Fear Itself: The Perils of High Anxiety

Do you feel unsafe? Are you and your family at risk? Almost anyone who watches television, reads a newspaper or consumes social media has repeatedly heard that teaser or asked themselves the question. At one time the answer might mostly have been no. Not anymore. 

Now such questions have the power to provoke widespread panic response and a rush toward the latest “miracle” cure or charismatic demagogue.

In 2016, Donald Trump revealed his basic strategy to journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. “Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear,”  he explained. It was, for example, at the core of his advice to a friend who had acknowledged bad behavior toward women. Never show weakness, he advised. You always have to look strong. Fear is the key to real power.

For more than twenty years, I’ve been fascinated by what Marc Siegel has called “free-floating communicated fear.” When Siegel, an internist and frequent TV talking head, first labeled the phenomenon, he was worried mainly about the tendency of his patients to personalize risks that were often remote. In his book, False Alarm: The Truth about the Epidemic of Fear,” he made the point that we often worry about the wrong things and fear itself could pose a greater risk. 

Franklin Roosevelt apparently thought so when he said, during his first inaugural address, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That may have been an overstatement, although the popular interpretation is that it’s best to face problems than become captive to doubt and fear. In any case, it is fair to say misinformation that provokes unreasonable fears is too often a tactic of political opportunists, unscrupulous businesses and irresponsible media. Today we are seeing the drastic, long-term impacts.

Part of the problem lies in our brains, specifically the amygdala — the central station for processing emotions like fear, hate, love, and bravery. Once it detects a threatening situation, it pours out stress hormones. But if the stress persists for too long, it can malfunction, overwhelm the hippocampus (the center of our "thinking" brain), and be difficult to turn off.

Most animals tend to react only to real, direct threats. In humans, however, chronic fear can be triggered by words and symbols — the perception of danger that may stem from hype, fragmented information, uncertainty, or misunderstanding. Repetition is a high-powered weapon that can turn this into a mass movement.

Siegel’s book attacked the situation in three parts. First, he looked at how our "fear biology" can wear us down rather than protect us, inducing paralysis and even making us susceptible to diseases — including psychosis — that we might otherwise resist. He linked the reaction to the "war on terror," charging the government, media, and drug companies with encouraging people to be unreasonably afraid.

At the time, the media’s obsession with the bug du jour — that moment’s big scare — was already leading to misinformation and diverting attention from real dangers. Malaria and AIDS were killing millions every year, but receiving relatively little publicity. Instead, public health resources were focused on the latest potential threat. The public was urged to obsess over bacterial and viral warfare, while there was no training for radiation poisoning, the Coast Guard was understaffed, and seaport security was neglected.

As a strategy for making money, fear-inducing propaganda can be traced back to the early 1980s, when pharmaceutical companies began advertising heavily to convince us that their drugs were essential to good health. At this point, it’s a constant assault.

Siegel told the story of Ira Lassiter, a popular journalist whose arthritis made him eager for the latest cure. "The pendulum swung from panacea to panic, and drugs that were misperceived as lifesavers instantly became villains," Siegel wrote. Lassiter became a self-proclaimed arthritis drug addict. What finally gave him relief was aspirin, which he initially took to deal with a cold. He discovered that it also worked for his sore hips.

Siegel called aspirin an "antifear drug," mainly because it is highly useful without being misperceived as a panacea. The Greeks found it in the bark of the willow tree. Centuries later, a chemist isolated sodium salicylate and, in 1897, Bayer employee Felix Hoffman found that acetylsalicylic acid could be effective in reducing pain.

But even aspirin couldn’t counteract the universal fear epidemic that arguably began with the anthrax scare that followed the 9/11 attacks. Government and media repeatedly colluded to convince people to fear something "that didn’t truly threaten us,” wrote Siegel. “Then, once we were worried, we saw that our federal agencies weren’t functioning effectively, which worried us further." It was one step in a gradual decline of trust in both government and science.

During the West Nile virus scare, the possibility was raised that the US blood supply wasn’t safe. But "blood supply" was a misnomer,  suggesting that a bug could move from one donor into all our transfused blood. The truth was "one donor, one recipient,” and no large-scale pooling of transfused blood. 

In 2003, when the focus turned to chemical weapons and a possible Iraqi nuclear attack (a hype in itself), scam companies pushed potassium iodide pills, claiming that they would prevent thyroid cancer. But a thyroid filled with potassium iodide won’t protect the heart, lungs, and bone marrow, so such pills were like "going out into a snowstorm wearing only a scarf."

What followed was misinformation associated with public health alerts about anthrax, smallpox, SARS, influenza, Mad Cow disease, avian flu, and eventually Covid. In some cases, the government was a greater danger than the supposed threat, mishandling evidence and building high-security labs that provided an opportunity for bad actors to gain access to human pathogens. One study found that most germ attacks were conducted by former or current researchers. 

In early 2004, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal took the lead in warning of a possible avian flu epidemic. As a precaution, more than 100 million animals are slaughtered. Later in the year, a shortage of flu vaccine sparked a national panic. The first victim was an elderly woman who fell while waiting in line for her shot.

Today fear is a highly contagious virus, and the most effective superspreader since 2015 has been Donald Trump. He began by blaming immigrants for most of the nation’s problems and claimed that a “big beautiful wall” would protect us. His basic technique was crude but effective labeling, adding more false threats as the campaign proceeded. It became a major weapon in his “culture war,” along with attacks on anyone who challenged his delusions and lies.  

Fear is also central to his negotiating approach. “The only way to get a good deal is to blow up the old deal,” he told Gary Cohn, the Goldman Sachs investment banker who became Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council. As Bob Woodward explained in Fear, a book on Trump’s first administration, “Cohn realized that Trump had gone bankrupt six times and seemed not to mind. Bankruptcy was just another business strategy. Walk away, threaten to blow up the deal. Real power is fear.” 

It’s the same thing he’s doing now, frequently combined with unpredictability as a tactic to threaten the entire country and the world. Traditional allies have become enemies who are “raping” us with unfair trade, setting off a global trade war that could spark recession.

His latest move is executive orders aimed at “investigating” critics Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs, two members of his first administration, to promote fear among his opponents as well as his current staff that any opposition can lead to presidential charges of treason. Even if this turns out to be unconstitutional, it serves as a grim illustration of the high legal price of defiance.

The good news is that it’s possible to neutralize Trump’s weaponizing of fear and heal ourselves. To start, it involves effectively deconstructing  the fire hose of false assertions, something his opponents and media have found it difficult to accomplish. For some, simply holding on to hope and faith helps. But as Siegel warned, many religious folks have “become overloaded with today’s obsessive worry." And some have served as accomplices in promoting mass fear and hate. 

Another approach is to take an occasional break, simply turning off the media. This is easier said than done, especially with the addictive algorithms that are central to most social media’s business model, but worth the effort.

Another strategy is reeducation that puts risks in a realistic perspective. That includes less focus on the unlikely, less acceptance of the rhetorical exaggeration of potential impacts and, with the help of people who have real knowledge, a psychological purge of the high-pressure misinformation that is being shot into our brains.

Other suggestions are just common sense. Get regular sleep, eat healthy food, exercise, and enjoy some entertainment. Perhaps even more important at the moment, question or ignore those who compulsively push threats that appeal to prejudice rather than logic and leave out obvious facts, or worry us even more by bungling the response. Replace unreal fears with self-discipline and some courage.

I would also add the importance of maintaining a sense of humor. More than 20 years ago, in the midst of the SARS scare, I posted a notice in my house calling for entries to a list of "101 things to be afraid of." As the responses accumulated, we found that the sheer number and diversity tended to make each one look less threatening. From asbestos, mosquitoes, and dengue fever we moved on to losing your keys, barcodes, drunk drivers, being impaled, Tammy Faye Baker, and indifference. Everyone is afraid of something, but laughter can help to trip the amygdala’s off switch.

Overcoming fear isn’t easy, of course, especially when oppressive states, autocratic leaders, compromised experts, and soulless businesses like Big Pharma engage our instinctual apparatus for their own purposes and profit. Our fear triggers have already led us well down the road to mass manipulation. 

The first step toward liberation is to realize we are being conned and relearn how to realistically assess risks, to distinguish between illusion and reality. After that, every move away from misplaced worry is a step in the process of recovery.

False Prophets of the Electronic Age

Unmoored, bombarded with disinformation, and spiritually starved, 

voters turn to electronic hucksters and demagogues who offer simplistic answers and the false hope of a moral revival. 

By Greg Guma

Glenn Beck and Fox News called the August 30, 2010 rally they staged in Washington, DC “non-political.” But that didn’t stop conservative politicians from saying the opposite, describing it as a reaction to Obama administration policies. And the rhetoric appealed mainly to those who already thought the US had been hijacked by godless socialists. 

The result was bizarre, although tame compared to the average Trump rally, and capitalized on the fact that it was held the same day, and in the same location, as Martin Luther King Jr’s historic “I have a dream” speech. Yet it flipped King’s vision on its head. A early example of political trolling.

None of this was really a surprise. Opportunists Beck and Sarah Palin — who had attracted a cult-like following of anti-government Tea Party activities and nativist “Mama Grizzlies” with her fact-challenged approach to politics — had seized the chance to distort public debate and promote themselves as electronic prophets. After all, they had a powerful pulpit on Fox News, whose parent company had just exposed its political preference with a $1 million contribution to the Republican Party. It was just the beginning.

Christian right evangelists had been doing this for generations. Starting with radio in the 1930s, they used each new technology to influence opinion, win elections, and hammer home their theology. One of the first was Aimee Semple McPherson, who pioneered the approach on a powerful Los Angeles radio station. Broadcasting from her temple, McPherson styled herself a modern-day Joan of Arc in a titanic struggle against communism.

McPherson’s crusade reached the boiling point in 1934 during the insurgent Democratic gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair. The socialist author of The Jungle and other novels about the excesses of capitalism had pledged to “end poverty in California.” But the evangelist, in an alliance with Republican leaders, Hollywood propagandists and political consultants, recast the race in apocalyptic terms.

“Someone has cast in the poison herb,” McPherson bellowed on the Sunday before Election Day, “and if we eat thereof we shall all perish and the glory of our nation as it has stood through the years shall perish with us.” Sinclair, at first the front runner in an era of mass unemployment and hard times, became the target of the nation’s first disinformation-fueled “media campaign” and ultimately lost by 200,000 votes. McPherson effectively seized on growing fears of revolution, convincing her flock – many of them poor – that the real enemy was satanic communism and its Democratic messenger.  It sounds too familiar.

First appearing on CBS stations in 1930, Father Charles Coughlin built a similarly ardent following with his volatile mixture of populism, nationalism and anti-semitism. When CBS management insisted that he stop railing against “international bankers,” the evangelist appealed directly to his radio flock, who sent more than a million protest letters to the network. CBS responded by replacing all paid religious broadcasts with Church of the Air, a show that offered free, rotating air time to speakers from the three “major” faiths. This became a standard media approach with religious groups, a time slot for those with enough followers and clout.

Coughlin responded by creating his own network and becoming even more political, and ultimately fascist. Along the way, until losing much of his base in World War II, he suggested that “Christians suffer more at the hands of the Reds than Jews do in the Third Reich” and that Nazi Germany had to protect itself from Jewish communists who were influencing radio, journalism and finance. Attempts to censor him were often decried as “Jewish terrorism.”

Like Donald Trump, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his Christian fundamentalist movement had an intense love/hate relationship with mass media. After all, the movement flourished on TV with Falwell’s “Old Time Gospel Hour.” By 1980, a tabloid newspaper turned Falwell’s radio and TV pronouncements into syndicated columns. The paper’s reporters gloated about its growing influence. At the same time, however, they despised the “immoral” television networks. It took a while to get one of their own.

For these pioneers of electronic fundamentalism, the real “insiders” were purveyors of “smut” and degenerate lifestyles, a vast group that included most “non-Christian” media and members of the press. Their basic message, which read like a newsy catechism, was that the “moral” can clean up the media by exerting control over it. That meant boycotting specific outlets, while supporting and exclusively consuming Christian media.

Through insistent propaganda, the Moral Majority turned ignorance into strength and sexism into a virtue. This sounds all too contemporary in the post-truth era of bully boy politics.

Still, the electronic fundamentalism of Falwell’s empire was almost moderate in contrast with the outright Aryan arrogance of Christian Vanguard. “Specifically compiled for the Elect,” this religious house organ was obsessed with one big enemy, the Jews. It was a more bullish racism, punctuated with articles like “Sadistic Jewish Slaughter of Animals.”

Pretending to intellectual rigor, one article attempted to prove that the enemy was plagued by a “devastating sense of inferiority.” In another report, covering an Aryan Nations Movement conference, the publisher of a sister publication, Zion’s Watchman, came out strong against humanism, marxism and “the seed of the serpent.”

Yet the Aryans remained hopeful, according to another contributor, because “the various right wing movements will come together, and unite as never before once we understand the importance of rallying under the Law of God, making what we call Germany’s WWII ‘Nazism’ seem tiny in comparison.” It was scary stuff, yet crept into public discourse.

Like many movement house organs of the pre-Internet 1980s, Christian Vanguard had a mail order clearinghouse for books, with listings under headings like “secret societies,” “the money question,” and “the Jewish world conspiracy.” Another heading covered “self defense and survival,” and included books on explosives, combat and surveillance. This was an early warning of the armed and dangerous nativism and survivalism to come. 

Clearly, the “Elect” were prepping for a future war. Reading their paper also offered solid proof that Nazism was alive in Louisiana and other places in the ’80s. In 2017 it ultimately re-emerged publicly and violently in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Not much has changed since the radio years except the targets. Speaking on his own TV network, Pat Robertson made the goal absolutely clear years ago:  “to mobilize Christians, one precinct at a time, one community at a time, one state at a time, until once again we are the head and not the tail, and at the top rather than at the bottom of our political system.” In a country founded on the principle of church-state separation, this sounded unlikely — for a while. Yet Beck, Palin and millions of others embraced this “dream.”

To call Beck and Palin evangelists, or even propagandists, isn’t a stretch.  Promoted by Fox and backed by corporate conservatives like the Koch family, they and others normalized an extreme, religiously-infused ideology and immersed viewers in a false reality. Specious arguments were presented as history, biblical truth or scientific fact. At first these “electronic “prophets” disguised their political calls as sermons or attempts to “restore” integrity and honor. Too often “mainstream” media legitimized and mainstreamed their messages. Now the mask is off.

Working with idealogues and opportunists, the religious right created a distorted picture of contemporary reality that millions of people, insecure and hungry for guidance, came to embrace. As former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed explained before the election of George W. Bush, the short-term objective was to force candidates to endorse their religious right’s agenda, an effort that frequently proved successful. But the ultimate step was to turn the agenda into national policy, a goal that first came into view when candidates for president in 2000, most notably Bush, inserted religious right rhetoric into the presidential election.

A foundation had been laid during the previous decade. Although their candidates faltered in the 1990s, Christian Right “wedge” issues – school prayer, family values, sex, abortion, and gay “lifestyle” – skewed the debate, eclipsing the competing views of progressive Christians and others who opposed an intolerant and paranoid theology.

“Our time is coming,” Pat Buchanan told the faithful during the 1996 presidential primaries. Having lost every race on Super Tuesday, he nevertheless predicted victory for the fundamentalist forces he helped catalyze. Buchanan’s gospel of “cultural war” struck a chord with the Christian right and Howard Phillips US Taxpayers Party, which wanted to restore the “Christian republic,” end welfare, scrap the civil service and IRS, and withdraw from international organizations. 

In 2000, candidates like Steve Forbes, Allen Keyes, and Gary Bauer built on this foundation, linking jeremiads about political corruption and moral decay with calls to overthrow Roe v. Wade. Once Palin emerged during the 2008 presidential campaign Buchanan looked positively gleeful on TV as his gospel was embraced by a new generation.

In response, progressives put their faith in exposure. When more people understood the extreme views of the Christian Right, went the logic, their candidates would be rejected. But too many people, uncertain about their futures and the safety of their families and friends, were already vulnerable to the politics of paranoia and blame. 

From time to time, Beck and others would also point to a secret conspiracy supposedly bent on subjugating the nation to some form of mutated socialism or fascism.  The idea that Barack Obama was a Muslim Manchurian Candidate fit well within this theory. It echoed the sermons of McPherson and Father Coughlin. In a time of distrust and decadence, when more and more believe their institutions don’t work and leaders are usually greedy crooks, it isn’t hard to accept such a prophecy. Then came birther-ism and Donald Trump.

Unmoored, bombarded with disinformation, and spiritually starved, too many people have turned to electronic hucksters who offered simplistic answers and the hope of a moral revival. Although some spiritual traditions offered more constructive answers – tolerance, equality, harmony with nature, and social justice, among others – their spokesmen don’t often reach so vast an audience.

But endlessly repeating lies and distortions, while sometimes effective for a while, doesn’t make them true. Even a manipulated public must eventually face the contradiction of a movement that poses as patriotic and “pro-family” and the divisions and destruction it promotes. There is still hope that the hypocritical moralizing of opportunists — from Beck and Palin to Trump — will be exposed for what it is, a false prophecy that no amount of repetition can conceal.

Media Maverick: Guma’s Writing Explores Alternatives

“After almost two months and endless hours of teleconference debate, Pacifica’s national board had reached a decision. It seemed impossible, but the “old white guy” from Vermont was being offered the dream job from hell. The catch was that I had ten days to decide. And two weeks to get to Berkeley.” — from Managing Chaos

…a skilled writer who has immersed himself in Vermont life and politics for decades.  — Sasha Abramsky

…the first executive in Pacifica who has been willing, and able, to share his experiences…. They ought to be required reading for all PNB and LSB members.  —  Nalini Lasiewicz

By Eugene M. Scribner

BURLINGTON, VT — Managing Chaos: Adventures in Alternative Media is Greg Guma’s intimate look back at his experiences over 60 years as a journalist, activist, editor and progressive manager — of newspapers and magazines, social change organizations and Pacifica Radio, the country’s original listener-supported network. 

Photos: Left, by Kat Farnham/Bennington; Center, Anne Winther/Burlington; Right, Jesse Guma/Rochester

His 15th book — in a career that formally began in 1968 with reporting and taking photos for the Bennington Banner, a southern Vermont daily, Managing Chaos discusses the evolution of radio and television, the impacts of concentrated media ownership, the rise of the alternative press, and his own work — before and during the progressive revolution that changed Vermont’s power structure.  

Weaving together a lively, granular account of what he saw as Pacifica Radio’s “post-revolutionary” CEO for two years and episodes from his earlier life as a stressed out student, rookie reporter, and radical organizer, Guma also explores the challenges of maintaining democratic institutions in a culture of distrust and polarization — striking the balance between truth and advocacy, observing and participating, the personal and political — and of managing conflicts with persuasion instead of force. 

He calls Managing Chaos “a media saga, a personal story, and a cautionary tale.” The 317-page, illustrated paperback edition will be published by Maverick Books and available for online orders July 25, 2o24. For review copies or interviews, email Mavmediavt@gmail.com.

From 1978 to 1990, Guma edited and wrote for The Vermont Vanguard Press, a groundbreaking alternative weekly, and syndicated feature articles and columns internationally for decades. He also started and managed three bookstores, including Maverick Media in Burlington and Revolution in Santa Monica. Beginning in 1986, he began editing a progressive global affairs publication, Toward Freedom, continuing for more than 12 years. In 2004, he co-founded another weekly, Vermont Guardian, with Shay Totten. He became Pacifica’s Executive Director in 2006.

From Politics to the Paranormal

In 1989, Guma wrote The People’s Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution, an eye-witness account of how the state went from being loyally Republican to culturally and politically progressive. At the time former Governor Phil Hoff called it “the most complete, knowledgeable and fairest description” of Bernie Sanders’ mayoral years. More than 25 years later, Guma and the widely-praised book became primary sources for leading journalists covering Sanders’ two presidential campaigns.

Working with UVM’s Center for Research on Vermont, he recently followed up with Restless Spirits & Popular Movements: A Vermont History (2021), which revisits the state’s past through memorable events and people, “reclaiming stories sometimes lost or forgotten along the way.” Vermont History lauded it for drawing from “decades of reporting to offer insights into some of the major political actors and movements from the late 1960s to the present.”

One of the early stories that captured Guma’s eye concerned the Eddys, a family of alleged mediums in central Vermont during the 1870s, and the remarkable people who converged on the family’s farm and “circle room.” After writing about this for several publications, including Fate Magazine, he developed an historical novel based on what he had learned, one that dramatizes the events and characters surrounding the fateful meeting of investigator Henry Olcott and Helena Blavatsky, the remarkable occultist who created the Theosophical movement. 

A romantic mystery of the paranormal, Spirits of Desire (2004) has been compared to E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. According to Joe Citro, it’s a well-told, remarkable story playing out “against a tapestry of social, intellectual, religious, political and scientistic forces.” 

More recently, Guma revisited the same period with Into the Mystic (2023), which digs into the actual events dramatized in the novel, and explains spiritualist and theosophical beliefs, as well as subjects like karma, reincarnation, and astral projection. Spirits of Desire was the inspiration for Woman of Another World, a film adaptation currently being developed by Nora Jacobson. 

Guma has co-authored books with world citizen pioneer Garry Davis and Kentucky civil rights leader Georgia Powers. Working with Robin Lloyd and Green Valley Media, he’s written scripts and narrated documentaries about Haiti, Guatemala, Vietnam and the legendary Bread & Puppet theater troupe. Here’s an example: Journey Home. He also edited the colorful photo book, Bread &. Puppet: Stories of Struggle and Faith from Central America (1985). 

Davis and Guma worked together on two books, the first a recap of Davis’ decades as leader of the world citizen movement. In addition, their Passport to Freedom: A Guide for World Citizens (1992) explains how to use the World Passport and other documents Davis created and distributed to defend human rights around the world. They followed up with A Global Odyssey (2000), which covers Davis’ later exploits challenging borders and spreading world citizenship in Japan.

Powers asked Guma to work with her to dramatize the life of a beloved ancestor in 2002. The result was Celia’s Land (2004), which combines history with informed, sympathetic speculation. It reveals how Powers’ aunt, Celia Mudd, who was born into slavery before the Civil War, became owner of the Lancaster family’s farm in Kentucky, and defended her rights in an extraordinary 1903 trial.

In 2003, Guma completed Inquisitions (and Other Un-American Activities), a play dramatizing the struggle for workers rights and civil liberties, especially Chicago’s 1886 Haymarket riot and show trial. It uses the interrogation of activist Lucy Parsons during the 1919 Palmer raids to explore timely themes and recreate the movement for an eight-hour workday, the Haymarket bombing, and hanging of four activists.  Since initial performances at Burlington City Hall, it has been distributed as an audio drama, airing on hundreds of radio stations and available as a podcast series.

Guma’s other books include Uneasy Empire (2003), about the struggle over globalization and post- 9/11 repression; Big Lies (2011), looking at how corporations, politicians and media can warp reality and undermine democracy; Progressive Eclipse (2012), a follow up to The People’s Republic; Dons of Time (2013), a novel Kirkus calls “well-constructed, action-flooded sci-fi set in a realistic historical world”; Fake News (2018), on journalism in the “age of deceptions”; Planet Pacifica (2021), a short introduction to the network’s problems; and Prisoners of the Real (2023), an intellectual journey about the price of hyper-rationalism and control that opens the door to a new vision of freedom and cooperation.

Eugene M. Scribner is a retired social critic discussed in Managing Chaos. His writing ran in Vermont publications from 1973 to 1999.

Bread & Puppet (editor) * The People’s Republic * Passport to Freedom Uneasy Empire * Reign of Error (editor) * Celia’s Land * Inquisitions * Spirits of Desire * Dons of Time *  Progressive Eclipse * Big Lies 

Fake News * Planet Pacifica * Restless Spirits & Popular Movements 

Into the Mystic * Prisoners of the Real * Managing Chaos

— From New England Press, Seven Locks, Toward Freedom, University of Vermont and White River Press, Fomite, Maverick Books