Okimura1170

“One of the important rules about how fear works is that the fearful individual focuses obsessively on the feared object. There is a good evolutionary reason for this: when in danger it is important not to get distracted by other things and to focus 100 percent on the threat and how it can be extinguished. Politicians, businessmen and others in the right place at the right time can exploit this by promising fearful people a solution and then robbing them when they are not looking. Such robberies need not be confined to money — much more darkly, they can be stealing things that are harder won and harder to win back, like personal freedoms and human rights. Another important rule about fear is that fearful individuals are not usually very good at weighing probabilities objectively. A person’s perception of the importance of a threat is directly related to the number of incoming messages about it that she receives. Dangers with an infinitesimally small likelihood, like an asteroid hitting the earth, can be perceived as imminent by a person under continuous bombardment with images of an asteroid hitting the earth.”
― Gigi Foster, The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next