The Papers, The News and the Existential Need for Threats

Have you ever tried to get a friend to stop reading the news for a week. Or totally stop using any form of media for more than a few hours?

You will find it impossible. And not because your friend, even if he wanted to try it, would make the attempt. Your friend is not capable of stopping. It's not something your friend is able to do.

People have lived for a hundred thousand years in societies, where there has been daily threat to life, through disease, being eaten by other animals or socially created threats. This latter one we will discuss later being the most important in the context of this theory, through the supplemental theory of 'visionary rumours'. And of course there's the ultimate threat to life, old age.

Annoyingly this is not a problem logic and reason can attend to. So greater efforts to convince people of this theory showing why people won't stop will do nothing. This is a metaphysical, spiritual, psychological or whatever, thing. It is unconscious activity. And when held universally by the great masse of people, the most powerful force driving society.

Why is what we read and hear about many times daily important here. And why is it not possible to get your friend to stop ingesting any news for more than a few hours?

Think about this: until maybe less than a century ago, there were indeed daily threats to everyone, both rich and poor had to deal with. Nature cares nothing for class. This activity had become normalised over the aeons, such that humanity has forgotten this 'readiness' for the threats had developed into a survival tool, kind of built into our DNA or some other substructure giving us life.

But since perhaps the second world war, technology has advanced so quickly across the board, and productivity has grown to such terrific heights, that nearly all the threats we used to face daily, no longer present themselves. 

This is all relative - not all threats have been removed. But relatively so many have, that this DNA based survival tool, helping us remain ready for threats, a fear program if you like, is no longer required technically. And sure, by stupidity we might lose these advances and regress to a life once again faced with authentic daily threat. This outcome being the final one humanity must overwhelm if it wants to survive longer than any other species so far in the universe. And yes, there are still places in the world not much more advanced than the west was several hundred years ago. But even these are fast on the up, if they choose to be. Everything, for everybody, in the world is improving immensely in the economic and health sense. 

But we are where we are: no longer do we have to face existential threat. So why all the fabricated threats which society creates out of nothing?

So what's the issue? Well, we still 'need' to feel the extistential threats in our bones because like a zombie and orphaned CPU thread, the program still runs, unaware things have changed. Being unconscious activity the program is not governed by material life. We still need that fear program to be running just in case. And given this program prepares us for survival, it is process zero in the operating system. That's to say, all other social processes are descendants of it, so inferior.

The news today, and the disinformation we all feed on so greedily is the very thing creating artificial threats to life. The creation of imaginary existential events which keep the zombie program on thread zero, running.

Classic expositions are climate change doctrine, silly wars in a world where there are no enemies, pandemics, poverty when there's no shortage of wealth, famine when there's no shortage of food, great recession ls when the productivity is growing at a blistering pace etc... This is not to say these things are not real, they are very real. It is to say that when they happen the world reinforced them fully without question. And when everything is fine, the social world will tip things over the edge into a manufactured form of threat by not stopping them when there's every opportunity to do so.

Conspiracy theories are a special case. These are fabricated by a resistant subset of society not willing to accept the world's problems are largely contributed to by them too, and conveniently project blame onto a cabal of wealth and power to escape from their own complicity mentally. Nonetheless conspiracy theories, though nonsense materially are a red alarm pointing indirectly at the visionary rumours discussed by this theory I propose here - something very very wrong is happening and no one seems to be able to put a finger on it. Conspiracy theories are shouting loudly about this.

Not everything we feed on is disinformation. Just enough is needed to create the visionary rumours necessary to satisfy the fear program and keep it running. And do not make the mistake of blaming the state, the universities or the news media for serving up the food. We are all eating it up like pigs with snouts buried deep. It is Us. Not Them. 

Even if these threats are imaginary, visionary rumours, they nevertheless satisfy the need of the program. A primordial need, an instinct. And the fear program is bug free and has no problem fending off attackers. It needs no updates nor patches. If we need it badly enough it will be created out of nothing, notwithstanding the consequences of carnage it might eventually cause materially.

The program software is normally distributed using annoying periodic software updates. Security updates mind. This is about fear. Your safety is under threat. So do not disable automatic updates.

And given this need for a fear program, is the biggest social need, it's not really possible to expect your friend to stop recieving it for more than a few hours.

Of course, I'm well aware, this theory will draw more resistance than any other, and will be dismissed immediately out of hand. Because there is no evil rich and powerful class to project the blame onto. You and I are root cause. There is not a person in the world who will consider this. One did pass on by, who did recognise it about 2000 years ago, so we're told. And he was nailed to a tree for it.