A Recent History of Fear

FEAR: A Recent History It was 1966. I was in college. The year before, 1965, Bob Dylan put out two albums: Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. They captured the age, but neither we nor he, Dylan himself, understood how long the age would last. It seemed over by 1969. It wasn’t. It is back now . . . still or again. It’s hard to tell which. In service of my plea, I offer a few select lyrics from the two albums in the present of late autumn 2020. From “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on Bringing It All Back Home: Look out kid It’s somethin’ you did God knows when But you’re doin’ it again . . . Watch the plain clothes You don’t need a weatherman To know which way the wind blows . . . Look out kid They keep it all hid . . . The pump don’t work ’Cause the vandals took the handles Kafka (he would) said it back in 1914 with his The Trial. We all read Kafka, and knew we were on trial. It was something we did. Nuclear holocaust was just around the corner. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 had been an early warning. The US invasion of Vietnam was going full tilt, and the males of us could be shipped out at any moment. It must have been something we did. So the next song reminded us. We didn’t really know what was going on. From “Ballad of a Thin Man” on Highway 61: Because something is happening here But you don’t know what it is Do you, Mister Jones? . . . You raise up your head And you ask, “Is this where it is?” And somebody points to you and says “It’s his” And you say, “What’s mine?” And somebody else says, “Where what is?” And you say, “Oh my God Am I here all alone?” . . . You’ve been with the professors And they’ve all liked your looks With great lawyers you have Discussed lepers and crooks You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books You’re very well read It’s well known . . . Because something is happening here But you don’t know what it is Do you, Mister Jones? We knew we didn’t know what was going on. We had been born into a world of nuclear weapons, and we did know they could obliterate all of us and everything. Ours were real fears. Granted, in 1962, the Soviets had only two or so intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear war heads and several outdated long range bombers (National Security Archive 2012), but we believed otherwise. The CIA told us so, because they and their arms companies wanted us to buy more bombs. Nonetheless, in a few years the Soviet missile capacity matched or even exceeded ours. There was a whole genre of film and fiction predicated on post apocalyptic worlds. That was scary and so was going to Vietnam. Walter Conkrite showed it to us every night on CBS News. Of course there was the war in Vietnam. The United States invaded in 1965, after the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 10, 1964). Doubtless the people of Vietnam feared being bombed and invaded, but people in the United States did not fear an invasion by Vietnamese troops led by General Giap, although he had defeated the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bin Phu ten years before. But then their ranks were filled with former Waffen SS troops, and ‘we had beat them back in 1945. No, Americans did not fear Vietnam, but young men had good reason to fear being drafted and sent to Vietnam to kill and be killed. Neither nuclear war nor the invasion of Vietnam was everyday kinds of fears. They were distant, not near. By 1966 Americans had gotten over everyday fears. There had been polio . . . beaten, and TB (tuberculosis) feared by poor people, but that had been tamed. Black people still worried about lynching, but the civil rights movement and laws in 1964 and 1965 promised more security unless you challenged a Southern sheriff. Starvation? There were food stamps now, Welfare or AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) for impoverished women and children, Medicare for old people. Those kinds of fears seemed in the past. New everyday kinds of fears were yet to come. The New Fears They came with the Reagan administration. It could be serendipitous, but beginning with Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1981, public consciousness was barraged, if not inundated, by fears of things previously taken for granted as safe. 1982 bottles of Tylenol pills of acetaminophen were tampered with cyanide resulting in seven deaths. New packaging laws throughout the United States made opening over the counter drugs much harder as a result. Seven deaths led to a raft of federal and state laws. Such promotions played on the common but subterranean fears of the majority of Americans—e.g. tainted drugs and food. Up next were razor blades in Halloween candy. But all such reverse fears--psychologists might call them ‘projections’—had a definite political association, which only appeared to be lacking in the cases of tampering with common pain relievers and Halloween candy. More to come helped clarify the pattern. Before Reagan, 1968 Richard M Nixon ran on what Kevin Phillips called the ‘Southern Strategy’ (Phillips 1969). It was linked to a sub-strategy of the wildly successful campaign of ‘crime in the streets.’ Suddenly in 1968 a public relations efforts made local crimes a national issue, which it had never been before. Of course non-Whites were the assumed perpetrators, and ever since, White US voters have favored the Republican presidential candidate. The ‘crime in the streets’ political strategy rested on the entrenched social structural of White supremacy in the United States, with culturally appropriate echoes in the other Anglophone settler countries along with various European imperialist societies with their historical specializations. Those subterranean fears came from White people’s fears of Black people, which grew from slavers’ fears of a slave uprising. White people in America grew up in the 1950s fearing Indian attacks as kids learned that the ‘settlers’ (White) and US Army Cavalry (White) had been attacked regularly by Indians, thereby slowing the White settler genocide of the Native American population. By the time of President Reagan, therefore, the ground had been cleared and fertilized to make everyday life one of peril. And it was that which made the new fear different from old fears. Old fears of possible catastrophes were reality based but not everyday concerns. They were ancient, from droughts and floods, to wars and invasions. They were very real and probably called for some collective action, but they did not intrude on the quotidian. The new fears pushed their way into morning ablutions, breakfasting, housekeeping, daily shopping, and the like. Their promotions seemed continual, talk about them was ubiquitous. There was no escape. That was the point. The other characteristic setting them apart was their phoniness. They were prima facie, completely, and obviously made up concoctions of some public relations executive. That made them no less popular. Everyone, or so it seemed, lived anxiously. Stalking, child kidnapping, and serial killers played intermittently throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century (Keppler and Potter 2005). Illegal drugs also threatened every household by luring young people into sordid lifestyles or the threat of muggings by desperate addicts. These tales of terror, in ways not unlike the blood libel levied against Jews in the Middle Ages, supported public calls for more laws, more police, and bigger prisons. By the end of the century, the United States had the most jailed population n the world and probably within history. It was not due to the rise of a totalitarian regime. It was by popular demand. Relief from this trend came in an unexpected form—the attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon September 11, 2001. It made all the other scares fade. Terrorism became the all encompassing narrative. Elsewhere I have explicated the fear of crime and terrorism (Skoll 2009, 2010, 2016), and will not delve into them here, but will recall my analysis of terrorism. Terrorism is whatever states say it is. States are based on terror, as their authority rests on a population’s fear of force. Terrorists are always those who threaten a state’s authority. For example, when the United States invaded Lebanon during its civil war in the 1980s and US forces were attacked, a new US federal law made foreign attacks against US personnel and property a crime. Later, in 1996, in an act of blatant irony, the US Congress passed a law called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-132, 110 Stat. 1214. Apparently an “effective” execution is not terrorism. The best part of the irony was that until that time, no US law made terrorism within the United States a crime. After 9/11 all such literary tropes gave way to the new terror accompanied by a global war against it. Soon the high culture of literature gave way to the farcical, not unlike Marx’s account of the ascension of Louis Bonaparte, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” (Marx 1852). Soon, all kinds of events became acts of terrorism. As they piled one upon the other, they constituted a new literary form, a mythology of terrorism made up of fairy tales from around the world, in which a small group of malcontents were persuaded to stage a murderous attack by the security forces of a country. Upon execution of the plots, the police conveniently found identifying documents of the perpetrators, who usually were so-called Muslim extremists. The terror mythology served as the rationale for growing police state policies and apparatuses in all countries involved in the global empire of capital. All the while the United States and its vassals promote terrorist organizations wherever there is a government that thwarts their wishes and whims, like Ukraine, Syria, and the western provinces of China, to name a few. With hindsight the faintly ridiculous fears about Tylenol, Halloween candy, and the rest were media promotions in the style of “if it bleeds, it leads.” Nonetheless they served to fertilize an ethos of fear among a citizenry. Hitchhiking disappeared from the United States, once celebrated in literature such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). At the same time a more concerted campaign against public employees like postal workers (“going postal” for berserker rages and mass murder) and attacks against public school teachers and their unions undermined the web of group affiliations observed and analyzed by the founders of modern sociology such as Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel. Seizing on these diverse social and cultural vicissitudes, owners of capital throughout the world mobilized their executives and public relations experts to use them in their increasingly desperate efforts to counteract the accelerating falling rate of profit. The Emotional Economy of Fear ‘Fear’ is an imprecise term more suited to artistic, literary, or political examination than to scientific psychological analysis. Commonly treated as a basic emotion unlike, say rapture, which is more complex, perhaps ineffable. Yet fear can mean any number of things from a reflex like the fearful response stemming from a near miss automobile accident to the long term emotion of fear of death in the trenches of the First World War. Attempts to distinguish between fear and anxiety founder on the shoals of definitional inexactitude such as that by Patrick Sylvers and colleagues (Sylvers, Lilienfeld, and LaPrairie 2011), who were forced to seek safe harbor in a self report instrument. Psycho-physiological measurements offer no help as the adrenaline associated responses are common to several other emotions such as excitement or anger. To add to the problem, fears are historically and culturally bound outside their contexts. For example susto is a culture bound condition common in certain Latin American societies, but not recognized elsewhere. At different times and in different cultures people have been afraid of different things for different reasons. During the late Middles Ages and early modern period of Europe people were afraid of witches. Some people in many different societies carry fetishes and talismans to ward off threats that are typically of a supernatural character. Fear, then, is often meaning dependent and culturally shaped. Common descriptions of fear in dictionaries and encyclopedias assert that fear is an unpleasant emotion. Nonetheless, fear sells as the genre of horror in fiction and film bears witness. People pay money to be frightened so how unpleasant can it be? Observable behavior in the face of fear offers more promise for understanding it, but even such behavioristic simplifications run into complications. For example, one can say that people in general fear being struck by lightning, and yet one can see aficionados playing golf in electrical storms. Such risky behavior cannot be attributed to ignorance, because most adults know that golfing in the presence of lightning is dangerous. There are some people who actively seek extremely dangerous and fright inducing “sports” as bungee jumping to get an adrenaline rush. Fear, then, resembles pornography. We recognize it when we see it (Stewart 1964, 197). Another trouble is that people can be afraid either with or without a threat, and even worse, threats can be real, imaginary, distant, imminent, and so on. Getting back to fear of lightning, although most people fear it, they also know that if they take precautions, they need not be fearful. Unrealistic fears sometimes take the form of phobias such as fear of snakes or spiders. Of course there are dangerous snakes like the coral and fer de lance, which can kill humans. Nonetheless, most snakes are harmless, especially the ones that most people would encounter. Wearing snake boots is a good idea in snake country so people who live in major urban centers could be said to have irrational fears if they fear snakes, because they are not likely to encounter them. Fear of global ecological collapse is both realistic and imminent enough to call for corrective action, but typical psycho-physiological reactions to ecological fears probably tend toward the non discernible or neurotic. Fear is a most variable topic, but its effects on social relations and political dynamics have a certain predictability. The Culture of Fear and the Plague Science lives in—if not by predictability, pace Karl Popper—at least regularity. Scientists are always scrounging for regularities. Occasionally they find them. More commonly they invent them. So, abandoning the barren plains of individual emotions, it is within societies and their cultures that scientists should seek reward for their researches into fear. The scientific study of society and culture holds a distinct advantage over that of psychology: Society and culture are directly observable and require no sensitive instrumentation. The problem for socio-cultural scientists lies in the meaning of observations. For example, if one wants to know the boiling point of water, it requires instrumentation—a thermometer. Most social facts are available to human senses without instruments outside of their own senses. In bygone days some anthropologists set out to study societies remote from their own and with simpler social structures, typically based on emically reckoned kinship. ‘Emic’ here mans how the people under study reckoned kinship. Some noticed that from time to time the village turned out to witness and applaud the murder of some of their own preadolescent boys. The anthropologists wondered whether they had discovered a psychopathic culture that reveled in murder. Upon reflection, however, they realized the boys had not actually been killed. They had been ritually murdered. It was a rite of passage in which their childhood selves were killed and their adult selves born. Those early anthropologists had to observe with a wider lens and ask the right questions, as the people they were studying assumed that the meaning of the killings was obvious. Which meant, among other things, that the anthropologists could not gain much knowledge simply by asking the people why they killed the boys. The people probably would have thought they were crazy and given them a patronizing stare. With that in mind, let us examine the great plague fear of 2020 in much of the world. It is late 2019. Chinese health agencies report to the world an outbreak of a new strain of influenza with a notably high death rate, which is not unusual for a new flu. Chinese authorities clamped down. The quarantined the city of the outbreak, Wuhan, with restrictions on the province, Hubei, in central China. Without border precautions, within a few weeks, the flu had spread to the West, where indolent governments led by the United States assiduously ignored the peril—i.e., did not close borders, did not protect confined, vulnerable populations in nursing homes and prisons. (WHO Timeline - COVID-19). Here is what they did instead. Instead of following long established measures to curtail infectious epidemics, they did not close, restrict, or even monitor international borders. They did not surveille centers of disease outbreaks, because they had stripped their public health apparatuses of funding for basic measures such as monitoring disease outbreaks. They did not protect vulnerable populations or the confined populations in nursing homes, extended care facilities, and prisons. They did not augment acute care facilities such as hospitals for critically ill patients. They did promote a public relations campaign led by the World Health Organization, headed by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus with long term ties to major, global pharmaceutical companies and by the US Centers for Disease Control, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci with long term and close affiliations with pharmaceutical manufacturers. There were a few other leading lights, but these two were the vanguard operators. Instead of pursuing traditional responses to infectious epidemics, both organizations advocated for the unprecedented strategy of “lockdown,” which quarantined whole national populations which were not sick. The two organizations vacillated about recommending masks for general use. They strongly promoted an as yet undeveloped inoculation for the new flu. Big pharmaceutical companies garnered grants from national governments led by the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and other Western governments. In the absence of any conceivable measure of whether and how much most people in the world feared getting sick and dying from the new flu, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear could discern the public relations campaign created a culture of fear. Health officials in the West did not give repeated, public recommendations for staying healthy, other than hand washing and mask wearing. An aside on mask wearing is that no controlled study demonstrated effectiveness in preventing virus transmission by any kind of mask, and yet many jurisdictions required their populations to wear masks, and most people followed orders. To stress again, there is no telling whether people were afraid of the new flu, but most did follow orders. Therefore, a relevant and serious question is whether obedience is an accurate measure of fear. Shifting to another science might provide some insight about detecting fear. The science is physics. Until well into the twentieth century, physicists questioned the existence of electrons, because they could not be observed directly. Nonetheless, their existence could be inferred from their theoretically described effects. A similar strategy is applicable to the culture of fear. Instead of trying to observe fear, the scientifically minded analyst can observe the effects of a culture of fear. The effects are palpable to the point of intrusive. In the West, especially the United States, Britain, France, Australia, and Germany to name the most notable, informal social pressure and shaming enforce lockdowns and masks. Civil penalties are levied against individuals who violate the rules. Militarized police attack and arrest those who protest. The foregoing suggests that the fear might be more about social pressures and sanctions than about a disease. Other effects of the official response to the epidemic are both more illuminating and suggest the reasons behind the policies promoted by global medical organizations and enforced by national state apparatuses. The main effects of the lockdowns are massive unemployment with concomitant burgeoning of the reserve army of labor which attacks syndicalist endeavors and lowers wages overall. Small businesses have been driven into bankruptcy while big businesses take over their share of the market. Big Tech in the person of such giants as Amazon, Google, Facebook, military industries, and select producers of pharmaceuticals and agricultural products have thrived. So, therefore, the effects are lowered wages, competitive advantage, and increased concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands. I suggest these effects were the real purpose of the construction of a global flu epidemic. Those purposes have so far succeeded. The Political Economy of Fear In an especially concise and cogent analysis, William I. Robinson (2020) summarized the problem: “The turn toward a global police state is structurally rooted in perhaps the fundamental contradiction of capitalism: overaccumulation” (23). Along with over accumulation go concentration, inequality, and unbalanced organic composition of capital. All are interdependent and inescapable characteristics of the capitalist system. In the early twenty-first century all are manifest and world-wide. There is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide from their effects on people’s material lives. An important consequence is that people in different classes are affected differently and have different fears. The three to four billion people in the lowest economic rung fear for their lives and rightly so. Theirs is a realistic and imminent fear. Fear by the upper class is also realistic and imminent, but for different reasons and of different things. Nonetheless, they too should fear for their lives if history is to be believed. The days of Madam la Guillotine may sadly be past, but a rising of the people of the world should make the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates tremble. Just like those who wear snake boots and avoid playing golf in electrical storms, the global ruling class has much to fear from the rest of humanity. The following is my humble attempt to summarize the underlying, long term contradiction of what its master analyst, Karl Marx, called the ‘bourgeois mode of production, or what most people today call simply ‘capitalism.’ The core of capitalism is the wage system. It generates profits as owners of capital employ workers who produce more value than they are paid. The owner pockets the difference. Some is reinvested in more production. Competition raises its ugly head, as other capitalists produce the same commodities. Those who can sell at a lower price garner more sales, hence greater profits. To best competition, the capitalists lower costs by, among other things, paying less in wages in two ways: paying workers less and less and by replacing workers with machines. Therein lies the rub. To lower costs, capitalists buy machines. The problem is machines, which are already consummated profits, do not produce value. Only human work produces value so fewer workers means less value, less profit, and therefore a long term decline in the rate of profit—i. e., return on investment. Several authors explain this economic law in greater detail (Kliman 2015, Roberts 2014). The cycle of capital leads to greater investment in machines concomitant with less variable cost, and therefore lower wages for the working class. It also leads to a growing number of unemployed workers. As workers compete with one another on the labor market, more workers means lower wages. As some capitalists drive others out of competition, they gain greater shares of the commodity market. Despite overall lowered profits, increasingly fewer capitalists gain greater shares of the totality of profits, which in turn leads to greater capital accumulation and concentration of capital in a shrinking number of hands. This is what Robinson calls ‘overaccumulation.’ Another consequence of lowered profits in commodity production is that owners of capital seek profits elsewhere. Profits they must have, because without them not only do their fortunes fall, but the system itself comes to a grinding halt with massive disruption in the social system of relations. Owners put their money into rent and into speculation. Rental investments, however, raise costs, both the costs of living and therefore the cost of reproducing the working class, but also the costs of producing commodities. In the modern world the most notable kind of rent investment is intellectual property, which has the direct effect of raising costs of production. Some capitalists gain from real estate investment, but others lose, and regardless more money goes into machines in an effort to gain competitive advantage. Real estate investment therefore adds to a vicious cycle of competition, greater investment in machines, and lower rates of profit. Speculation has other unfortunate consequences. It makes bubbles. The relatively recent bubble of investment in mortgage based derivatives led to the bubble bursting in 2007-08. Global banks faced failure. Governments bailed them out, and passed the burden onto citizens. It came to be called ‘austerity.’ Political unrest ensued, raising the threat level against the global ruling class. In the past, overaccumulation has been corrected by mass destruction of capital. The last time these conditions prevailed, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War provided the means of destruction. In the twenty-first century, the accumulation is many times greater and capital is concentrated among even fewer capitalists. The inevitable result will have to be much more devastating than the previous twin catastrophes. Indeed, the need for more destruction by orders of magnitude threatens not only the global political economy, but civilization itself. Fear and Society Humans and their hominid progenitors socialize at cocktail parties and caves, on savannahs and at soccer matches, and wherever such beasts as we can congregate. We are social primates. Charles Darwin linked certain communication systems to our sociality, especially facial expressions (Darwin 2007/1872). Modern studies have confirmed Darwin’s insights (Sylvers et al. 2011). Clifford Geertz (1965) observed that there is no such thing as an unsocialized, unenculturated human being, although there are anti-social human beings typically found among business, military, and political leaders. Hanging out is, among other things, definitive for humanity. The great COVID panic of 2020—prematurely pronounced a ‘pandemic’ by the World Health Organization when there were fewer than 12 thousand planetary deaths out of 7.7 billion people—occasioned a peculiar panoply of responses by most governments (mainly Western or Western dependents) around the world. One was so-called lockdowns, as if health authorities were prison wardens. By November 2020 no evidence has been discovered showing lockdowns have any effect on COVID contagion (Chaudhry et al. 2020). Another was mask wearing, a practice with zero scientifically confirmed effectiveness Rancourt 2020). Promises of vaccines that would save the day, produced and directed by the major pharmaceutical industries were not unlike wars produced and directed by major arms manufacturers. They held out the promised land so long as people learned to obey the new rules for the new normal. Chief among these were avoidance or social distancing, such as closing venues where people could socialize, engage in political agitation, and generally affirm their common humanity. Mask wearing came to be a multifaceted signal of obedience, conformity, and an affirmation of the magical curative properties of the displays of a fetish. The world heard from health authorities and governments that we were faced with a zombie apocalypse as portrayed in fiction and film based on Max Brooks 2006 novel World War Z in which a pandemic kills and turns people into zombies who reflexively infect other people with the disease. It was transformed into a hit television series The Walking Dead. Not insignificantly, Brooks had previously authored military adventure novels for the not yet adult readers. A better fear inducing narrative could not be imagined (Baker, forthcoming). Art and entertainment are one thing, but Cassandra-like warnings are another. A problem with art, with which authorities have struggled since time immemorial, is that they can capture the unconscious knowledge of the people before it gets edited into public discourses. Indeed, a central problem with postmodernist critiques, much beloved by Anglophone academics since the 1980s, was their commitment to stay on the surface and concentrate on discourses. Their anti-Marxist, anti-radical, and anti-revolutionary homilies were meant to obscure and even deny underlying causation. But still, they did it with style, or as Peter Temple (2000) put it, “Universities never do catch the joke until it’s too late. Many a French fraud had died laughing while earnest Australian [and American and British] academics were still doing PhDs on his theoretical jokes” (175). The panic attack of 2020--also denominated the pandemic of 2020, ostensibly prompted by the COVID of 2019—recreated a post apocalyptic world of the revelers at the “Masque of the Red Death” (1842) a short story by the long lamented Edgar Allen Poe, which captured the spirit of ruling class fears when faced with a popular threat. After all, what could be more popular than a plague? Of course, as is their wont, the ruling class off loaded their fears to the working class. Let hoi poloi carry the burden. We have finer sentiments and important things to do. Ah, Pan . . . he becomes so useful in times of crisis. The ‘pan’ prefix pertains to Pan, a Greek god of woods and fields, who was the source of mysterious sounds that caused contagious, groundless fear in herds and crowds, or in people in lonely spots. So pandemic it was. It was an induced fear. It added to the culture of fear that had been building since the Tylenol panic of 1982. The goal was to divide people. Make them afraid of each other. Deconstruct (one of those postmodern neologogisms) the obvious, because if you deconstruct what everyone can see with their own eyes, you can make them afraid of the silliest inventions, even the colds and flu everyone gets in the colder climes. To summarize, Chinese health authorities announced to the world health authorities that they had tentatively identified a new strain of flu-causing coronavirus. Western health authorities led by WHO and the US CDC declared a health emergency, calling it a pandemic and naming the new disease COVID-19. The flu itself is much like any new strain of flue appearing every 10 years or so. Such new virus infections race through world populations, killing the most vulnerable. Yet, governments did nothing to protect those populations, many of whom are confined to nursing homes and other long term care facilities. A of late 2020, they still haven’t. Western governments, led by the Anglophone Five Eyes, or leaders of the military supported global empire of capital, coerced governments in the West and Western dependencies to enforce police state measures. Global media which relies on the main wire services such as Agence France Press, Associated Press, Reuters, et al. jumped on the propaganda bandwagon to support the new normal of shut downs, severely restricted travel, commercial closures, and mass layoffs of workers. As of the end of 2020, these measures were still in place. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum, a think tank for the world capitalist class, published a plan for what has come to be called, ‘The Great Reset’ (WEF 2020). The Great Reset calls for a global reconfiguration of employment. It envisions expanded virtual work using cybernetic manipulation underpinned by a shrinking work force. Commodities will be produced in Third World dependencies, where real products are generated through minimally compensated workers. What is the goal of this plan? It is to correct for the falling rate of profits in producing commodities. It is, in effect, the global ruling class’ effort to avoid the demise of the system of global capital, which they lead and on which they depend for their status as lords of the global empire. The plague of COVID serves the ends of the ruling class in its attempts to escape its own demise. Class Fear As with so much else, fear varies according to class. Working class fears are largely economic, lower working class fears also include imprisonment. Owning class fears are political. The owning class fears revolt against them by everyone else. Globally, the owning class, consisting of a few thousand people affiliated with some hundreds of families, faces the potential wrath of the other 7.7 billion people on earth. The numbers alone should strike terror in their hearts. Based on the extreme measures they take to protect themselves, they must be very fearful indeed. The working class fears destitution. Most of its members are but a few paychecks away, and those who are not employed—a growing number in the time of COVID—must rely on the fickle largesse of government controlled safety nets. Their lot is especially risky as the owning class controls governments. Of course the owning class also controls paychecks. For the working class the wolf is always at the door. The foregoing simple facts seldom make it into daily discourse. They are banned from global media outlets. People grow up schooled with the myth of fairness and equality, but eventually discover there is neither. Aside from the childhood fairytales so much a part of what has risibly been called education, the mythology surrounds public consciousness from so-called news outlets, movies, and other forms of entertainments. The content is pumped out by highly paid hucksters. It is delivered electronically through all communication devices. The messages carry a duality. At one level they proffer security for obedience, but the other level carries the hidden threat of abandonment. Then of course, lurking just out of sight is chance. Chance is a fallback excuse used by owning class apparatuses when they miscalculate the market. In today’s world under the global system of capital all fears, like all social relations, derive from the relations of production. Abstract existential fears, fear of death for example, become conscious, articulable in symbolic form according to prevailing culture, only because of the structures of society, which are based on the relations of production. Anything else is the meaning people give to reflexive physio-chemical reactions. It is ideology composed of the prevailing ideology of a society, or as Marx and Engels put it in 1845, "The ideas of the ruling class are, in any age, the ruling ideas." Consequently, modern society floats on a sea of perpetual fear, as the relations of production are in constant flux. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. . . . The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx and Engels 1848) . Western societies, led by the United States, have given the basic social fear an acute edge for certain members of the working class. In that country, the lumpen proletrariat defined partly in racial terms, fear not only destitution but also incarceration and murder from their most direct experience of the state’s repressive apparatus, the police and the oxymoronically named ‘criminal justice system.’ Ghetto dwellers in twenty-first century America are “on the run” as they try to maintain livelihoods and their most intimate social bonds (Goffman 2014). They live in fear of prison or the modern day version of lynching—killed by police. The class based fear, which defines the lives of impoverished, lower class non-Whites in the United States follows the regularity described by Dario Melossi (1993 and 2008). On the run and in fear of their lives is the base condition and way of life for millions of lower working class and non-White people in the United States. Moreover, the most satisfyingly effective part of their fear is that the better off working class, especially the White working class, have been persuaded to fear their less advantaged brothers and sisters. What a godsend for the owning class! It helps allay their fears of revolt and paves the way for hyper exploitation. Class based fear takes odd forms. Nancy Scheper-Hughes described two versions. In northeast Brazil subsistence agriculture and local markets were displaced by the cash crop of sugar. International capital flowed into sugar production and sugar cane agriculture, which quickly depletes soil. Peasants were driven off their land and congregated in massive slums, which re-created poverty of medieval proportions. Infant mortality skyrocketed, running at about 25 percent or even more (Scheper-Hughes 1993). A concentration camp kind of stoicism prevailed in which fear of death became about as relevant as it was for the denizens of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. A different version of existential fear is about sales of body parts. There is a lively global trade in body parts for the organ transplant market. Scheper-Hughes (2000) describes a growing market for human organs as the wealthy fail and then they seek new life from the poor of the earth. She also notes rumors that people are being killed for their organs, but largely dismisses their veracity, because, as he notes, there is no shortage of sellers out of desperation. There is no need for murder or coercion, as so many people, hundreds of millions at least, have no other recourse as global capital has destroyed their former livelihoods. Murder for organs is a false fear. It is a distraction from the reality of the realistic fear of the global political economy. Murder for organs partners with poisoned Tylenol and razors in Halloween candy. They are exemplary propaganda pieces. Popular fears reflect successful magic acts. They are misdirections, slights of hand, legerdemain. For example, in a study of what people in the United States fear the most, their number one fear was of corrupt government officials. The study was a self report survey analyzed in Fear Itself: The Causes and Consequences of Fear in America (Bader et al. 2020). One has to wonder how people would fear corrupt politicians in the absence of demonstrable deployment of police and military against them. After all, the United States still has the death penalty for a variety of crimes, but apparently that is not what people fear. They do not fear threats to their lives, but they do fear corruption. It is as if they fear that Rod Blagojevich hid in their closets and threatened to jump out to sell them a US Senate seat, the crime for which he was convicted, sent to prison, and whose sentence was commuted to time served by US President Donald J Trump. The point of this example is that it is not less absurd than the popular fears currently promoted by the global ideological apparatuses which serve global capital and its ruling class. So, they do not fear what Louis Althusser (1995) called repressive state apparatuses. They fear the fairy tales concocted by Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses. Back to the Future It is as if 55 years had not passed since Bob Dylan told us it was something we did, they keep it all hid, and not to follow leaders, but watch our parking meters. The Joneses still don’t know what is happening. Back in 1965 people would have scoffed at wearing surgical masks in public, revolted if major sports were cancelled, stormed government buildings when unemployment reached the level of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Can the world be so different, and if it is, what has changed? For one thing, in 1965 people did not get their news of the world filtered through what is deceptively called ‘social media.’ They may not have known what was happening, but they knew the difference between fairy tales and everyday slanted journalism. Maybe they did not know the story of the John F Kennedy assassination was the whole story, but they were willing to go along with the general outlines, even if it did not make complete sense. Millions saw Jake Rubenstein (Jack Ruby) walk through a gang of Dallas police, pull out a pistol and shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. It seemed suspicious, but what could a person do? The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution did not call for hundreds of thousands of volunteers as had Pearl Harbor. The government had to draft them. People had wised up to a degree. What changed was the sophistication and reach of the ideological state apparatuses. It was no longer just television, radio, and several local newspapers. By 2020, cities had only one newspaper, big cities had two or three, but they were all owned and their content controlled by a handful of corporations with close links to the Pentagon, military industries, big pharmaceutical and agricultural combines. The same is true for all the rest of the media. In 1965 police were not semi detachments of the US Army, FBI, and national security agencies. In 1965 public schools were controlled by local school boards, not the US Department of Education. In sum, while the amount of available information has increased by orders of magnitude so has central control of what people actually consume. As a result, new fears serving ruling class interests are curated and propagated by apparatuses so vast that they see almost incomprehensible in their ability to shape public consciousness at will. Today’s fears are not out own. They are sold to us, or really rented to us. Their owners can end our leases at any time, and move us to new houses of horror. 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