A Hypervigilant pilot will give everyone on the plane the jitters. If leaders act like there is always a need to be vigilant, then their subordinates, underlings, staff, workers, followers, will panic and spread panic. The good leader is calm, they inspire rational action, they help the mass or the mob to better use judgement more than passion when facing a difficulty. This is an observation, not me, I am no leader most of the time.

The hyper vigilant, yet powerless, individual has little impact on their situation, nobody is looking to them for direction, they do not make others panic, they just appear crazy to most people’s observation. They are an outlier. Hypervigilance is when you are too focussed to think, when the possibility of something bad happening causes you to only focus on the something bad that may or may not happen, it is a debilitating psychological state of readiness for the event that you are trying to be ready for, the event that is the worst case scenario in your head. The opposite of rumination (where you cannot let go of a past event and must continually think it out after the fact), hypervigilance does not let us get away from the events of the future that we may fear, it makes us make decisions based on those fears, like how we use our democratic tokens, or manage the safety of our family unit.

According to Rick Roderick, a tactic used often in politics is to position a rival as banal, he describes this as “banalization”. The more ridiculous you could make a person look, by making claims about them that are merely speculative, the less impactful you make the truths they may tell. Jesse Jackson had this done to him, Michael Foot and Tony Benn also, and in recent times Corbyn. Nobody listens to the guy that is seen as ridiculous. On the other side of the coin is that person who is taken seriously even though they are in error mostly, or in fact a clown. These are the powerful individuals that have a position, but have no real business occupying said position, they have been enabled. I refer to the Boris Johnsons and Donald Trumps and Nigel Farages of this world, pseudo intellectuals with no basis to their utterances other than coming to believe their own bullshit because others have fostered it. Powerful people surround themselves with people that make them feel like they are smart and correct, they rarely invite challenge, and when they meet it they try to change the subject or make a joke or be convivial. They make statements that are not true and hope their charisma will carry them, they cite the outlier as the model for the average, they basically do bad science and try to make it look like intellectualism.

Imagine one day you are the secretary of state for Transport, the next you are the secretary of state for education. How long does it take you, a politician, to start speaking as if you are an authority on the subject of your new role? We see this happen over and over again, people with a degree in finance running healthcare, folks with no skills in statistical analysis pursuing house building or social space initiatives in cities. Yes they will be advised, but shouldn’t the advisor be in charge instead? Clearly Dominic Cummings is a much smarter individual than the clown Bojo, so were all the Covid Scientists, maybe Bojo would have done a lot better if he had set his own ego aside and listened instead of directing? I’m not saying I agree with Cummings, perish the thought, but his plan had thought behind it, it may have seen fruition if Johnson’s ego had not been in the way of it. I wouldn’t have enjoyed the success because this is a right wing thinker.

Jitters is the term I have used here for the panic that one person, or a body of people, can export from their own psyche to the psyche of others. It is inspirational panic, hysteria can be the result, and this hysteria is useful. What I am saying is that everything we are worried about comes from what our leaders, in every situation, want us to be worried about. Every wolf at the door is created by somebody to scare us. We fear the little brown man getting off the boat with no shoes on because people with purpose tell us that he is the reason our NHS is in crisis. This is fear as directed, weaponised fear.

We fear the Crazed world leader, the one that is not our pal, who intends to crush us and steal our freedoms, while at the same time we fear that the crazed world leader, the one that is our pal and wants to crush our perceived enemy, might fail if we even slightly criticise, scrutinise, or reveal, his similar barbaric methods. We fear that those same world leaders might make our olive oil prices rise, or lead to a shortage of toilet paper, or take the oil or grain that they own away from our needy grasp.

We fear that the regulations that once protected the citizen against the greed of the financiers (checks and balances) will create an uncompetitive landscape of money dealing so as to ruin our financial position in world terms, we fear this because we are told to by the biased press and political bodies that this will be the result and it will be bad for us. We are becoming conditioned into fearing the very thing that protects us, the people, against the nefarious actors in pinstriped suits (Farage et al).

We fear that our politicians are constrained by environmentalism and crazy lefties with their notions of freedom of expression and political engagement. We fear this because we don’t remember the generations before us that worked hard and sacrificed much to constrain the powerful on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the larger body of citizens. This is where human rights comes from, where health and safety at work comes from, where the preservation of life and the right to the basics of human dignity comes from. What fear mongers want is more control, they tell us it is for our benefit that freedoms are traded for feelings of safety, and that once unconstrained they will look after us. History tells us a different story, one of slavery and poverty and subjugation and empire and greed. The world became a better place following world wars, not because of the wars but because of the rebuilds of the aftermath. It was the necessary lurch to the left in the west that made the most difference in history when it comes to mass human emancipation and political engagement/action. They want you to fear that this is unsustainable, and the rise of parties like Reform UK and their ilk all across Europe is proof that we are all following along.

We fear the press, as if they are after our juicy secrets, we fear them enough to enact the laws called for by celebrities and business owners and politicians, again we hobble the important mechanisms of society to suit the purposes of the powerful and against our own best interests (for they are the exposers of lies and the scrutinisers of the fabric of power). This is paradoxical, the money men buy the newspapers so that they cannot do news, so that it is they and not the journalists that control the narrative, then they and their cohort further hobble the journalists by finding outliers (criminal journalists) and make them the example of the whole bunch. We jail the truth tellers on trumped up charges and promote the propaganda makers that spout unsupported mistruths, I cannot get Farage off my TV screen but I have to go to the further extremes of media to absorb credible political speakers that cannot be bought!

We fear sexual liberty, we fear it that much that we will ban it from TV yet let our children learn all manner of violence from their programmes and games. We fear the educated mind, our school system is designed and manipulated to produce non-thinkers, accepters, adopters of canons. We fear that somebody might read a book, the wrong book, and foster the sort of thoughts that maybe challenge the status quo. This is hidden behind the false claim, false in a nominally liberal and democratic society anyways, that there are people who are better at deciding what we can absorb than we are. The mechanism of this is not the prohibiting of this material, just the making unavailable of it. When you can reach for the Bible from the school library shelves, but there is no Nietzsche or Nabokov or Dostoevsky available then you know you are in a controlled environment and subject to the motivations of those that hold power and wish to decide what is best that you fear or support.

Fear not what you may currently fear, these may not be your real concerns, you may have been pointed at the wrong target deliberately. Fear the who that made you jittery…

Paul S Wilson