I've seen over the past several years is that the big publications, after being brought over to Facebook and Twitter for better access to readers, are being forced to play this game too -- while they continue to lay-off staff and reduce costs. There's more than a whiff of desperation I see in the majority of headlines from most major news sources. It is a sad thing.
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
The writing style is pretentious, and for the life of me I can't see why trigger warnings, of all things, are being spun into this narrative. Perhaps betrays a lack of understanding of the concept from the author.
valuearb 9y ago
I hope the author found their point, because I went 3 pages in and gave up looking for one.
ivanhoe 9y ago
To be honest I think this was pretty obvious to anyone living outside the US, especially after 9/11. And unfortunately for the rest of the world, it's nothing US exclusive, scaring people into obedience is the oldest trick in the book. Fear has been always one of the main selling point for politicians, ever since the beginning of time. When faced with a common threat (real or not) people tend to unite under a leader who they hope will protect them, and it's any totalitarian ruler's wet dream. Frightened people are easier to control and far more likely too look the other way on whatever irregularity or injustice, as it will always seem unimportant compared to the threat and fear they feel.

425 points by oblib 9y ago

Lapham’s Quarterly is an absolute treasure. This issue is especially timely and informative (to say the least).

I would make the argument, with increase in taxes, regulations, and limitation on speech; coercion is the top-selling consumer product. Just my 2 cents.

kmicklas 9y ago
Libertarians never cease to amaze me with their amazing ability to spot coercive relations in civil liberties and their complete blindness to the economic coercion inherent in capitalism.
- lend000 9y ago
  Not to validate the nonsensical and off-topic comment to which you are responding, but yours makes an equally broad and nonsensical generalization.
infogulch 9y ago
How are the tax increases, added regulations, and new limits on speech justified? Because for as powerful as politicians are, if they royally piss of their jurisdictions they can still be voted out of office. So how is it they can keep getting away with eroding away these rights? Fear.
- hi1234567890 9y ago
  Ok, you got me there.
yequalsx 9y ago
You haven't made an argument. You've just stated an opinion without providing evidence or reasons that your opinion ought to be considered. The article, by comparison, is well written and provides cogent reasoning.
- hi1234567890 9y ago
  I acknowledge your comment. I didn't have time to go into the level of detail to merit a full argument. Think of it as "manner of speaking".

uptownfunk 9y ago

Brilliant magazine.

erikb 9y ago

I wanted to complain about the title not really making the right distinction, that fear is not a product but a sales method. However, the author actually understands that distinction and really talks about fear being the product. That also implies that people desire fear and that fear is produced with industrial efficiency. Interesting thought.

rednerrus 9y ago
This is what makes horror movies sell, right?
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
  For most of them, yes. But horror is (or at least can be) distinct from fear. "The Silence of The Lambs" is horrifying, but not necessarily considered a horror movie. Likewise "Apocalypse Now", which is mostly about the emotion of horror, but not designed to frighten in any way.
rfrank 9y ago
>That also implies that people desire fear and that fear is produced with industrial efficiency. Or, that what people consume and what they desire aren't always the same things.
- tinym 9y ago
  At the very least: * What people buy * What people want * What people say they want * What people would actually enjoy * ...
pier25 9y ago
What is most interesting to me is that people do not know what they want or what they are really consuming.
- erikb 9y ago
  Yeah, I also often think about that. We act based of a set of needs. But we don't even need to know what these needs are to continue trying to satisfy them.

lutorm 9y ago

Funny, I just watched this: https://youtu.be/JrBdYmStZJ4?t=22s https://youtu.be/JrBdYmStZJ4?t=22s Seems pretty apt.

fl0wenol 9y ago

I got excited for just a split second on the off chance the author meant the Monolith Productions title back in 2005.

mxfh 9y ago

A not so convincing conservative (counter) narrative that lumps up the arguably questionable nature of trigger warnings with a russian imposed nuclear doomsday scenario? That assumption that a russian bomb was merely a copy of the the American effort, spying helped it speed up, but mostly prevented costly mistakes for the soviets is just another example of american exceptionalism. Would rather watch Adam Curtis' Power of Nightmares again, blaming the culture of fear rightly and mostly on the rise of neoconservatives.

Ygg2 9y ago
> A not so convincing conservative (counter) narrative that lumps up the arguably questionable nature of trigger warnings Conservative? Can trigger warning exist without fearing something? I think the author describes evolution of fear.
- mxfh 9y ago
  I wouldn't call this fear, but a, yet to be proven effective, strategy to avoid retraumatization. The motivation, as I understand it, is actually to enable and prepare more people reading things they would be otherwise afraid of, so quite the opposite of fear. Besides some right wing people seeing this as one of the horsemen of the end of free speech, this relatively obscure and confined practice simply doesn't warrant mentioning it on level akin with national doctrines like MAD.
amalcon 9y ago
The narrative didn't seem all that conservative to me -- it attacks conservatives at least as much as liberals, and concludes that the election of DJT is the present culmination of the trend. I do take issue with pulling trigger warnings in here (though, in fairness, that was a minor part in the article), just because it's re-enforcing a very negative trend. Trigger is a term of art in psychology, related to post-traumatic stress disorder. It specifically refers to a stimulus triggering a fight-or-flight response in a situation where it would not be called for in someone without PTSD. We should be giving this clinical issue the respect it deserves, and not conflating it with the things we are more abstractly afraid of.

rc_kas 9y ago

Upvoted! I don't even know what is in the article. I just love the headline and I totally agree with it.

amelius 9y ago

Also: "Fear of missing out" It's essentially what our culture seems to be based on nowadays. Thanks Facebook, thanks Google.

United857 9y ago
I'd say FOMO has been the primary technique used since the dawn of advertising. Not unique to Facebook or Google, although perhaps more prominent.
maxxxxx 9y ago
That's the luxury version. For a lot of people it's fear of going under.
komali2 9y ago
Why do you thank facebook and google for this?

coldtea 9y ago

The 2nd top-selling consumer product: the first is anxiety (for your body, social status, income, career, etc.).

alecco 9y ago

Playing devil's advocate, all this fear and anxiety (as @coldtea properly states) is an engine of the economic machine of the western world. What I'd argue is that is all twisted for idiotic reasons. For example, it would be good to have fear of death used to push society towards things like cures for cancers. And anxiety used to push ourselves to reach our potential instead of seeking validation in superficial things expressed in Instagram pictures. But we humans like the quick fix and the advertising lobby delivers. We have 50% of the blame here. Same with the unhealthy foods and drinks we take all the time. To improve our behaviour we need incentives like most animals.

aleyan 9y ago

This is not this essay's first time[1] making it to this front of hacker news. And I am glad for it, because Petrified Forrest essay is great, and Lapham's whole issue[2] on fear is fantastic. Unfortunately two pieces I found most relevant for HN crowd from this issue so far aren't available on Lapham's Quarterly website. They are a moralistic Japanese 17th century account of an entrepreneur in "All the goodness gone from tea"[3] and Joseph Heller's bit on "Corporate Welfare" in "Something Happened"[4]. Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14589087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14589087 [2] http://laphamsquarterly.org/fear http://laphamsquarterly.org/fear [3] https://books.google.com/books?id=ux89AAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA93&ots=_0XDTIXhUw&dq=%22all%20the%20goodness%20gone%20from%20tea%22&pg=PA93#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=ux89AAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA93&ots=... [4] https://books.google.com/books?id=b2AiWB98p5sC&lpg=PT14&ots=GTXIjffuIu&dq=_&pg=PT14#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=b2AiWB98p5sC&lpg=PT14&ots=...

oblib 9y ago
When I entered the link I kind of expected to be notified it had be posted already, but no such notice came up. I was revisiting the site today and couldn't remember seeing that article linked here so I thought I'd give it a try. Nice to see it get around some more. It really is a high quality site and one I look forward to each update with real anticipation.

ethn 9y ago

I think it's quite ridiculous that any author can get away with the obscure clairvoyant claim that people are really irrational and desire to be fearful——it's a claim contrary to primitive animal and human psychology alike. The motivation to go buy products associated with fear has nothing to do with fear itself even when you explicitly define fear as an uncomfortable uncertainty. The reason to want to know fear, why fearful subjects are even discussed, is the quite natural rational thirst for information about uncertainty. Thus, you would expect them to purchase services that provide information about and that mitigate uncertainty. Much of the financial economy is purposed as a mitigation to uncertainty, because uncertainty causes an inherent inefficient allocation in resources in order to prepare for the uncertain event. If there is uncertainty, the rational agent is forced to prepare for it with capital (be it financial or physical). This causes there to be an unused buffer of resources that cannot be allocated to more pressing utilizations. Instead, the rational agent is obliged to maintain a buffer, and even incur more transactional costs in maintaining that very buffer. Uncertainty is expensive, and the rational agent thus seeks to understand all disturbances to mitigate the cost of uncertainty. tl;dr The author is actually engaging in the cheap literary trope where the general population lacks rationality and the author is the exception for pointing it out.

enraged_camel 9y ago
No, I don't think the desire to mitigate uncertainty explains it. The reason is simple: fear is about overplaying and exaggerating the risks and uncertainty. Fear of terrorist attacks is a great example. If you live in the US, that means that over the past 15 years you have been more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than a foreign terrorist attack. Yet a lot of people shit their pants with regards to, say, Islamic terrorism.
- ethn 9y ago
  Terrorism is a real threat to interests abroad and test on the ability of the US to mitigate small risks. If they can't mitigate small risks how would they be able to mitigate a large risk? Every single human created disturbance (i.e. war) begins with a small group of people cascading into a larger force, with governments it happens with leaders, but it's greatly more unpredictable when it is propagated by an unknown people–especially when that group is in a region which produces 81.5% of the worlds oil supply. You would be quite irrational to not be interested in the domestic and foreign affairs of your own government. Even more irrational to say it's not a problem.

komali2 9y ago

I'm slowly trimming away the means I acquire news, because it's all becoming so editorialized. Twitter is bombarded with bots and flamewars, reddit is a lost cause, and news.google.com is mainly driven by larger syndications that have mastered the "Big Headlines Sell" strategy. That leaves HN and my little local papers, Mountain View Voice and its ilk. Great for local stories and tech news, but I feel like I'm missing out on what's going on in the world. Every time I dip my feet in global news, it's screamed at me, dripping in panic: "Trump DID A THING!!!" "Cops Shoot a Guy AGAIN WHY DID THEY DO THAT?!!" Are there any good general global news sources that don't try to manipulate my emotions as I read them? Paid or free.

eloary 9y ago
Business news sources tend to be clear headed, because they are in the space of news you can put a dollar value on, and hence will pay for to make more accurate. That doesn't make them perfect, since they still tend towards an editorial agenda favoring "business as usual" power centers over disruptive forces, but I don't feel like I'm being fed outrage most of the time.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  >Business news sources tend to be clear headed, because they are in the space of news you can put a dollar value on, and hence will pay for to make more accurate. It also pays to put out dishonest hit pieces against competitors, or dishonest reviews of your own products to make them seem better than they really are.
  - eloary 9y ago
    We get to see those because they're advertising. That's the whole point of "you have to pay." When I read a hype story about a company someone else is paying. Really good, cheap or free info about the present and future tends to lie not in a consumer paper but in dense, wordy PDFs that are cast offs of internal researchers at major multinationals and government bureaus. Those documents are often released to tell investors and taxpayers "here is how we view the situation and why" and their structural mission is to get the assessment right so that they make correct moves. There is little storytelling or human interest to these documents, but they are valuable for the same reason that knowing about the weather is valuable.

microcolonel 9y ago

Don't watch cable news, your life will be better. If you're not already convinced that most cable news is editorialized for political gain, then surely you're convinced that is unhealthy to rubberneck at every problem in the world.

f4rker 9y ago

this is pretty stupid and blatantly false.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mathiasrw 9y ago
> I'm no joke starting to see the value of Chinese, Singaporean, etc. and maybe even North Korean (!!) censorship - people can't be fucking idiots and destroy the country over stuff on the news if it's not on the news. Sounds like you assume that state based censorship will remove/limit fear from the news. States are the main beneficiary from a fear-based population. It's a tool to direct anger away from relevant areas that could threaten established structures towards areas that has little or no significance (or even better: other parts of its own population) If you don't fear anything, there is no reason for a state
- deleted 9y ago
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  - rbehrends 9y ago
    > All I can do is look at Singapore from the outside and be in awe (look at their neigbhours.. then look at Poland's or USA's neighbours and compare the amount of fear). I look at Singapore on the Press Freedom Index (rank 155 out of 180) and am not in awe at all. It scares me that people who grew up in liberal democracies find something to admire about its model. Perhaps it's just that our life experiences are different. I grew up in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. My mother's family fled East Germany shortly after WW2. My father's home was within a couple of miles of the inner German border. I got to visit East Berlin before the Wall came down. My memories of explicitly government-regulated speech are negative, through and through. All I can say is that I never want a government to have that much control over speech. The hypothetical use of that power for good does not offset the damage it can cause in the wrong hands, and in an authoritarian country, there is no way to peacefully remove the government from power if it chooses to abuse that power. > Freedom of speech has really come to mean outright lies, slander, fear mongering, FUD, bullshit, conspiracies and so on. What value does speech have if the only defense is "it's not illegal" and not "it's right". There are a number of fallacies here. * One is the assumption that in order to restrict harmful speech, it has to be ordered from above. (Seriously, Hobbes's idea that you need an authoritarian ruler to protect liberties is a bit dated.) * Another is that having an authoritarian government would fix this. The worst offenders when it comes to speech aimed at undermining liberties are people already in power. An authoritarian government would exacerbate that issue. Whatever side "won" would also get the power to suppress any speech they don't like. * We don't protect potentially harmful speech because we like it, but because of the dangers if we open up speech to government censorship. While one can argue that maybe Brandenburg v. Ohio went a bit too far, the underlying idea – to keep the government at a safe distance from regulating individual expression, even expression that you strongly dislike – is sound ("freedom is always the freedom of dissenters"). If there's a role for government, it would be to ensure that valid opinions aren't squeezed out (Fairness Doctrine and such), not to ban harmful speech.

nathan-wailes 9y ago

Hey all, I'm interested in this topic and created several summaries for my own use (below). Since this article is somewhat long and isn't as easy to understand as it could be, I figured other HNers might find these summaries useful: ----------------- Short plain-English summary of the major things he says in the article: People in the US are generally much safer than in the past, but they also seem to be more afraid than in the past, and it seems to be because there are powerful groups that benefit (or believe they benefit) from this state of affairs: those associated with or members of the news media, the military and its private-sector suppliers, politicians, the very rich, and the police. This shift to having the public generally fearful seems to have started in 1949 when we in the US learned that the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. Consensus in Washington became that the Soviet Union was a more immediate and serious threat than it probably really was, and the news media sold papers by stirring up fear of WW3. In the 1960s the news media made people afraid of the possibility of an actual armed revolution within the US by leftists. With the fall of the Berlin Wall the news media and politicians shifted to fear of drugs, and since 9/11 it has been terrorism. ----------------- The main ideas / questions discussed, in his words: [Motivating problem:] In no country anywhere in the history of the world has the majority of a population lived in circumstances as benign and well-lighted as those currently at home and at large within the borders of the United States of America. And yet, despite the bulk of reassuring evidence, a divided but democratically inclined body politic finds itself herded into the unifying lockdown imposed by the networked sum of its fears—sexual and racial, cultural, social, and economic, nuanced and naked, founded and unfounded. [Main questions:] How does it happen that American society at the moment stands on constant terror alert? Why and wherefrom the trigger warnings, and whose innocence or interest are they meant to comfort, defend, and preserve? Who is afraid of whom or of what, and why do the trumpetings of doom keep rising in frequency and pitch? ----------------- Paragraph-by-paragraph-ish main ideas (as far as I could tell), in his words: Fear [is] the oldest and strongest of the human emotions. [There is] real fear and neurotic fear, the former a rational and comprehensible response to the perception of clear and present danger, the latter “free-floating,” anxious expectation attachable to any something or nothing that catches the eye or the ear. I’m old enough to remember when Americans weren’t as easily persuaded to confuse the one with the other. I was taught that looking fear straight in the face was the root meaning of courage. [After] August 1949, when the Soviet Union successfully tested a [nuclear] bomb, my further acquaintance with fear was for the most part to take the form of the neurotic. The Cold War with the Russians produced the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. For the everybodies whose lives were the stake on the gaming table, [this] didn’t leave much room for Teddy Roosevelt’s looking real fear straight in the face. Expectant anxiety maybe weakens the resolve of individual persons, but it strengthens the powers of church and state. Fear is the most wonder-working of all the world’s marketing tools. Used wisely, innovatively, and well, it sells everything in the store—the word of God and the wages of sin, the divorce papers and the marriage certificate, the face cream and the assault rifle, the grim headline news in the morning and the late-night laugh track. [He tells a story of working as a reporter in NYC in 1962, receiving a press release from the Russians about new weapons tech, and having the editor of the paper mold it into a front-page fear-soaked story, presumably motivated by the desire to sell more papers.] Expectant anxiety sells newspapers. The Cold War was born in the cradle of expectant anxiety; so were the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The innovative and entrepreneurial consensus in Washington resurrected from the ruins [of Russia post-WW2] the evil Soviet Empire—stupendous enemy, world-class and operatic, menace for all seasons, dread destroyer of American wealth and well-being. Fattened on the seed of openhanded military spending (upward of $15 trillion since 1950) the confederation of vested interest that President Eisenhower identified as the military-industrial complex brought forth an armed colossus the likes of which the world had never seen. The turbulent decade in the 1960s raised the force levels of the public alarm. The always fearmongering news media projected armed revolution; the violent fantasy sold papers, boosted ratings, stimulated the demand for repressive surveillance and heavy law enforcement that blossomed into one of the country’s richest and most innovative growth industries. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 undermined the threat presented by the evil Soviet Empire, and without the Cold War against the Russians, how then defend, honor, and protect the cash flow of the nation’s military-industrial complex? The custodians of America’s conscience and bank balance found the solution in the war on drugs. The stockpiling of domestic fear for all seasons is the political alchemist’s trick of changing lead into gold, the work undertaken in the 1990s by the presidential campaigns pitching their tents and slogans on the frontiers of race and class. Like the war on drugs, the war on terror is unwinnable because [it is] waged against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun. [The War on Terror] is a war that returns a handsome profit to the manufacturers of cruise missiles and a reassuring increase of dictatorial power for a stupefied plutocracy that associates the phrase national security not with the health and well-being of the American people but with the protection of their private wealth and privilege. Unable to erect a secure perimeter around the life and landscape of a free society, the government departments of public safety solve the technical problem by seeing to it that society becomes less free. The war on terror brought up to combat strength the nation’s ample reserves of xenophobic paranoia, the American people told to live in fear. Given enough time and trouble over the last sixteen years, their collective fear and loathing collected into the cesspool from which Donald J. Trump became the president of the United States.

arkis22 9y ago

I would have thought it was sex

mancerayder 9y ago

Without a doubt the business news has a greater interest in delivery of facts on the ground than your typical national newspaper. To that end I pay for (and only pay for) the Financial Times due to their attempt to seek out truth. For example, on controversial issues they'll have editorials from both sides, long articles, and they publish letters criticizing and correcting articles. As it's investment-minded and British owned, there's more of an international focus. The sad thing about the FT is how expensive it is. Investors tend to care about facts more than feelings, so objectivity becomes a worthwhile pursuit. When you're investing in a commodity, foreign currency and so forth, you're going to read everything with squinted eyes, looking for the facts.

richev 9y ago
> The sad thing about the FT is how expensive it is. Real journalism costs money, and ad revenues aren't what they used to be.
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  Partly because of ad blockers. But ad blockers became popular due to the rise in obnoxious ads. It’s an endless cycle that advertisers and publishers aren’t working at all to fix.

yuhong 9y ago

It is funny how the US focuses on "intellectual property" over selling actual goods. We have been running a trade deficit since the 1980s I think. This reminds me of patent trolls for example.

NumberCruncher 9y ago

Evergreen: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews Tl,dr: None of these stories [the news] have relevance to my life. Reading them may be enjoyable, but it’s an enjoyable waste of time. They will have no impact on my actions one way or another.

richev 9y ago

Article needs editing for length and clarity.

avs733 9y ago

In some sick way I am a little impressed with Fox News...the comments in this thread seem to indicate they have effectively won the battle they chose to fight by making everything seem biased. Nihilism isn't intended as a political strategy but it is an effective one.

colanderman 9y ago

Maybe I'm dumb, but I can't glean the meaning of this partial (verbless) sentence? > Not the outcome envisioned by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but the one raising the question addressed in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. Lapham’s Quarterly is highly regarded, so I would expect such non-sentences – especially at the start of a paragraph, complete with a drop-cap – to be culled by the editor (or author, who is in this case the same person). Or am I just not intelligent enough to understand this style of writing? (Even inserting a well-placed “is” does not clarify this sentence for me.) Aside, I’m surprised the article doesn’t touch on why fear is so delectable to the American palate. I suspect it’s that humans expect fear, like how we expect work, pain, hierarchy, and other objectively unpleasant things which we seek out when lacking, to restore balance to an otherwise saccharine existence. Americans in fact have very little to rightly fear, thus our lizard brains instinctively latch on to anything to fill that void in our lives.

known 9y ago

AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

Hasknewbie 9y ago

"Fear itself these days is America’s top-selling consumer product" Isn't that the point Michael Moore was making in Bowling For Columbine all those years ago? We are only rediscovering what we already knew.

apexalpha 9y ago

The joy of your country having a neutral public broadcaster...

DanielBMarkham 9y ago

The internet promised to make every man a publisher, and it has succeeded. The problem is that most professional publishers shouldn't be publishers, much less the average person. There's simply too much money to be made with eyeballs. A press with no overhead is a race to the bottom with a cast of billions, many of whom would fight to the death over pennies. I tell my friends to monitor and severely cut their intake of news. Ingesting news today is a profoundly emotionally unhealthy thing to do, and to the degree people ingest it, they are usually over-the-top in their fear of various things, the vast majority of which are no threat to much of anybody. We've always had this situation with small publications. As a former freelance journalist, what I've seen over the past several years is that the big publications, after being brought over to Facebook and Twitter for better access to readers, are being forced to play this game too -- while they continue to lay-off staff and reduce costs. There's more than a whiff of desperation I see in the majority of headlines from most major news sources. It is a sad thing.

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago

The writing style is pretentious, and for the life of me I can't see why trigger warnings, of all things, are being spun into this narrative. Perhaps betrays a lack of understanding of the concept from the author.

valuearb 9y ago

I hope the author found their point, because I went 3 pages in and gave up looking for one.

ivanhoe 9y ago

To be honest I think this was pretty obvious to anyone living outside the US, especially after 9/11. And unfortunately for the rest of the world, it's nothing US exclusive, scaring people into obedience is the oldest trick in the book. Fear has been always one of the main selling point for politicians, ever since the beginning of time. When faced with a common threat (real or not) people tend to unite under a leader who they hope will protect them, and it's any totalitarian ruler's wet dream. Frightened people are easier to control and far more likely too look the other way on whatever irregularity or injustice, as it will always seem unimportant compared to the threat and fear they feel.