[mikkupikku]

During the 20th century the American government (as well as others) put a lot of effort into finding ways to control people. Drugs, control of the media, MK Ultra and Mockingbird are just two examples of many. Everything more or less failed. Dosing unsuspecting civilians with LSD doesn't have much useful effect.

But one thing worked, and they should have known it all along. Fear. If you can make people afraid, you can control them. They want us to fear birds. They want us to fear our neighbors. They want us to fear other governments, and faceless terror organizations that are probably hiding in your bushes outside, if you see something, say something!

[BriggyDwiggs42]

“They want us to fear birds” is wild man

[bavent]

Good thing birds aren’t real.

[mikkupikku]

They've been beating the bird flu drum for years, and why? Suppose bird flu is a real threat, what is the public meant to do about it? Stop eating birds? There is no pragmatic course of action anybody but highly specialized scientists can take to counter this alleged threat, and yet they keep beating the war drum, trying to make everybody afraid. Fear is the point.

[JumpCrisscross]

> what is the public meant to do about it?

By this logic, any coverage of international relations is also a conspiracy.

[markus_zhang]

Technically they are dinosaurs man. Ancient fear comes back.

[disambiguation]

Alfred hitchcock was ahead of his time.

[jfengel]

They did know it all along. It's been used since time immemorial.

But mass media and social media have given it new opportunities. Ironically I think we all expected that having access to more information would have been a tool against that, but it turns out to be much less effective at explaining fear than conjuring it.

[engineer_22]

You're right!