Many of us have nightmares in which we face something we fear and are inexplicably frozen. Whether it’s the desire to run, strike out, or yell, it’s not an uncommon experience to be unable to move when facing horror and dread in the dream state. This is anxiety, which is a subset of fear.
We are all familiar with the “fight or flight” response to fear. It is a “primitive and powerful survival reaction,” explains psychologist and researcher Dr. Rachael Sharman. “Once the brain has perceived a danger or threat, bucketloads of adrenaline course through our veins, increasing heart rate, pumping blood to muscles, and moving our attention toward a very singular focus: fighting off or getting away from the threat. We become so singularly goal-directed in that moment, we may not process (and therefore cannot remember) any extraneous details. . . . Many people report ‘operating on instinct’ with no clear memory of how they got away from or fought off a danger.”17
Fear can be helpful when it serves as a momentary alert, prompting us to act. Anxiety, on the other hand, hurts us because it is an emotional state brought on in part by life experiences to “cope with adverse or unexpected situations.”18 Anxiety is a chronic state that can be brought about by an environment awash in fear-inducing events and messaging. It can be malleable and reduce our ability to cope properly with events in our lives. It is a state that makes us even more vulnerable to the constant hectoring by neo-Marxists and others on the left. This includes leading Democrats warning us that we are on the precipice of planetary doom as they create severe and immediate economic, social, and cultural crises.
Let’s look at a prime example of leftist propaganda intended to induce anxiety: climate change, which I address in greater detail in a later chapter. We know that the Earth’s climate has changed, and temperatures have fluctuated dramatically throughout history, beginning long before humans even existed. Millions of years ago, for example, Antarctica was a swampy rain forest, not the ice-covered continent it is today.19 More recently, glaciers covered much of North and South America, Asia, and Europe about 20,000 years ago, long before humans were burning fossil fuels.20 So, yes, climate change is real. Places now in the deep freeze were once warm and filled with plants and animals, and places now home to billions of people, cities, suburbs, and farms were once buried under giant ice sheets. These climate changes were driven by natural forces.
Yet now the left tells us that unless climate change is stopped—in other words, unless we stop Mother Nature in her tracks—our planet and all living things will be quickly headed for irreversible disaster. The bells are ringing, the sirens are blaring, and we, like good, trained dogs, are supposed to panic.
The left is simply wrong to declare that climate change is an existential threat caused by human activity. In fact, the accusation that climate change is “man-made” is one of the most egregious examples of malignant narcissism. It is meant to convince us that our very existence is a horrible, dangerous thing, allowing this view to be weaponized as a handmaiden of fear and control.*
This particular issue is perfect for the Fear Industrial Complex that seeks to terrify us into doing its bidding. After all, what could be more frightening and motivating than the thought that the world will end soon unless we take urgent and drastic action? America’s bumbling neo-Marxists seem to be channeling the French astrologer Nostradamus, who predicted almost five hundred years ago that the world would end in the year 3797.21
That end date is too far off to be useful for the fear merchants. Today’s environmental alarmists claim the world will end much sooner unless we change our whole way of life and redistribute wealth and political power right away. If this causes energy shortages that cripple economies and literally leave communities in the dark, creates food shortages that lead to malnutrition and even starvation, and sends prices of many products soaring . . . well, buckle up and take it. Remember, fear and anxiety are the point. Leftist policies that deliver destruction are not a bug of this mendacity—they are a feature. Envy is a bitter and malicious handmaiden.
In January 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a self-proclaimed socialist, put Nostradamus’s prediction on steroids by declaring definitively that the world will end in twelve years if climate change is not addressed. In a videotaped interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates at a public event, she said: “Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up, and we’re like: ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’”22 Her comments were delivered very seriously, and to applause.
Ocasio-Cortez repeated her doomsday warning months later, and then suddenly backtracked on Twitter after four months and summarily blamed the GOP: “This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it. Like the ‘world ending in 12 years’ thing. You’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal.”23
But the damage was done. Fox News reported: “A Rasmussen poll, conducted earlier this week, found 67 percent of Democrats believing that the U.S. has only 12 years to avert the ‘disastrous and irreparable damage to the country and the world’ stemming from climate change. Out of all total likely voters, 48 percent of respondents believed the apocalyptic claim.”24
It’s unfortunate, but not at all surprising, that Ocasio-Cortez—a former bartender who became the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress when she took office in 2019 at age twenty-nine—believes most Democrats have the brainpower of sea sponges. Perhaps that explains their willingness to do things that destroy so many lives. Her ridiculous claim that the world will end in 2031 builds on the kind of overwhelming fear and pathological anxiety that Democrats have long relied on to win voter support.
There has indeed been a disaster unfolding, ruining people’s lives, but it’s not a warming planet. It’s the emotional and mental abuse perpetrated upon average people about climate change, creating an environment of liquid fear and mass anxiety.
This is just one tiny slice of the neo-Marxist and bureaucratic establishment’s efforts on many fronts to frighten us into surrendering our autonomy and freedom to a massive government that pledges to protect us from contrived boogeymen. Climate is a perfect issue because predictions of future disasters can’t be indisputably disproven until years or decades later.
The Method of the Marxist Madness
Earlier, I described to you how I was stalked in Times Square and how my instinctive reaction to my fear was to get away as quickly as I could. My mind was on autopilot, but it wasn’t frozen. At a certain key point, my critical and logical mind came alive and allowed me to take control not only of that situation, but of my determination to confront my predicament and transform fear into resolve. Fortunately, I was able to escape my stalker without injury, unlike too many other women here and around the world.
When we are engaging with “real fear,” as de Becker would call it, we act: “Real fear is not paralyzing—it is energizing.”25 These actions allow us to address the issue at hand, take control of our environment, and protect our personal safety. This is necessary fear, moving us to concern and the logic required to address that issue. As we cope with artificial fear constructed by politicians and other malign agents of the establishment, we are constrained in part by the fact that there is no immediate way to confront or resolve the fear. And that’s part of the point.
Whether it’s climate change, pandemics, crime, cancel culture, social chaos, or any other number of establishment and neo-Marxist schemes, there is no solution to address the anxious fear pounded into us by professional alarmists and their enablers.
“Progressive” policies focused on protecting criminals from justice rather than protecting the public from crime, along with the economic devastation of COVID-19 lockdown policies, have made walking anywhere in New York City past 9 p.m. a dangerous act. Defunding the police and enacting no-bail laws allow criminals, violent and otherwise, to remain on streets empty and quiet enough to be the setting for an episode of The Walking Dead.
We see this everywhere, especially when news reports in the summer of 2020 of the now infamously described “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots were filled with images of small businesses on fire. The riots followed the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a white Minneapolis police officer who was later convicted of murder. What we were seeing did not match what we were being told was happening. This creates a cognitive dissonance, adding to the sense of chaos and fear.
The left is good at one thing—organizing people to do its bidding, often under pretexts and through manipulation and lies. We don’t need to imagine the impact of blending the malice and rage of envy with the anonymity of the mob mentality. We have seen this chaos—fomented by leftists in our own government and outside organizations like (but not limited to) Black Lives Matter and the fascist street gang Antifa—unleashed on civil society in the form of riots, arson, statue toppling, and personal violence. These groups want people to believe that their violence and riots are acceptable responses to social distress, but this is not true.
The left wants to instill immediate fear through specific violent events, but also to instill anxiety in all of us about future violence. The anxiety of unknown consequences is what pushes us off a cliff into an underlying chronic state of fear.
Most Americans were appalled and transfixed at the images of the rioting we saw from our windows, or on our TV or computer screens during the summer of 2020. We saw thugs burning down business districts, law-abiding citizens assaulted and murdered, police officers attacked, state and federal buildings vandalized and set on fire, and statues of historic figures damaged or destroyed. Our first understandable concern in the face of such obscene and repugnant violence is safety and survival.
In his book How Fear Works, Frank Furedi—a sociologist and analyst on issues including terrorism, fear, and cultural authority—points to Aristotle, who “wrote in his Rhetoric that ‘fear may be defined as a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful event in the future.’ The connection drawn by Aristotle between fear and visions of the future has important implications for understanding our current predicament.”26 Furedi adds:
In practice, anxiety about the unknown reinforces the public’s concern about specific threats and habituates it to fear [emphasis mine]. When society is habitually drawn towards worst possible outcomes it fosters a mood where fear can acquire a character of a habit, the acquisition of which endows fear with a banal and casual character.27
We are being habituated today into generalized fear by a number of disturbing developments designed to induce anxiety. These include Marxist rhetoric about America being irredeemably racist; demands to defund or even disband police departments; politicians accusing millions of Americans of being white supremacist terrorists; the Department of Justice announcing plans for terrorist investigations of parents who dare to confront local school boards; outrageous rhetoric and actions by the federal government and some state and local governments regarding COVID; and legacy media acting as the perfect handmaiden by perpetuating the negativity, accusations, and smears vomited up by the Fear Industrial Complex.
These are not unrelated situations. Nor are they wholly natural consequences of our modern world, as the progressive establishment would like us to believe. Instead, we are being subjected to accusations, emotional manipulation, crime- and violence-induced fear, health “emergencies,” economic chaos, and cultural issues being deliberately exploited, contrived, and weaponized against us.
In Liquid Fear, Bauman’s description of the emotion is an important addition to our discussion, about why it’s such a malleable controlling tool that is so appealing to bullies, tyrants, grifters, and totalitarians:
Fear is at its most fearsome when it is diffuse, scattered, unclear, unattached, unanchored, free floating, with no clear address or cause; when it haunts us with no visible rhyme or reason, when the menace we should be afraid of can be glimpsed everywhere but is nowhere to be seen. “Fear” is the name we give to our uncertainty: to our ignorance of the threat and of what is to be done—what can and what can’t be—to stop it in its tracks—or to fight it back if stopping it is beyond our power [emphasis in original].28
Evading Murder-Suicide
Gavin de Becker’s warning about becoming desensitized to our intuition when inundated with constant messages of danger is vitally important politically and socially, but also personally. His work has helped me understand a terrible event in my life that I want to share with you to illustrate how being caught in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety hampers our natural ability to manage our environment and puts us at even greater risk.
In my second book, The Death of Right and Wrong, I wrote about the suicide of my first partner in 1982, Brenda Benet. An actress in her midthirties, she was an alcoholic and had attempted suicide in the years prior to our relationship. I was sixteen when I first met her, and eighteen when I moved into her Los Angeles home nestled in the beautiful Mandeville Canyon section of Brentwood.
As the years go by and we get older, it’s extraordinary how much more we understand about the various events in our lives, especially when we become the age of the person whose behavior so terribly altered our life. Only when I entered my thirties did I completely grasp the impact of this nightmarish experience on my teenaged self, and I am surprised I survived.
For decades, I felt guilt for not acting to stop Brenda’s death by a self-inflicted gunshot wound and for not consciously recognizing the signs leading up to her act. And there were signs. With the help of psychotherapy, writing, my work, and my friends, I have come to terms with the trauma of being at her home when she killed herself while locked in a bathroom.
What I have never disclosed until now is the fact that Brenda’s suicide was likely meant to be a murder-suicide—with me as the murder victim. I feel able to bring this to light now because it has been almost twenty years since I first wrote about the experience, and over forty years since the event itself. It has taken this long, but I now understand myself more and feel I finally comprehend the situation and my actions enough to share it with you.
I had not been paying attention to my intuition, or even to outright signals from Brenda about her intentions and capacity for violence. I had grown exhausted by her behavior and had adapted to a level of anxiety and fear that allowed me to cope with our roller-coaster relationship. Or at least I thought I was coping.
After arriving at her home for what Brenda told me would be lunch (I had ended our relationship and moved out two weeks earlier), I let myself in, and it was immediately apparent Brenda was in the downstairs bathroom near the front door. I could hear her pacing, and I could see the shadow of her movement in the light at the bottom of the door. I knew immediately, somehow, that she was going to kill herself.
For years, I explained it as “intuition,” but more than that, it was the culmination of signs I had collected in my subconscious for years. Suddenly, I connected the multitude of suppressed dots within seconds and knew what would happen.
I frantically begged Brenda to open the door and told her nothing was so serious that we couldn’t work it out. She didn’t respond, but continued pacing. At one point, I told her I was going to break down the flimsy door, which had a single-handle lock but no bolt. I was confident I could break it down with a swift kick or shove.
Upon telling Brenda what I was going to do, I heard her step back. The shadow on the floor indicated she was facing the door. As I prepared to throw myself into the door, I had an extraordinary and overwhelming sense of fear. At first, there was what felt like a physical restraint in front of me, almost like a massive hand placed on my torso, and I understood completely—it was as clear in my mind, as if in that moment someone else in that room was saying directly to me: “If you do this, you will die.” It was like a batch of data being dropped into my mind.
