Is your perception of crises being manipulated?

Is your perception of crises being manipulated?

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — Can anyone recall the last time that we weren’t being bombarded with talk of some dire existential threat?

Doesn’t it seem that we’ve been careening from one “crisis” to another for the past couple of decades, with several now simultaneously coexisting? Recently, there have been the issues of weather that’s too hot or too cold, Covid, the East-West global rivalry, foreign wars, perceived threats to democracy, terrorism, and others.

But is the world really any worse off than it has been historically? Or is your perception just skewed?

The reality is that the world has hardly ever been less dangerous. A study by the University of York published in 2020 found that the world has become more peaceful since the 1990s, with fewer deaths from wars. The trend is also echoed in statistics of violent crimes in the Western world. Crime rates have also fallen “precipitately” for homicide, burglary, theft, and other property crime since the 1990s, according to another study from the Minnesota School of Law published in 2014. Data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime suggests that the U.S. homicide rate is about where it was in the ’50s and ’60s.

As for the annual weather panic that sets in each year at the peak of summer — does anyone ever wonder whether people who lived through bad weather in the early 1900s ran around lecturing others about the need to save the planet? In 1911, a 70-day heatwave across all of Europe that lasted from July 4 until September 13 and reaching 40C caused a reported 40,000 deaths in France alone and caused some wells in Paris to completely dry up.

Fragile individuals succumbing to viruses — seasonal or otherwise — is hardly new, either. Nor is social conflict capable of leading some to believe that democracy itself is threatened, even though a Marist poll last year found that two-thirds of Americans believe that to indeed be the case now.

Members of the congressional committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, have suggested that nothing less than the country’s democratic system was threatened when supporters of former U.S. President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol on the day of the ratification of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory over Trump. Come on. This is a country that has dealt with scandals ranging from Iran-Contra to Watergate and both the successful and attempted assassinations of sitting presidents. And yet somehow the system has persisted. If anything, it has been reinforced, because every time there’s an event that causes the Washington establishment to scream about an attack on democracy, it only ever seems to serve to put forward the argument that the answer is even more top-down government control.

So if none of these threats are actually worse than they have been historically, then why does it seem like it’s getting more chaotic? The answer lies in each person’s individual perception and the manipulation thereof. The degree to which someone perceives a threat is largely tied to their sources of information about it. Western authorities have arguably become more anxiety inducing in their communication of threats. The result has been increased support for bigger government and higher spending under the guise of security. At the same time, other crises created by government mismanagement, like migration, energy price hikes, and cost of living increases, tend to be evoked only when absolutely needed.

Technology has also drastically changed perceptions. The development and rapid expansion of social media platforms allowed for each person to carry around the anxiety induced by authorities in their pockets.

Of course, there are those who have availed themselves of technology to deliberately seek out diversity of information and views, if only to mitigate conventional or official narratives. It’s not hard to imagine the importance of doing so, given the history of government information manipulation around important events. But governments are now increasingly attempting to consolidate control over platforms in order to better control narratives under the guise of fighting “disinformation”. The Biden administration’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, set up under the Department of Homeland Security to police online narratives but nixed after just three weeks amid public outcry over censorship concerns, is a prime example. Diversity of information and analysis is also hindered by a creeping totalitarian cancel-culture driven largely by the left and against which the state has failed to adequately push back in defense of contradictory debate.

The end result of all this is a collective narrowing of worldview that focuses people’s attention disproportionately on certain crises — particularly those promoted by government in their own selfish interests.