I’m on a bit of a BBC documentary binge atm. Though this clip is an hour long, you get some of the idea after only watching the first ten minutes. This is another BBC documentary by Adam Curtis, called the Power of Fear and Nightmares.
This documentary argues how the nature of politics in the west has endured a very significant shift in incentives in the past couple of decades. Politicians in the past were focussed on progressed, achieving goals and bringing about good for the public. Now, their role is one that solely protects us from looming dangers like global terrorism and global warming. Adam Curtiss, in his documentary, argues that these dangers are grossly exaggerated if not fabricated to keep a certain ruling elite in power at the expense of spreading fear throughout a society. Politics is no longer a business of bringing about good. Instead, politicians have become managers who can control our fear and claim to know how to protect us from them.
He explains how the fear of Al-Qaeda after 9/11 was hyperbole to say the least. The American media claimed Al-Qaeda had sleeper cells in over 60 countries, including the United States. Additionally, they claimed of Al-Qaedas extensive military arsenal, their hidden bunkers inside caves, and their shadow influence within politics themselves. Adam Curtiss’ basic arguement is that the political ruling elite keep themselves in power by fabricating and emphasizing certain dangers, and claiming to have solutions to them, to spread fear to all their voters and convince them that they (the politicians) can address these problems front on.
It is probably obvious that many parallels can be drawn between this and Stuart Hall’s Moral Panic. In the same way that terrorism and Al-Qaeda’s threat was a gross exaggeration by politicians and the media, the fear of muggings in Britain was very much the same. The introduction of a new label (both “terrorism” and “muggings”) gave rise to a new fear of a particular social problem. This lead to the politics to readjust itself to address these issues and make sure they were dealt with in the appropriate manner. These new labels and the media’s responsibility for portraying them as a “new strain” of crimes/dangers lead to a dissipation of fear throughout the mass public.
I think these two points (the one made by the documentary, the other by Stuart Hall in ‘Moral Panic’) is that crime is not as clear cut and statistically grounded as it is portrayed. The use of labels can lead to the rise of an apparent crime, when in actuality there has not been any new crime at all. A perfect example of a by product of this mentality is the color-coded terror alert warnings (yellow, orange and red) that were on the news for years after september 11th. I lived in NYC for all of that time, and even when the terror alerts were orange or even red, nothing ever happened! It was just a tool to spread fear.
-Nikhil
I very much agree with the way you linked the article on the Social History of a Moral Panic with that aspect of the documentary on Bernays. Especially the shift in strategy in the Western mind, in moving from that goal of constant progression (impossible and needs many resources to sustain that kind of growth) versus (far cheaper and efficient in maintaining and consolidating state power towards a controllable end) using fear to create and shift given perceptions when needed. With the example Al Qaeda we can clearly see the vast differences between perceptions held by the public and the reality of that organization’s ability to perform “terrorist acts”.
I do like Adam Curtis’s connection of the ruling elite and the creation (defining/labeling) of a social problem and the necessary responses, but i feel that it lacks inclusion of some of basic structural elements that complement that sort of phenomena.
In terms of the Moral Panic and the power of the “label”, the ability to seemingly conjure forth a social problem from disparate actions and patterns into some sort of clear narrative is quite terrifying indeed. It says a lot about current theories that dominate the world, and more specifically what “fictions” that people choose to subscribe to.
In these works is the importance of perception, whether it is conceived through statistical analysis or the insanity that is represented within the color coded terror alerts that used to dot the daily news cycle. I guess the next issue would be that in labeling these misperceptions perpetuated by media and competing power structures, what solutions may we hope to enact and how does it play into our own interests.