Fear and anxiety in modern society

According to new research from the Mental Health Foundation people in the UK are being more fearful.

A survey of 2,250 adults for the charity found 37% were more frightened or anxious than they used to be, compared with 28% who were not, while 77% thought the world had become more frightening in the past 10 years.

The foundation linked the result to government figures showing an increase from 13.3% to 15% in the proportion of people suffering from anxiety disorders in England from 1993-2007.

Furthermore

The report cited a number of causes for increasing levels of fear:-

• A ‘culture of fear’ evident in the way news coverage gives prominence to worst-case scenarios, such as predictions that the “Millennium Bug” would paralyse computer systems on 1 January 2000.
• The breakdown of social bonds, weakening people’s ability to deal with problems. Four times as many people live alone compared with 50 years ago.

Also, I would guess that alienation and atomisation would figure high in the causes anxiety and fear. And now with a recession, unemployment, redundancy, evictions, poverty and so on this will increase distress. But also a sense of powerlessness will increase as well.

People also perceive that the world around them is a more dangerous place, a risk obsessed society. And the emphasis on surveillance, ironically, increases those fears.

On the issue of the crime, along with the media’s sensationalist and dramatic reportage, fear and anxieties become overwhelming. The whole process of understanding crime creates a mystification as people tend to see crime and criminals through what is presented to us through the media. Though contradictorily these fears, crime for example, could actually provide reassurance.

In late-modern world of uncertainty, ambivalence, chaos even; of risks that are omnipresent but invisible, fear of crime might provide some rather modern reassurances. (Hollway and Jefferson – The risk society in an age of anxiety)

Welfare reform: it’s about putting families first…apparently…

James Purnell now wants to help claimants with alcohol problems back into work. First it was people with drug addictions and now Purnell wants to provide:

…real help for people looking for work and support for all those who need it to get off benefits – whatever the barriers preventing them. We need to look through the eyes of the person defeated by an addiction that keeps them out of work and on the outside of the community and give them the help they need.

We have introduced a new policy that will mean heroin and crack addicts get treatment in return for benefits. We will actually help them rather than simply handing them money which ends up in pockets of drug dealers.

But we can’t abandon anyone to long periods on benefits without help to overcome problems. So that’s why we are going to look at the arrangements for alcoholics on benefits, just as we did for problem drug users, so that people get the help they need to get sober, to get their life back and get back to work.

The appalling Clause 9 of the Welfare Reform Bill reminds me of what Harry Fletcher from NAPO said at the PCS lobby of Parliament on the Welfare Reform Bill in early March of this year, drug users can lose their benefits if they don’t comply with drug treatment programmes. And what attacks the core of civil liberties  is the potential sharing of information between the DWP and the criminal justice system. This utterly undermines and erodes the right to privacy especially having to declare whether you are a user (subject, as well, to invasive urine testing). This further stigmatises people who are already marginalised, it is about coercion and control by the state; ‘do what we say or you’ll your benefits’…. And people will fall off the benefits radar (which NL won’t give a damn about).

And you can bet something similar in the  coercive stakes will be put forward for claimants with alcohol problems.

Purnell feels your pain, he does you know, as he has spoken to, you know, some people regarding recession, relationship breakdowns and unemployment. He may not experience it but doggone it he feels it….

James Purnell also talked to people about their experiences of the recession and the pressure unemployment can put on the family, saying:

I have listened to lots of people here today who have told me how they see their community. Some were getting by or doing well. Some are finding things really tough because they or someone in their family has lost their job in this downturn. Some were struggling long before this downturn arrived. But everyone I met wanted to do the right thing.

Just what is the right thing, Purnell?

Drone warfare

This is part of an interesting but rather scary article about killer drones. No this isn’t the science fiction/double feature at the local multiplex it is what the Pentagon scientists are creating in the labs…for real. Ye Gods…

Whether these drones will be chomping on a cigar while programmed to say in a wooden Austrian accent, ‘Hasta la vista…baby’ as they blow you away remains to be seen.

Welcome to the drone wars of the future. Be afraid be very afraid….

In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg assassin, a “terminator,” back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the underground human resistance of Skynet’s time. You with me so far? That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminator movie and for the multi-millions who saw it, the images of future machine war — of hunter-killer drones flying above a wasted landscape — are unforgettable.

Since then, as Hollywood’s special effects took off, there were two sequels during which the original terminator somehow morphed into a friendlier figure on screen, and even more miraculously, off-screen, into the humanoid governor of California. Now, the fourth film in the series, Terminator Salvation, is about to descend on us. It will hit our multiplexes this May.

Oh, sorry, I don’t mean hit hit. I mean, arrive in.

Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven’t waited for Hollywood. As you sit in that movie theater in May, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings. And in the Pentagon and the labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are already talking about and working on next-generation machines. Post-2020, according to these dreamers, drones will be able to fly and fight, discern enemies and incinerate them without human decision-making. They’re even wondering about just how to program human ethics, maybe even American ethics, into them.

Okay, it may never happen, but it should still make you blink that out there in America are people eager to bring the fifth iteration of Terminator not to local multiplexes, but to the skies of our perfectly real world — and that the Pentagon is already funding them to do so.