“Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western society really is? Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them. They are in a particular panic over things that can’t even see – germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants. They are timid, nervous, fretful, and depressed. And even more amazingly, they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like the belief in witchcraft, it’s an extraordinary delusion – a global fantasy worth of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear. Amazing.
“How has this world view been instilled in everybody? Because although we imagine we live in different nations – France, Germany, Japan the US – in fact, we inhabit exactly the same state, the State of Fear…”
PAGE 500-501 State of Fear - Michael Crichton |
