In the first
chapter of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape explains to
Wormwood that there used to be a time when “argumentwas the way to” keep
his Christian patient “out of the Enemy’s clutches.”
Times and
methods have changed:
That might
have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans
still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it
was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing
and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of
reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons, we have
largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to
having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his
head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic”
or “practical,” “outworn” or “contemporary,” “conventional” or “ruthless.”
Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church.
The above was written in the 1940s. It was true then,
and it has metastasized in 2020 to a nearly fatal disease. Emotions and
feelings rule the day. The ability to follow an argument must be suppressed to
keep the people enamored with experts who do their thinking for them. Keep the
people focused on “personal peace and affluence.”
Jargon, not
argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church…. By the very
act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can
foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as
to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your
patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his
attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to
fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let
him ask what he means by “real”.
While doing
some research, I came across an article by Michael Crichton. Crichton was a
prolific author: Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain, Coma, Jurassic
Park, and more than two dozen additional novels and non-fiction works
under his name and pen names.
The 2005
article, “Fear and Complexity,” is
based on how he came to write the book The State of Fear. It
reminded me of Screwtape’s advice to Wormwood and CNN’s global town hall event
“Coronavirus Facts and Fears.” The fact is, it’s all about fear to control.
In 1998,
Crichton began research on a novel about a global disaster. In the course of
his preparation, he “casually reviewed what had happened in Chernobyl” in 1986,
“since that was the worst man-made disaster in recent times” that he knew
about.
What I
discovered stunned me. Chernobyl was a tragic event, but nothing remotely
close to the global catastrophe I was imagining. About 50 people had died
in Chernobyl, roughly the number of Americans that die every day in traffic
accidents. I don’t mean to be gruesome, but it was a setback for me. You
can’t write a novel about a global disaster in which only 50 people die.
Undaunted, I
began to research other kinds of disasters that might fulfill my novelistic
requirements. That’s when I began to realize how big our planet really
is, and how resilient its systems seem to be. Even though I wanted to create a
fictional catastrophe of global proportions, I found it hard to come up with a
credible example. In the end, I set the book aside, and wrote Prey
instead.
But the shock
that I had experienced reverberated in me for a while. Because what I had
been led to believe about Chernobyl was not merely wrong-it was astonishingly
wrong. Let’s review that.
But most
troubling of all [about predictions concerning the Chernobyl nuclear disaster],
according to the UN report, is that “the largest public health problem created
by the accident” is the ‘damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of
accurate information… [manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health,
belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on
assistance from the state.’
In other words, the greatest damage to the people of
Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by
radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder,
for a minute, exactly what that implies. We demand strict controls on radiation
because it is such a health hazard. But clearly Chernobyl suggests that false
information can be a health hazard as damaging as radiation. I am not saying
radiation is not a threat. I am not saying Chernobyl was not a genuinely serious
event.
But thousands of
Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be
afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told
their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they
couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a
future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as
they did.”
In fact, we need to recognize that this kind of
human response is well-documented. Authoritatively telling people they are
going to die can in itself be fatal.
A fearful population is a population that’s easily
manipulated. There are enough people who will accept any proposed remedy so
they can feel safe.
