People at all times were afraid of something. Psychologists consider this property a natural gift: a creature that knows no fear would be defenseless against any external danger.
The same psychologists say that there are situations and objects in front of which a person will always feel fear: height, darkness, pain, a sudden change in the environment, strangers, etc.
But the depth of the fear experienced, the mass and the number of common phobias, in theory, should change. Is it worth a person of the XXI century to be afraid (massively) of, say, witches or the evil eye? However, in fact, progress does not pacify phobias, but simply changes their "assortment". According to the World Health Organization, over the past 10 years, the number of phobias has grown from 300 to 1,030.
People who have a constant feeling of fear have taken the form of a mental disorder, that is, literally, sick - about 7% of the total population of the planet. And this share is incomparably higher than all in those countries that have succeeded more than others in the field of scientific, technical and social progress. The secret lies in the human unconscious. Fear is a basic instinct that never leaves our heads. Therefore, when the society of progress coped with the main sources of fears, the instinct of phobias had nowhere to do with their energy, from this people begin to fear something else, at first glance, completely harmless (long words, asymmetric things, clouds and even sleep on the right side, clowns, phones and confusion).
The enemy does not sleep
Of the serious and objective modern phobias, the most common is the fear of becoming a victim of a terrorist attack. So, in Moscow, according to polls of sociologists, up to 70% of residents are afraid of this. Muscovites can be understood: they have seen what terrorism is. But similar feelings are experienced by residents of those cities and countries where the likelihood of serious terrorist attacks is many times lower than the risk of being hit by a car. The point, apparently, is not how real this or that threat is. Although terrorism is a relatively new phenomenon, the fear that it provokes can hardly be called a newfangled phobia. Many experts believe that terrorism has just actualized the traditional human fear of an aggressive stranger, a secret villain.
In different eras and among different peoples, this villain had his own guise: a witch, a freemason, a Protestant, a communist … Now the insidious enemy has established itself in the mass consciousness in an Eastern man with a bomb. Another phobia grows from the same root, the activation of which is noted in all developed countries - ethnophobia. All the same fear of the stranger, fueled today by mass migration. In Moscow, for example, 55% of residents consider the expansion of the non-Slavic diaspora an undoubted threat. But there are countries where the Slavs are treated in the same way.
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Fear of big cities
Truly new phobias can be considered those that are generated by changes in the human way of life. For example, the disintegration of the traditional family has led to the fact that more and more people suffer from an obsessive fear of loneliness (autophobia). This nightmare worries 40% of Europeans today, including Russians. From the same series - the fear of old age (gerontophobia), which torments every fourth inhabitant of Europe. Humanity owes many new phobias to urbanization. Inhabitants of megalopolises, accustomed to life in the crowded areas of densely populated areas, began to panic fear of open spaces (agoraphobia). Moreover, this space does not have to be an endless steppe, for some, in order to be covered with sweat, it is enough to be in an empty city square or in a room with not curtained windows. The disease of big cities is called psychologists and fear of public speaking (peyrophobia).
This disease makes it difficult to perform any action that can attract the attention of others. There is, in fact, a whole bunch of phobias: the fear of expressing one's own opinion, talking to a stranger, meeting a girl on the street, speaking in front of a large audience … These fears are based on the fear of hitting the face in the dirt, getting a turn from the gate or showing their incompetence.
More susceptible to this kind of phobias than others are people who, by the nature of their work, need to care about their own reputation - businessmen, top managers, heads of institutions. Since the pace of life is rapidly accelerating, and the ways to achieve success are becoming more and more difficult, lissophobia began to acquire a massive character - the fear of not being able to withstand the race of life and going crazy. Another alarming trend is that fears are getting younger. 95% of patients in psychiatric clinics with phobic disorders are people under 40 years of age.
Trade in fear
Why didn't enlightenment and technological progress save humanity from phobias, but, on the contrary, "loaded" us with new nightmares? This question can be answered by the question: does humanity want to be cured of fears? After all, only psychiatrists are involved in treatment. But the whole industry of fear is engaged in the cultivation of phobias in the modern world. Fear has become a commodity that costs nothing but sells dearly.
For example, it is known that in car accidents hundreds of times more people die than in plane crashes. Nevertheless, many are afraid of flying by air, and mass autophobia is not noticed. This is understandable: any plane crash, in whatever corner of the planet it may occur, immediately becomes a television event, a picture that will be shown to millions of people and more than once. And a car accident is often a trivial episode. This is the principle of selecting information in the media: good is the news that can hit the viewer (reader, listener) on the nerves. At the level of physiology, this is just an adrenaline shock that "turns on" the addressee.
We can name a number of phobias that have arisen from scratch and are purely information products: fear of aliens, fear of cosmic catastrophes (including the recent syndrome of 12/21/12), robots or the Internet. Needless to say, the business of insurance companies is built on the exploitation of phobias. Manufacturers of medicines, cosmetics, and various kinds of hygiene services are also successful in this field. If you believe the advertising, today's men after 40 years almost completely suffer from prostatitis. Naturally, this dramatically increases the sales of the corresponding drugs and the income of urologists.
Psychiatrists suspect that a number of phobic disorders, such as phalacrophobia (fear of baldness), rityphobia (fear of wrinkles), osmophobia (fear of the natural odor of one's body), would not be known to medicine if they did not generate income for perfume manufacturers. As well as the film industry specializing in disaster films. This is by the way about the movie "2012". This also applies to all sorts of apocalyptic sects.
The "fear trade" is the most popular of political technologies. Whenever politicians need to enlist the support of citizens to carry out some dubious operation, suppress the resistance of opponents or prevent a possible failure in the elections, they throw out some kind of "horror story" into society that can paralyze the mass consciousness.
It can be Saddam Hussein's "biological weapon", the "conspiracy of the oligarchs", the threat of "communist revenge", "the war of civilizations" - any fiction that can inspire confidence and fear. With the current means of disseminating information, you can suggest anything you want. Moreover, humanity has not invented any social institutions and structures dealing with fear prevention. Only mental hospitals remain, but this is the lot of the very sick.