This was particularly eye-opening:
“...the state may actively want to instill fear in the population, thereby contributing to the making of mass hysteria. Illustrating this point is the leakage of an internal paper of the German Department of the Interior during the first weeks of the COVID-19 crisis [
101]. In the paper, the state experts recommended that the government should instill fear in the German population. In order to spread fear, the paper endorsed three communication strategies.
First, the state authorities should stress the breathing problems of COVID-19 patients because human beings have a primordial fear of death by suffocation [
102,
103], which can easily trigger panic [
104]. Second,
the experts emphasized that fear should also be instilled in children, even though there is next to no risk to children´s own health. However, children could get easily infected by meeting and playing with other children. According to the report, children should be told that when they infect their parents and grandparents in turn, they could suffer a distressful death at home. This communication advice intended to invoke anxiety and feelings of guilt.
Instilling guilt is another measure used by governments to make the population more supportive [
105]. The recommended message instills fear of being responsible for infecting others who die a distressful death. Third, the German government was advised to
mention the possibility of unknown long-term irreversible health damage caused by a SARS-CoV-2 infection and the possibility of a sudden and unexpected death of people who were infected. All these communication recommendations were intended to increase fear in the population.
Fear, at the end, is an important foundation of a government’s power. As Henry H. Mencken put it: “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” [
106] The overreaction of government to a perceived threat then fosters anxiety.”