FEAR and Happystance

Both in everyday encounters and during workshops, I frequently come across the power of FEAR (False Expectations Appearing Real) and how it can blight our current experience of our life. I described a visit to a pre-school group that had prompted me to consider the topic of chaos theory and happiness. It does seem as if some people’s current unhappiness is grounded in apprehensions about the future and a sense of helplessness about influencing those wider concerns and future events.

So, I recognised the phenomenon when I read Dr. Sanity’s tongue-in-cheek account of command hallucinations and the creation of FEAR. We need a Happystance to resist these strong command hallucinations and to provide us with personal and social resilience in the face of all the dire news that confronts us on a regular basis.

In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Friedman argues that the financial and social anxieties created by living in a stagnant economy lead people to look for explanations and answers in intolerance and fear. Furedi provides his own explanation for this behaviour. He claims that the phenomenon is responsible for the widespread internalisation of conspiracy theories: "[t]oday, acts of misfortune are frequently associated with intentional malevolent behavior".

Michael Crichton recently gave a lecture on Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century. He gives a remarkable account of the mis-information surrounding the impact of Chernobyl. He summarises some of the statistics of estimated deaths and health-related problems and goes on to discuss how wrong they have proved to be. Crichton quotes a UN report from 2005 that says the largest public health problem created by the incident at Chernobyl is the:

damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information…[manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state.

In Crichton’s opinion:

the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder, for a minute, exactly what that implies. We demand strict controls on radiation because it is such a health hazard. But Chernobyl suggests that false information can be a health hazard as damaging as radiation. I am not saying radiation is not a threat. I am not saying Chernobyl was not a genuinely serious event.

But thousands of Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as they did.

It is easy to assign a demon role to the demands of television and the public’s desire for information. It’s incompatible with our social and intellectual values that there should be a draconian censorship policy that would restrict publication, broadcast and dissemination of speculation. We need public discussions of important issues and so we need access to views from interested parties. But there are times when I would like some of the assumptions and data underlying the speculation (which is sometimes presented as if it is fact) to be made more explicit.

Most of all, I would like some smart economist to write a book on The Moral Consequences of FEAR or The Economic Costs of Blighting Lives Through Mis-information.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project