Fear dominates everything in America today. It’s crept into everything: politics, advertising, news coverage and social media. And if you fear, you don’t reason correctly. How do we fight this? Here’s a start. Alternet has launched a series of articles on fear and how to combat it.

We at AlterNet feel our society is overrun with a destructive and growing social preoccupation with fear. This fear factor breeds more violence, mental illness and trauma, social disintegration, job failure, loss of workers’ rights, and much more. Pervasive fear ultimately paves the way for an accelerating authoritarian society with increased police power, legally codified oppression, invasion of privacy, social controls, social anxiety and PTSD.

Over the next few months we will be looking at most aspects of society through a “fear lens,” examining how fear operates, what motivates the purveyors, and how we can better challenge the fearmongers. At the same time, we will work to figure out and help people better cope with fear issues, hoping that more people can join together and build more supportive communities. 

A hat tip to Salon for running a piece today titled 9 industries that scare you into buying things you don’t need which led me back to Alternet. Number one on the list, by the way, is security products. After all, criminals are everywhere ya know.