Fear might be warranted. When that occurs, you pull out all the stops on the mighty pipe organ and wail. There is no opportunity to do otherwise. During LSD experiments in the 1950’s, mental patients were guided through therapy. Some of them had to confront their intense fear of breathing! “What if that stops?”
Behavior under those circumstances is unpredictable and inherently unbounded by moral guidelines. The drive to survive is built into the fabric of our personality, one and all. If you wish to be moral and consistent according to your own personal standards you need to stay out of trouble. You can’t think clearly during a thunderstorm.
This presents a lovely opportunity for predators, high on the hunt while pursuing the thrill of the kill. They noticed that if you roar, you can scare your prey. This is low-hanging fruit for crowd manipulation and is easily picked, hurled and left on the ground to rot. Therefore, it’s probable that most of the news you receive from standard sources is self-serving and meant to accomplish some other agenda than to inform the public. Finding an unbiased source for current events and knowledge is therefore intrinsically difficult and rarely successful. In a general way, if the so-called headlines are shocking and fearsome then they’re probably wrong.
Some who have survived decades of news media and government propaganda learned this lesson the hard way, by being bludgeoned with contradictions over a long period of time when nothing they ever warned you about actually came to pass. If you had acted on the Y2K scare by building a concrete bunker, you looked pretty silly sitting in there the day after. The film “Blast from the Past” poked fun at a similar scenario.
Let’s get our personal well-being and balance radar up and running. VotePlusPlus suggests that the best source of news is hearing from as many of your peers in a diverse neighborhood as will talk to you. Let’s pay attention to our local situation and use that to put our national and world-wide conditions into perspective. Then, let’s support a system of plurality where representation and the accuracy of collective reporting and analysis can be vastly improved.