As we enter Dystopia: Or how to introduce a new system by using a health emergency (Deep Dive)
No, I’m not an “anti vaxxer” and not here to push “Qanon conspiracy theories” either, let me just start with that. I wouldn’t even mention it if it wasn’t necessary in 2021 to actually distance from these “modern curse words”. But when you start talking about certain facts and observations like I’m going to do in this article, it is inevitable that the first attempts to attack this story will be done by using exactly those definitions. In this article I will not talk about theories that Covid-19 is either a bio weapon or fake. I won’t talk about who to blame either. Because I believe that in the end it makes no difference. What does make a difference is how the situation is presented to us, what solutions are given, and the effect those solutions will have on us.
In my previous article I talked about the Society of Fear and how a “fear appeal” can be utilized as an effective propaganda technique in order to oppress even the brightest minds, especially if they are kept in ignorance. In regards to health issues, officials willingness to use the fear appeal to help change behavior has had it’s effect on society for a very long time. From the late 19th century into the early 1920s, public health campaigns commonly sought to stir fear. Examples include flies menacing babies, immigrants represented as a microbial pestilence at the gates of the country or voluptuous female bodies with barely concealed skeletal faces who threatened to destroy a generation of soldiers with syphilis.
An introduction:
Shortly after World War 2, epidemiological data became the foundation of public health and the use of fear fell out of favor, at least for a while. The primary focus at the time was the rise of chronic lifestyle diseases such as heart disease. But the research also concluded that campaigns based on the Fear appeal often backfired. An early but influential study suggested that when people became anxious about their behavior, they could tune out from the message or they would engage more in dangerous behavior, like smoking or drinking, to cope with their anxiety stimulated by the fear based messaging. But by the 1960s, health officials were trying to change behavior related to smoking, eating and exercise and they grappled with the limits of data and logic as their tools.
So they went back to using scare tactics as a method to deliver the message. It wasn’t enough to know that something was dangerous, we were made to react emotionally. Although there were many concerns about using fear to manipulate people, leading ethicists began to argue that it could help people understand what was in their self interest. A bit of a scare could help cut through the noise created by industries that made fat, sugar and tobacco attractive. Anti tobacco campaigns were the first to show the toll of smoking. These campaigns used graphic images of diseased lungs, of smokers gasping for breath through tracheotomies and eating through tubes, of clogged arteries and failing hearts.
And then came AIDS. Fear of the illness was hard to untangle from fear of those who suffered the most: gay men, sex workers, drug users, and the black and brown communities. The challenge was to remove stigma’s, to help promote the human rights of those who stood to be further marginalized if they were shunned and shamed. But when it came to these public health campaigns, human rights advocates argued, fear caused exactly that, stigmatization, and it undermined the effort. When obesity became a public health crisis and youth smoking rates and vaping experimentation were sounding alarm bells, public health campaigns once again adopted fear as their primary method.