In my chiropractor’s office, he has all these pictures with wise sayings. One of those pictures shows a forest of trees growing with trunks straight as arrows. The saying is:
As the twig is bent, so grows the tree - Alexander Pope
From the chiropractic perspective, this means that taking care of your spine and keeping your core aligned increases your potential for overall health. A proper alignment gives you strength, stability, increases your energy, and gives your body more resources to work in balance holistically.
Years ago, I read the book State Of Fear by Michael Crichton. He’s since passed, but over the course of his life, he was prolific as a writer, film maker, and certified doctor. A wildly successful man, his writing style mixed fact and fiction in an incredibly entertaining way while covering topics such as nano tech, the airline industry, sexual harassment, gene research, and in the case of State of Fear, global warming and mass hysteria.
When I read State of Fear back in 2005, I learned so much and had my eyes open through this book to a wide range of topics including:
Eugenics
Data modeling
Agenda-driven science
Man-made Climate Change theories
Mass hysteria
One of the things I found incredibly helpful was the glossary he includes in the back of the book with notations for everything he references in the story. He was wildly popular in Hollywood, and his stories and ideas include Jurassic Park, ER, Rising Sun, Sphere, and more. Coming out with a book that would be wildly UN-popular with the Hollywood elites demanded citations that backed up his ideas, and he provided them in abundance.
In many ways, this book prepared me for how to approach the past several years with sanity, critical thinking, and research. It was particularly interesting how he lays out almost a blueprint for ways to cause mass hysteria, including the use of propaganda, creating deliberate crises, how big funding influences research, and how fraudulent data can be used to bring the agenda full circle.
When you start with fraudulent data and then build out from there, you can create your own narrative, regardless of whether that’s true or not. As the pandemic got well under way, it was almost like Hollywood had once again taken one of Michael Crichton’s novels and turned it into a movie. Except, as we all know, that movie was reality.
The second I saw the projections in the report from Neil Ferguson at London’s Imperial College, I believe I said to myself “uh…this is bullshit and this is going to be really destructive.” This is the same man and same institution that created models dating back into the early 2000s forecasting insane death rates for things like SARS, Mad Cow, and Swine Flu. Their track record was embarrassing and dismal for close to 20 years.
(He’s also the same man who would violate the very lockdowns in 2020 he helped create so he could go have an affair.)
His study, published in early March 2020, was in many ways the initial match that was used to light the flames of the mass hysteria that we witnessed. In fact, I dug up an article from March 18th, 2020, that perfectly illustrates the beginnings of the hysteria that would tear through the fabric of our world.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/18/covi-m18.html
This was one of the key studies that was seized upon by the PTB to justify doing things we’ve never done before across world populations. Keep in mind, it was a model. A projection. An educated guess.
According to this study, the world was about to meet Captain Trips.
Combine this with the dubious video we saw coming out of China of people literally dropping in the streets, the need to get Orange Man Bad out of office, and the desire of the PTB to hasten their global dominance (and make some good coin in the process), it all adds up to the Molotov cocktail thrown into the window of the fireworks factory.
“The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. "Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe." That blew me away. "Turn on the TV," he'd say. "What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products." Fuckin' A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War“Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
These quote are from the brilliant 2006 World War Z by Max Brooks.
While this book is a fictional work dealing with zombie apocalypse, it reads like a real description of how a world can completely lose its collective mind when faced with fear, propaganda, and self-interested governments and billionaires.
I referenced this book in a previous post that I’d encourage you to check out.
There is no more powerful opiate for the masses than fear. Not sex. Not love. Not hope. Fear. And the PTB know this well. They are and will continue using this relentlessly to subjugate the world.
A few well-timed (real or fabricated) videos. Shocking headlines diluted through all the media channels. Parading “experts” onto the news to capture some soundbites that are based on the thinnest shred of truth or outright lies. And then wash, rinse, and repeat until the saturation is complete and the majorities are duly in submission, reinforcing the narrative and self-policing all those who don’t fall in line to worship at the alter of fear.
Global warming and man-made climate change just wasn’t working fast enough for these PTB. Wars? Yawn. Wars, natural disasters, and other drivers just have too much tangible evidence to consider, and the they realized this and grew impatient.
What needed to happen was a detonation of fear. Real, tangible fear that would strike at the hearts of every man, woman, and child. And what better vehicle than an invisible virus? An invisible boogeyman? YIKES!
It’s much easier to fleece the masses when the threat is invisible, and we all found that out in real time. I’m no longer shocked or mystified at how seemingly intelligent, reasoned people went full Karen, because fear has the potential to drive even the most sane and reasoned, insane and irrational.
Yesterday, Pfizer announced it would be vaccinating pregnant women to immunize newborns in the womb against - gasp - RSV.
I mean, what sane person really wants their baby coming out and having to struggle against things like the cold, flu, coughing, runny noses and fevers? Amiright? Why accept millennia of healthy human development, proven immune system building, sane healthy living, and ultimately, bodily autonomy for that new life when you can just get ahead of it all by jabbing Mommy? Please just disregard all that, along with the other over the counter medicines and therapies that ACTUALLY have proven track records.
We’re from Pfizer, and we’re here to make another buck…cough…help you!
Fear At The Root
There are many, MANY problems with fear, but in my mind, one of the greatest is how it nearly always becomes a self-fulling prophecy. I once heard this quote. I believe it was from the book The Answer by John Assaraf and Murray Smith. They may not have coined it, but I believe they definitely referenced it. And I may be paraphrasing…
Worry is a prayer for the things you don’t want.
Fear creates doubt, worry, angst, anger, anxiety, and a whole host of other negative triggers. It creates physical stress on your body. It shapes your entire perception. It can drive you to live reactively as opposed to proactively. Once a person becomes accustomed to living in fear and have it as a primary root in their “tree”, it becomes incredibly difficult to see through clear eyes. It creates a vehicle through which the cascade of unintended consequences can find a path to full realization.
People that are fear-driven often find themselves saying or thinking things like:
Why does this keep happening to me?
No, I shouldn’t take that risk.
Everything is so unfair! The world is out to get me.
Naturally this would happen to me.
A Proper Risk/Benefit Analysis
Proper risk/benefit analysis is vital to healthy, sane living. Risk MUST be weighed as properly as possible, at every turn. What fear does is short circuit that ability to assess in a holistic way. The reality is, we live in a world of risk, and if we can’t properly assess risk, our growth, development, and potential are stunted and warped.
As the twig is bent, so grows the tree - Alexander Pope
The PTB count on your inability to assess risk properly. Too many people have simply decided to outsource their own duty to assess risk, instead relying on others to do it for them. As we’ve seen, those others include people in white coats, floating heads on a screen, headlines scrolling through social media, and conversations at the dinner table.
This is dangerous and irresponsible. There are VERY few people in life who have your best interests at heart. 99.9% of the time (this is a scientific study I did just now so results are 50% accurate) someone is trying to sell you something or get you to do something that will benefit themselves, not you. The only one who can determine what’s in your own self-interest and best intent is yourself. The moment you outsource that critical decision, you open yourself up wide to be taken full advantage of.
The Covid years have been a literal clinical study in human behavior. These times will go down in history as one of the most clear litmus and stress tests on a global population ever. This moment will be studied by social scientists, propagandists, advertising agencies, government bureaucracies, dictators, corporations, and predators of all kinds for the next thousand years. And rest assured, these people will still not have your best interests at heart.
Combating a Fear-based Life
So how do we combat these predators? How do we take ownership to our own lives and make the proper risk-assessments that are vital to a proactive, confident, healthy individual life?
First reports are usually flawed. The fog of war, whether on a micro or macro level, is usually filled with wild inaccuracies, assumptions, half-truths, and often outright lies designed to manipulate. Yes, there are times where quick decisions need to be made. Life and death can hang in the balance. However, unless you’re in a natural disaster or literal battlefield, chances are you’ll have at least a little time to properly assess the situation.
Trust your intel. Just as governments devote vast resources to espionage and intelligence - which at its core is information gathering at the highest stakes level - so too should you have trusted, objective sources informing you. It’s hard today to fully determine what that means, because it seems like everything has become a psyop. However, that doesn’t mean that the truth isn’t out there. First, gather wise individuals into your every day life. Your immediate circle needs to be solid people you can trust, and you need a multitude of counsellors across many disciplines and avenues of thought. Then, find worldwide news and information sources that have proven to be reliable over time. Start with a wide net, then eliminate those voices and thinkers that show a decreasing accuracy in their track record.
“Impulse buying” is usually filled with regret. Take as much time as you safely need before you jump into the deep end of a decision. Much like the car salesman or late night infomercial relies on you to make an impulse decision, so too does the propagandist or predator. Good decisions are hardly ever made in a split second, and bad decisions made on impulse can carry a weight that take you years to cast aside. When in doubt, wait longer.
Be willing to change your initial impression. One of the worst and most lingering ways that people were damaged during Covid (of which we now see have been increasingly exponential), was the first 15-30 days. During that time, a perception became deeply embedded into the psyche of billions that we were facing Captain Trips, the end of the world. As we huddled in our homes, gorging ourselves on fear, on bodies collapsing in the streets, of mass graves in NYC and Italian hospitals shoveling bodies out the door, that fear, like the cancer it is, grew DEEP and entrenched into the minds and spirits. To this day, people are masking their kids, outside. People lined up around the corner for their jabs. Even as it quickly became clear that people like Neil Ferguson were wildly wrong; as the Diamond Princess cruise ship pulled into port; as little Billy - gasp - got Covid and had a runny nose for half a day; and as people without 3 other co-morbidities pretty much recovered (unless they happened to go to a hospital and get a vent shoved down their throat), the masses doubled, tripled, and quadrupled (what are we up to now?) down on their initial impressions. They refused to objectively look at real evidence and change their mind. The fear has kept them from being able to do that.
Question the consensus. “Social proof” is a marketing term I learned years ago. It’s one of the most powerful tools in the marketing playbook. Social proof is a powerful driver that says that the more people are flocking to something, talking about something, getting involved with something, the more good and right that thing is. Literally, if you see a crowd rushing into a burning building, there must be some kind of marshmallow roasting party going on in there and it must be fun. All of those people jumping off the bridge must have seen something great and beneficial at the bottom of that cliff, so you should do it too. It’s very tempting to be swept up into crowdthink, but in my experience, it’s usually very dangerous and self-defeating. Like most tools, it can be something used for good or bad, and this is one that is often wielded with someone else’s interest in mind.
Follow the money. One of the many ideas that Ayn Rand brilliantly illustrated in Atlas Shrugged was this (paraphrasing again) - “who benefits, and at what cost to whom”? In this age of manipulation, we MUST dig. We know when we walk into that car dealership that the salesman is out to make the most money for him/herself. That’s clear. Yet, now more than ever, it’s unclear to far too many that they are involved in a different transaction in real time - the transaction for their minds and souls. They fail to even comprehend that someone paid for that ad or study or soundbite. It suddenly just appeared to them on MSNBC or FOX and so therefore it’s pure and objective. One of the greatest things you can do right now, in every thought, conversation, or bit of information you’re processing is to begin with this question: “who’s really benefiting from this?”
There are so many ways to combat fear, and I can’t fully expand on them all in the context of this article. Maybe we can keep this conversation going because it’s more imperative than ever for us to make clear-eyed, confident decisions about our lives based on facts, logic, and reason, not feelings and emotions, especially the feeling of fear.
If you have other ideas or insights - or examples - of how to combat fear in your own life, please do comment. The more we discuss this, the better we’ll all be able to stand when Fear comes knocking on our heart and mind.
Stream of consciousness, using your text as inspiration:
Fear increases cortisol production and release which has a knock-on effect on the brain's chemistry.
The more our brain fires its neurons in a certain path (just lifting a finger takes hundreds of thousands or even millions firing in the same path simultaneously), the more the probability of the firing following a similar path increases with each such event.
Fear and stress feed on eachother.
Stress inhibits cognition, hampers informed decision-making, and triggers our flight/fight-response, making us much more likely to jump anywhere when we should think first whether to jump at all.
Any condition experienced for prolonged periods, especially with others, becomes our normal state of being due to normality being perception-based, both psychologically and neurologically.
Fear lowers the threshold for actions taken against the cause or source of the fear, no matter how illogical or tenuous.
To do anything rather than suffer fear passively means we will clamour for someone to tell us what to do to get rid of the fear.
Codify the above as memetic messages which use the mind's/brain's associative function in conjunction with pattern recognition. Let them repeat over and over without trying to steer which ones are to be the dominant ones: let this sort itself out naturally, as it will refine the memes and nudge the target audience ever closer to acting, any event fitting the meme(s) serving as an opportunity for release.
Before you know it, you'll have otherwise fully normal people demanding you - the authority - stop being so lenient, so lackadaisical and so forgiving. They/we will not only grudgingly admit that sometimes unpleasant measures are needed; we will demand the yoke and the whip, as long as we also get to wear the jackboot. We will ourselves make, out of what should be a regrettable necessity dictated by external circumstances, a virtuous duty which only the true believers have the strength of character to carry out.
Which faith or -ism or culture/people/race/you now what I mean and era doesn't matter. The extent of the actions resulting from the above will only ever be curbed by greater force and a redefinition of cost/reward-perceptions.
And anything that can happen, will (have) happen(ed). Somewhere. Somewhen.
Hey did you ever get those memes? I posted them in your comment section but you have a large following so it may have been looked over.
March 16th you were looking to promote.
https://westcoastjohn1978.substack.com/p/remember-remember