Fear Is (Literally) the Mind Killer

How the system's propaganda warps our brains...

When people are afraid, they are more willing to give the "authorities" more power—usually at their expense of their own.

World War III, terrorism, mass shootings, disease, mass immigration, economic turmoil, communism, fascism—everywhere you look, people are understandably terrified. These fears fuel the tightening grip of authoritarian politicians and government as the masses turn to them for protection and relief.

None of this is revelatory. More interesting is the biological dynamic that goes along with the age-old tactic of instilling fear in populations to keep them under control. This dynamic helps explain why fearmongering is so effective—and how it helps keep people chained to the system.

Primitive Instincts in the Modern World

The "fight-flight-or-freeze" response, the body's mechanism to defend against and survive threats, is common knowledge. Heart rate, breath rate, and blood pressure increase, the body's sensitivity to pain decreases, pupils dilate, and cortisol and other stress hormones are released, among other automatic responses that help us survive dangers. One of the brain's most primitive systems, the limbic system, plays a key role in this response.

Before modern times, fight-flight-or-freeze helped people survive direct threats like predators, extreme weather, or physical conflict with other humans. It is still essential today for life-threatening situations, which remain an immutable part of the human experience.

However, the realities of present-day life trigger the fight-or-flight stress response over less dramatic concerns. Whether it's the stress of paying bills and taxes, interpersonal relationships, constant stimulation from television, social media, and the internet, or the never-ending news cycle, many humans are caught in a chronic state of stress to varying degrees. While most people may not be caught in a maximum capacity, life-or-death stress response all the time, nearly half of Americans report feeling frequent stress. Anxiety rates are on the rise. A 2022 survey found over a quarter of Americans are so stressed they can’t function.

Stay Scared

Nowhere is this hyper-stressed paradigm more apparent than in the political realm. Mainstream and alternative media alike perpetually hammer home reasons why people should be afraid and on edge. Threats are everywhere, domestically and abroad, and something must be done about them. That "something" often includes giving those in power more of it—more funding, more control, and consequently more capacity to intrude on privacy and freedom.

This is easy to recognize with exceptional events like 9/11 and COVID-19, but it also characterizes every election cycle: Politicians and the news media continually stress the chaos that will unfold should the wrong person and party take power. It's always the MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF YOUR LIFETIME, and if your candidate doesn't win, civilization is going to collapse. Nearly three-quarters of Americans reported feeling stressed about the election this year. Another recent poll found seven in 10 Americans consider the country’s future a “significant stressor.” This is not unique to 2024.

It seems obvious that when people are caught in stress, reactivity, and fear, they aren't thinking clearly. Rationality goes out the window as they rush to find someone else—someone who has power or is seeking it—to make their discomfort go away. But why?

The following is my working theory.

“Fear is the mind-killer”-Dune

Full disclosure: I didn’t formally study neuroscience, but I have a strong interest in it (I almost majored in a subfield, but math prerequisites deterred me). I’ve also spent most of this year repairing my own glitched-out stress response with a neuroplasticity-based neural retraining program, which has led me down rabbit holes like this one.

When the brain's survival mechanism is activated, the prefrontal cortex’s functioning is reduced. This is the brain's highest functioning region. Among many other responsibilities, the prefrontal cortex plays a key role in rational decision-making, concentration, complex learning, and reasoning. This region of the brain most resembles the concept of the “mind.”

When the fight-or-flight response is activated, this part of the brain is understandably turned down as the more primitive, instinctual regions take over. This makes sense if you're running from a tiger—not if you're navigating complex political issues, choosing which lesser evil to rule over you, or watching stressful events on social media and television. As scary as these may feel, they are not usually immediate threats to most people. Yet consuming the news cycle is linked to increased stress, anxiety, and depression (I think it’s worth mentioning here that the brain rewiring program I’m doing strongly advises participants to avoid the news while rewiring their overactive nervous system).

Chronic activation of the stress response can have significant health consequences, affecting nearly all systems in the body over time. Stress-linked conditions include well-known ones, like cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease, and digestive dysfunction. A less obvious physical consequence of chronic stress is the impairment and atrophy of structures—dendrites and spines—within the prefrontal cortex. Chronic stress literally changes the physical structure of the brain.

This can result in weakened connectivity and decreased signal firing, which is problematic because connectivity and firing are essential for higher cognition, abstract thought, and working memory. At the same time, the amygdala, which is key for emotional regulation and plays a major role in the limbic system and fight-or-flight response, can become overactive. These mechanisms effectively rewire the brain to deprioritize critical thinking and hyper-focus on threats and survival.

Given the collective reactivity continually mounting in society, it's hard not to wonder if this type of brain dysfunction is occurring on a mass scale to some degree (as with chronic stress causing other health problems). I obviously can't prove it, but if a chronic stress response depletes people's critical thinking centers over time, why wouldn't this reflect in the external world and society?

Chaos breeds more of it

With the neverending news cycle and relentless onslaught of fear-inducing stories and developments, it seems highly plausible that this ongoing deterioration of brain function fuels people's descent further into the hive mind—toward the herd-driven, hysterical reactions that increasingly define political discourse. It also likely weakens their ability to see through high-intensity, neverending streams of propaganda.

None of this is to say that everything that plays out in the news cycle is a ruling class conspiracy to amass more control (that said, it has been widely established that various government agencies and political actors have intentionally and deceptively crafted narratives that serve their interests). Nor is it to say that everyone with chronic stress desires authoritarian rule.

But given how well-established the link between stress and cognitive function is, it’s a connection worth considering. When everything is high-stakes, civilization-ending, and life-or-death in the world of politics—and when government is so massive that it has the power to directly affect you—there is very little time to respond. There is only time to react, and people's emotional, fear-driven reactions consistently lead them to vote for corrupt politicians who seize increasingly more power. Unsurprisingly, politicians constantly incite fear and warn of the catastrophes that will ensue should their competition prevail.

People are terrified of their fellow humans and what harm they might cause if they gain power through elections and the government. Sadly, they clamor to the institution doing the dividing and conquering to save them. Few stop to consider that if their perceived enemies can oppress them through the State so easily, perhaps the State should not have even more power. Regardless, this dynamic is unsurprising considering we receive programming from childhood that the system offers the best way to solve our problems. Voting is our recourse, and the government is an extension of ourselves. Is it any surprise that terrified, activated people turn to the system to make their fears go away?

Breaking the cycle

None of this is to say that fears about current events and the state of the world are unwarranted. These feelings are normal reactions given the circumstances. However, there are dire consequences when the very system that creates so many things to fear (and masquerades as the solution) continually stokes these terrors: It keeps people in a state of panic where they beg that same system to save them. Clouded by fear and caught in perpetual stress, they are desperate for relief.

It doesn't have to be this way. More and more humans are seeking peace and awareness, internally and externally. An increasing number of people are disconnecting from the fear-driven paradigm altogether and seeking non-government, decentralized solutions to centralized problems that are rooted in love over fear.

It is possible, if not essential, to turn down the stress response—not only for our health but also as a rebellion against a seemingly omnipotent system that feeds on our perpetual fear and dysregulation.

Note: I have updated this article to change the wording from “it physically draws blood away from the frontal lobes, including the prefrontal cortex” to “the prefrontal cortex’s functioning is reduced.” While the original source I used explicitly says blood is drawn away from the frontal lobes, I found this difficult to confirm explicitly in other research and so modified the sentence to more accurately reflect my findings.