Introduction
The last two years provide us with a stark example of manufactured fear and division within COVID-19 responses and politics. Across America, people on both sides wonder how we came to the point where we are unable to agree on anything regardless of how non-controversial an issue seems. Unfortunately, few question the nature of the hysteria on both sides or where it started.
We are so focused on fighting or fearing each other that we never stop to ask why we’re told to fear and fight. We don’t ask if the argument for that fear is rational or supported by reality. Nor do we ask if the solution presented by government to address that concern is the best one.
The Fear Responses
To begin with, some level of concern about COVID is rational and expected if based in the individual’s risk factors. However, the level of fear on both sides over the situation is hardly rational or driven by reality. Here in America, we have two fear responses: liberal and conservative.
On the liberal side of the aisle, there is broad support for forced vaccination that government and media figures generate by warping the data they present. By ignoring deaths to showcase a rising case load, they convince the liberal crowd that the disease is so serious it necessitates immediate action on their part and the government’s for humanity’s survival.
Looking only at what the CDC, the president, and media outlets’ talking heads like CNN’s Don Lemon have told them about COVID, liberals conclude the disease poses severe risk to everyone across the board. Never once do they stop to listen to the plethora of doctors and scientists these groups refuse to platform or hear out before they make a judgment call on the nature of the pandemic. Instead, they take what they have heard without questioning and move straight to crippling fear and compliance to avoid the presumed danger.
The next step in such a mental process is always to fear anyone who refuses to comply. This is only rational if you believe the only way we can all survive is to comply. Anyone who doesn’t comply then becomes a danger. As this fear and the idea that compliance is the “moral” or “decent” thing to do are regularly reinforced, a misplaced moral superiority begins to develop. This is demonstrated by the “Karen” who invades someone else’s personal space publicly to yell at them for non-compliance.
On the conservative side, there is a lack of fear toward the disease itself—often to a degree equally unwarranted by evidence. Instead, many are terrified that the push for vaccination is a government conspiracy to kill conservatives or a method to separate them from those who will comply for future retaliation. The more reserved individuals fear that the government will use this to grasp power they will never relinquish again, thereby costing them their individual liberties. While this is a rational concern, where they take the concern is often irrational and ends in conspiracy theories.
These fears lead them to jump to conclusions about motivations with little to no evidence. Those seeking for power encourage—and seemingly instigate—this by refusing to release information that would leave reason free to combat the falsehoods on both sides. This serves to further convince conservatives that conspiracy theories are warranted.
Further, the religious side of conservatism adds an additional layer of contradictions and irrationalities in the form of concerns about the use of aborted fetal tissue. This adds the fear of immorality to their communities, turning a legitimate medical decision into a moral evil.
When you combine fear of government collusion with big pharma to control population, a general paranoia that the government wants them gone, and religiously guided debates on the ethics of using a medication developed with aborted fetal tissue, you end up with the conservatives’ intransigent refusal to admit that there is any case in which vaccination might be warranted.
In the end, it is a moral choice. “Complying” by vaccinating makes you misguided or even evil. It is no longer a medical choice weighed carefully and made to protect you as an individual. It is a sin against morality, perhaps even against God.
Fear—The Totalitarian Toolkit
Before examining America’s modern version of fear tactics to rob a people of their individual rights, let’s position those tactics squarely in the long history they possess. Germany and Russia are two excellent modern examples of totalitarian regimes’ use of fear to gain power. Despite differences in tactics, both used fear to encourage people to ignore the loss of their freedoms, give them up freely, or else capitulate when force was applied.
Germany began instilling fear based on a legitimate economic crisis and a fabricated threat. First, Hitler pointed to the legitimate economic crisis that Germany was experiencing after WW1. Then he pointed to a fabricated threat—those who had made decisions that made them wealthy while others suffered. In this case, that class of people was the Jews.
When he began stripping them of their rights and branding them as second-class citizens, he had already stirred up such resentment against them that the majority of the German people supported the abuse. To tip the hesitant ones over the edge, he then set fire to his own capital and blamed political rivals—the Dutch communists.
With that, he had generated all the fear he needed. The German people were too busy fighting each other or invisible threats to recognize the true threat—Hitler’s steady removal of their rights until they descended into a police state.
In Russia, the fears and concerns of the people were well-founded in the abuses occurring under the Tzar. When Lenin came in, he touted himself as the savior they had prayed for. Once he seized power, it became apparent that was not the case. To keep the people compliant, he, and Stalin after him, employed force and created fear of other citizens.
Their method was much different from Hitler’s. They encouraged neighbors to report each other’s “misdeeds” from the beginning, creating a justifiable paranoia within every individual. Anyone could be a Russian spy or the secret police, and you couldn’t trust that your neighbor wouldn’t report you for a meager amount of bread, money, or social favor. People were too busy eyeing their neighbors to focus on the ongoing destruction of their rights.
Modern day American government relies mainly on Hitler’s tactics. They brand one group the enemy and convince another that group is a mortal danger through inflammatory rhetoric and constant reversal of “facts”. In some states with more extreme policies, they have encouraged tattling on anyone breaking COVID rules. By using lies, refusing to release information, and playing the blame game, the government instills fear in one side and suspicion in the other. As a result, those trying to get the truth find it increasingly difficult due to the political grandstanding.
In the process, neither side objects to the persistent destruction of individual freedoms until it is too late. One gives it up for illusory safety and blind faith in government. The other argues about peripheral issues, ignoring that their earlier surrender of other rights and failing to see that they are now reaping the consequences. Neither side will unite with the other due to false senses of superiority.
For totalitarians, regardless of the method utilized to destroy reason and set citizens at one another’s throats, this is the perfect outcome of irrational fear. Once citizens cease to be informed, rational members of society, they no longer constrain government. They become government’s property instead of being owners of it. This spells the death of individual rights, freedom, and reason on both sides.
The Rational, Fear-Free Response
If we want to come through this crisis with freedom intact, we must start with a response predicated on reason. It is not enough to shun the bad responses outlined above; we must replace them with the good and the ideal. If we want a world we’ve been longing for when this is all over, we must fight before it is too late. To do this, we must combat fear by finding the truth and seeking to address prevailing either-or fallacies by presenting rational alternatives and evidence.
However, in our fight to preserve freedom, the correct, moral principle that should guide us is that government’s purpose is to protect individual rights. Their agendas do not trump individual rights to pursue life, liberty, property, and happiness if the individual does not violate anyone else’s right to the same. Any exercise of government authority against this principle is outside the purview of government’s purpose. This response to COVID removes the hysteria and improper moral superiority, freeing everyone to make rational choices regarding their own health.
It also allows us to avoid the false dichotomy that supporting medicine and science demand support of totalitarian edicts for those who refuse to act as we think best. Reason will allow us to establish what course of action is best for us while leaving others free to do the same and to choose differently. We can come together with reason because it shows us that science and respect of individual rights can shake hands when we destroy government-generated hysteria. Through reason and respect for others, both sides stop fighting and turn to destroying the thief in their midst to regain rights for everyone and freedom to live in peace.
Interested in reading more about totalitarianism or in learning more about the historical examples in this article? Consider starting your list with one of the listed resources below.
The Herald of Totalitarianism by Atlas Rose
The Cause of Hitler’s Germany by Leonard Peikoff
The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff
The Rise of Hitler’s Germany Explained by The New Ideal
The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro
