I’ve just finished two books of the Swedish author, David Eberhard who is a psychiatrist, entitled: ”In the land of security addicts” and ”The land of the easily offended”. David is in large parts touching the symptoms of fear culture but points out a straight responsibility to regulatory and governmental officials and in the end our politicians. He concludes that the state wants to protect us by using many forms of restrictions upon our way of life. Protect us from what? Anxiety, mostly regarding death, would be one of the more dominant drives for more security. This is similar to the previous discussions in this blog regarding terrorism acts and preparations for terrorism that would bring up a need for more restrictions and surveillance of communication. This is not dealt with in David’s books, but I regard that fear in any form always drives a security process.
It is interesting that fear culture has two faces, security and fear. What we need to clear out though, is who’s fear and who’s security? We also need to keep in mind that there are large commercial interests in technical products and other services in security business. It is not so far-fetched to assume that those commercial interests do not want to pose the fear argument but in some way getting other doing that. That could be media, government or researchers, bodies that would gain as well on pushing fear arguments. Media wants publicity, government wants justification and the researcher wants more funding. It may also be that all of these three work together in a hidden or open pact. I will comment the books mentioned earlier in my next post.
