Fear mongering is good for business. Anyone that disagrees with that will either find themselves to be ignorant or deliberately misleading, perhaps due to special 'interest' in said fear mongering business. After all it isn't pulling parallels to some sort of secret society, the fraternities of the Da Vinci Code or the infamous illuminati. Rather, it is standing in full naked glory in the sunlight, or in the pouring rain depending upon which part of the world you talk about. Regardless, the weather is besides the point here.
Having a strong source of demand is the pinnacle of any product life cycle. One that prolongs itself, with each purchase driving up the demand, is not afar from a gift from the gods for corporate. Well, fear is just that. It works in various ways, a common market being new parents. When handed a screaming, puking, scrawny hairless prune of a thing, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. Ever since Locke spoke of how children were clean slates, and how every childhood experience could make or break their life, new parents have found themselves walking on eggshells. Companies saw this as an opportunity to push for haute diapers and eye wateringly expensive 'cognitive enhancing toys' promising to turn their kids into the next Einstein or Curie.
It doesn't end there, we've seen these tactics used for everything from birth to death. Fear of an inadequate education has parents parting with bundles of cash for ludicrous private school fees, fear of missing out drives people to buy the newest phone, fear of a fire drives home insurance policies and fear of death, or rather the fear for the financial standing of your loved ones if you make an untimely exit, makes you take out life insurance. The market of fear follows you even after you've kicked the bucket- your loved ones are nagged into the expensive coffins lest your soul not find peace without the right cushioning.
But, we've made peace with it. Deep down we're all well aware of this tactic and know matter how much we might insist on our adventurous souls, we are cautious and boring. For most of us, if given the chance, we'd happily trade in a few extra bucks for that additional safety wrap for both us and our family. So what if you don't smoke or drink, work from home and maintain an excessively ordered exercise regime. Your roof could fall upon your head. Who'll pay for Timmy's college then? The fact that a lot of us do in fact smoke, drink, eat carelessly and venture out in traffic, how we see global supply chains and increased competition in the job market, only goes to prove how statistics aside, we're all willing slaves to the fear.
Then there's the other fear. Not the irrational kind that a toddler may face, nor the social anxiety that plagues much of the youth, but rather the fear often publicly endorsed. The kind we're seeing now, with Covid-19 making its rounds. "Stay at home" is a phrase passing from one politicians mouth to the next, it's been appropriated by actors and singers, transcending borders and languages. It's short, catchy and seemingly works. China's "stay at home" order, while certainly being draconian and almost apocalyptic, is lauded for its efficiency.
It works.
We know it does and thus it gains a pass. At least amongst most people. Countries have certainly seen their share of crowds protesting the lockdown. Ramadan coinciding with it has made it harder to get the especially pious to comply. Elon Musk, the technology tycoon behind SpaceX and Tesla, joined in on the upheaval, calling the lockdown "fascist". Regardless of those anomalies, the public around the world, especially those with greater patriotic sentiment- which when called upon, whether it be to save the NHS in the UK or the evening cheering in India, has worked surprisingly well (the fines in the former and the unusually vigilant policing in the latter have certainly helped). You could go as far as to say that the fear, with the emphasis on flattening the infection curve, has been justified.
But there's the other sort of fear. The kind that has whole countries and politicians acting like a bunch of toddlers, carelessly passing the blame around. The president of the US referred to it as the Wuhan wirus, then going against his own intelligence agencies recommendations that the virus hadn't been cooked up in a lab, insinuated just that. The coincidence, which was mistaken for causation, amongst countries developing 5G technologies and Covid cases, added fuel to the fire. The Chinese government hasn't simply played the victim of these conspiracy theories, fueling their own, finding covert US operations to blame. As China moved to make investments in HDFC, an Indian bank, there wasn't a shortage of theories in India that portrayed the virus as all part of an intricate evil Chinese plan to buy the whole of the Indian economy.
When Australia urged for an international investigation into the source of the virus, China amped up the hostility. That wouldn't be very wise, they said. The hermit nature along with China's unusually low cases has left many, never before in a situation of such global panic, scratching their heads as they grow more susceptible to these theories. That's a folly which we need to find a cure against.