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Fear Of Everything
Why we’re in the mess we’re in and why we probably won’t get out of it
Sometimes I look at pictures of the cave paintings at Lascaux and I wonder if their real purpose was to terrify the audience. I can imagine a proto-journalist caveperson pointing to a big bison or heavily-antlered buck on the cave wall, seeming to move in the flickering light of an oil lamp, and shouting, “It’s going to kill us all unless we kill it first! And, did you know, magic herbs shoved up our noses can protect us against these threats? Here, I just happen to have some magic herbs you can buy…”
The fact is, we humans have always been astonishingly stupid and gullible. Not surprisingly, there have always been a few fractionally more cunning humans out there to take advantage of us.
The human brain didn’t evolve to perform thinking tasks; indeed, quite the opposite. As thinking can burn up to 30% of available blood glucose and as that very glucose was usually required for running away from danger or seeking food, we evolved explicitly to avoid thinking as much as possible.
Today, we’ve accomplished our evolutionary goal: we rarely think at all.
Instead, we have the media to tell us what to believe and repeat. And because the media knows fear sells better than anything else, we have a…
