Culture of Fear and Consumption

I first heard the expression "Culture of Fear" when I was only 12. My mother had rented the movie "Bowling for Columbine" (Michael Moore, 2002) for she had to watch it as part of a coursework, so I joined her. This movie is a documentary that explores the causes of a massacre that took place in a High School in 1999. It not only talks about that, but it also discuss other acts of violence with guns. I remember a particular scene, in which Michael Moore (the actual designer of the whole film) interviews Marylin Manson and asks for his opinion on what could possibly have created this constant fear the Americans live with, and why is it plausible. Marylin stated that, although many blamed the violence in television, cinema and computer games to be the main causes of this "environment of fear and violence", those were not the real causes. He said that the United States' society is based on a "fear and consumption" culture, where people buy because of fear.

I was very interested on his view - which had a lot of other points to sustain it, I simply can't remember all of them - and then I started to dig out information on this called "Culture of Fear". I found out that, actually, the main definition for it is related to politics, in a way that some society incite fear in the public to achieve political goals.

"The people don't want war, but they can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." -Hermann Göring.

This term was also used to describe irrational fear in other contexts, such as people fearing other people from different ethnical origins, and etc. None of those applied to what Manson wanted to say though.

The Culture of Fear present in the American society - and maybe we can actually broaden its concept to the whole world's society - has a different meaning. There is a Colgate commercial that promise "if you have bad breath, they are not going to talk to you". This may sound a simple commercial, but if we pay a little more attention to the sentence, we'll be able to observe that they are , in a certain way, inciting a fear in whoever watches it. The purpose of it is to make one feel afraid of the bad breath, and to buy their product because he is afraid of having a bad breath. There are a lot of other commercials containing fear-based messages.

But the question is: why incite fear? Because it is profitable. Media is always stating that we live in violent times, and showing murders, assaults, robbery statistics on TV and on the news all the time. Every newspaper, every headline that is made to scandal its readers: they are making a fear grow inside people. And this fear is extremely profitable. Of course, many may say that indeed we live in violent times... But humanity has always live in violent times. And, along with the fear, they also announce its solution: buying. So people go shopping, because they have fear. They build high electrical fences, they buy electronic devices, they improve their car security. In America, they even buy guns, and we all know that the guns market in the US is gigantic.

For comparison purpose, if you go to Canada, especially if you go to cities that are located near the border with US, you won't notice houses so damn secured. In fact, you will notice the opposite: Canadians leave their doors unlocked, they have low fences, they do not worry so badly with security. That would be really weird, since they are really near the US, therefore the danger is almost the same. 

Anyway, it is important to point out that the Culture of Fear and Consumption is not exclusively American. It exists in the whole world, because it's what make the capitalism gears spin, but in the US is more intense.