Sorry, Bear, but I got idea to blog.

I have been getting into podcasting lately, having added a “podcatcher” (what a cute name!) to the many apps on my tablet. And one of the first things I did was get caught up on the Cracked.com podcast.

It’s an excellent podcast, BTW. Smart funny people talking about really interesting topics. To me, that’s heaven.

Recently, I was listening to an episode about moral panics (one of my fave subjects… double heaven!), and it got me thinking about a lot of things.

Things like horror movies, McCarthyism, and the Salem witch trials.

And it all leads me to the question in the title of this entry : Do we have a need for something to fear? Every society ever has made up scary stories to frighten themselves. The impulse that drives horror fans to the theaters is universal. We definitely have the capacity to enjoy being scared.

But I think it goes deeper than that. As you all know by now, I am big believer in catharsis, and when you think about it, modern society produces a steady stream of small scares that must accumulate in our fight or flight or hide centers just waiting for a trigger event for them to crystallize upon.

Of course, most of these small frights aren’t of the saber toothed tiger variety. If they were, we would get our stimulation and our catharsis all in one neatly packaged event, assuming we survived.

No, our fears are more swift and subtle than that. We experience and stifle fears so efficiently that we often have no idea we are doing it. Little frights, like feeling a moment of fear as the elevator starts moving, or the fear that comes when you are crossing a busy street, or even the constantly low level fear that comes from driving.

So it seems entirely possible to me that fear builds up in our blood just like anger does (hence outrage addiction) and the more sophisticated and civilized the culture, the less chance there is to vent that latent fear.

Anger is easy. Go smash the hell out the ball in a racquetball court. Argue over politics on some Internet message board. If you are very rustic, go chop wood.

But fear? What, besides horror fiction, in our modern world lets us vent fear?

I mean, what would that even look like? A gym where a scary guy with a knife chases you? A new form of exercise that involves a lot of running, screaming, and hiding? Primal scream therapy?

So we have no conscious way to vent our accumulated fears. That means the only outlets for them are subconscious, and that brings me to the subject of moral panics.

For those who don’t know, a moral panic is a specific fear that takes hold in a society which spreads very quickly, becomes a solid belief for thousands or even millions of people, and then fades as the panic ends and reality returns and people realize that they have gotten caught up in something which is patently silly when viewed in the clear light of day.

And this is not just rubes and rednecks. Even the smartest people in society get caught up in these things. It is a very difficult thing to go the opposite way as the herd when there’s a stampede.

A classic example is the McCarthy hearings, and the whole Red Scare in general. In a time of unprecedented peace, order, safety, and prosperity, the collective unconscious of the American people invented the sneaky commies under every bed who wanted nothing more than to turn your kids into Communists.

Viewed from this era, it seems patently obvious that these seemingly all-powerful, infinitely sneaky and underhanded, omnipresent Commies were only slightly more rational than a nationwide panic over ghosts.

Yet everyone, from the simplest farmer to the most learned professor, believed in those magic Commies at the time. Why?

Because people need something to fear. These moral panics give people the catharsis they need, and we become very, very attached to that which affords us catharsis, especially if it a release of emotions we don’t even know we have.

So moral panics sweep through cultures like wildfires, doomed to be a historical embarrassment at best, and an inhuman atrocity at the worst.

The Nazis owed their rise to a moral crisis about Jews, after all.

This also explains the popularity of conspiracy theories. They form a full and rich worldview that is thrillingly filled with danger and villainy, and all made up of seemingly plausible precepts.

The one thing we cannot seem to accept is that we are perfectly safe and everything is, actually, fine. The truth is that this world of ours has never been better. This is the safest, sanest, most humane, most prosperous, most ideal era there has ever been, and things just keep getting better.

But that provides no catharsis, so we go on thinking the world is going to hell, that surely this is the worst things have ever been, that ruin is nigh and crime runs rampant in the streets and we are all lucky to be alive.

The facts simply do not fit that view. But we prefer the scary world because it echoes, expresses, and reinforces our own fears while making our everyday, boring, safe lives seem a lot more exciting and dramatic, and all while actually remaining perfectly safe in our modern urban lives.

Put simply, we prefer to think the world is a horror show. And if reality does not provide sufficient fun, we simply make up demons and villains and then act exactly as if they were real.

And the modern era is not immune. The media confects a new moral panic every day. Fear drives ratings, after all. and people just love freaking out over things which do not even exist, like vodka eyeballing or butt chugging or rainbow parties.

The solution, I think, begins with bringing our fears to the surface. We need to all acknowledge that we all have fear, just like we had to acknowledge that we all have lust.

Only then can we begin to build the social machinery necessary to give these fears a conscious, voluntary, socially approved way of venting those fears before they build up to a point where they make us crazy and rob us of our ability to rationally assess threats and to enjoy the peace and wonder of the real, modern world.

Plus, it would make it way harder for politicians to manipulate us.

Think about it.