This week I came down pretty hard with man flu, which is regular flu caught by a man that leads to constant and nonstop complaining about how he is likely to die at any moment because he feels so bad. Women seem largely immune to man flu as they (mostly) suffer with dignity and just get on with it. However I’ve become aware of many more flu strains the last few days thanks largely to the scare mongering Australian press with their American style over-hype reportage.
The newspapers from my home are particularly skilled at weaving nasty sounding medical acronyms like H5N1 (avian flu) into doomsday scenario headlines containing words like pandemic. Now drop that on a mainstream population that doesn’t really know how to critically evaluate new sources and challenge the information for validity, and what you end up with is a slightly panicked and scared population. The point gets even more rammed home when I talked this morning to my mother on Skype and hear them talking about cow flu of all things, a purportedly more insidious strain of flu that *really* makes you sick.
Seriously I wonder where this crap will end? Worse for me, I really don’t know who to blame; is it the media journalists for writing all this biased sensationalist rubbish in the first place, or is it the irresponsible news consumers for not making even a modicum of effort to critically review what they are reading and taking at face value? All this wouldn’t be so bad except that where there is general population fear, there is somebody selling a cure and making a profit. Michael Moore in his documentary Fahrenheit 911 deftly illustrated the point when he showed how the sale of ridiculous personal safety equipment skyrocketed with each and every media campaign that declared the state of the nations terror level. In the case of Australia there of course is the marketing of flu vaccines to help save people from the evils of bird/swine/cow flu. Which if you look into with even a small amount of research will show a large body of evidence that suggests these vaccines simply don’t work because of the mutation that each flu virus undergoes when passed from host to host, until you get to a point where the virus is a different strain from what you have been inoculated against. However if you follow the trail of money eventually it will end up somewhere in a big pile, and someone or some corporation more than likely is sitting on top of it.
So at this point you could suggest a conspiracy of some sort that this is all manufactured at some top level, but I think that would be by and large, over the top. Human nature being what it is, there is simply no way to effectively organise even a moderately large group of people to serve one general purpose unless you are an outright communist country with a singular leader. No, I think it’s more likely that there are just clever individuals who know how to exploit a particular situation for their own personal or corporate gain by using (and manipulating) the social conditions that already exist.
For example, Australian journalists will always write sensationalist news because most news readers are so used to being shocked that if they aren’t they tend to lose interest quickly in such reportage. This particular style of reportage then creates a situation of fear in the readers, which creates a desire for protection from the scenario that is threatening them. Somebody identifies this desire for protection and translates it into a product that can be commercially produced and sold. This product is then made available and of course the masses follow suit and purchase the product, which in terms buys them peace of mind. There is a low level of social engineering involved, but in this example I would hardly call it organised. There are examples that can be made that show how organisations make very effective use of social marketing as one facet of social engineering to control a population, but that’s for another day. The point here is that the mainstream create this situation for themselves by simply going with the flow, rather than asking some questions that would prove all the fear wrong.
So after 5 days my man flu is tailing out, I’ve been nursing myself with Vick’s Vaporub, dis-solvable paracetamol and vitamin C, and old fashioned bed rest. I’ve complained and whinged, but I knew that I’d recover and that it wasn’t life threatening and didn’t require any cocktail of expensive vaccines to protect myself from. If I’d have listened to the Australian news I probably would have been in fear for my life, but fortunately I don’t do that. I really don’t know why anyone does? Mainstream news is swill and should be treated as such.
Perhaps all this anger is in part because I’ve sick for the last 5 days and I just want to be done with it; the recovery always taking longer than I want. But also because of the stupidity of a system that uses an ordinary sickness to create fear and profit in people that simply let it happen. Each of us can influence this directly by very simply not buying into the fear, and not supporting the fear mongers.
Now wouldn’t that be a world worth living in!
Andy.
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