The Luddite

In the 6th century, the bacterium Yersinia Pestis caused the first recorded and confirmed outbreak of what is commonly called the "Black Death." At its peak, it killed thousands of Constantinople's residents every day. This horror would return, on and off, for a thousand years. In the 16th-century outbreaks of that same disease, doctors would wear full length black coats and leather masks with a bird-like beak. They filled the beaks with lavender to purify the bad air, which leading scientists considered the cause of the plague. Though their theories are now outdated, covering the wearer's entire body probably did offer some protection, but this technology also terrified patients. One would think that being treated by doctors who knew the latest and greatest science should be comforting. Instead, patients and their communities were confronted by what they saw as a monster dressed as death.

This most recent pandemic killed a confirmed 7 million people, though the excess mortality is a multiple of that. This pandemic was very different in a lot of ways. Centuries of research into the human body has lead to vaccines, a miraculously effective technology. Unlike their 16th century counterparts, modern scientists, now dressed in crisp white coats and swapping leather beaks for N95s, believe that this disease is caused by microscopically small organisms, not bad air. The COVID vaccine contains mRNA, which prepares the immune system to recognize the spike proteins found on these tiny viruses.

What does that really mean to me? I have never had any particular interest in biology. In writing this explanation, I am repeating words that I have been told by others, and arranging them in ways that I have been lead to believe are convincing. Despite this veneer of knowledge about how the vaccine works, I might as well be saying that I trust the wizards who make them, and that I believe these wizards mean us no harm.

But others distrust the wizards, as people are wont to do. They fear for their children. Despite the irrefutable efficacy of vaccines, people still see in them what those who came before us saw in the plague doctors' leather mask and long black robe; they see cold inhuman contrivances they do not understand. They speculate, or often outright claim, that the vaccines bring death, or are responsible for everything from autism to keeping the entire world population docile and compliant. This puts our scientists in a bind, forcing them to do further research on these new claims; they do public education campaigns about their results, holding press conferences and doing interviews, and yet the anti-vax movement grows and grows. In this way, science leads us to knowledge, dispelling doubt and superstition, allowing us to create technology, but these things bring with them further doubt and superstition, beginning the cycle anew. Each new round of paranoia builds on and incorporates the previous scientific findings, often appropriating the vocabulary. The supposed link between autism and vaccines isn't caused by "bad air;" proponents instead use the terms of modern science, like "neurotoxins" and "inflammations."

Does it really have to be this way? Is it a simple fact of life that each new idea or creation must be stripped down to its constituent components, only to be reassembled as paranoid delusion? We can't all know everything. If we wish to use a technology, we must, at least to some capacity, trust its creators about its machinations and intent. We could just accept that and move on, but so often it seems we cannot, choosing instead to assume their motives are malicious.

There appears to be a symmetry here. In other words, it seems there is something about our world that remains fundamentally unchanged, no matter how much science we do or technology we create. In physics, Noether's theorem tells us that if a system has a symmetry, it has a corresponding conserved quantity. For example, because the laws of physics are symmetric with respect to time, we have a conserved quantity, which we call "energy." No matter how much time passes, the total amount of energy in our system will always be the same, though it can change form.

I posit that we are dealing with a similar phenomenon. It seems the laws of our society are symmetric with respect to knowledge, that no matter how much science we have or technology we make, something remains unchanged. I propose we call the resulting conserved quantity "fear." Much like energy, the amount of fear in a system is dependent on the system itself. Some physical systems, like a fictional universe consisting of only a small room with a tank of gasoline, have a lot of energy. That chemical potential energy can be converted to other kinds of energy, like heat, but it cannot go away. A similar universe, otherwise identical but lacking the gas can, can never be the same fiery inferno; it lacks the energy.

We live in a very high fear system. This is an observable phenomenon. Energy, often measured in Joules, is difficult to measure directly. Instead, we measure the height and mass of an object, which we can convert to its gravitational potential energy; we measure speed to know kinetic energy; temperature can be converted to thermal energy; etc. The various forms fear takes can also be easily measured. We can count up all the dollars we spend on our enormous police and military budgets, human beings we incarcerate, guns we own, bombs threats, mass shootings, conspiracy theories, and so on.

We are so afraid of each other that we have chosen to organize our entire economy on the principle that its participants should disregard our shared humanity, choosing instead to rely on mutual suspicion. Here's Adam Smith:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.

In order to survive, each of us must learn not to trust other people, ensuring we continue to live in fear. We are social animals — this is a terrifying experience.

High fear systems must necessarily be rife with superstition, doubt, violence, lies, paranoia, and the like, for those are the various forms in which it manifests. When science is introduced, it cannot remove the fear, only transform it into a new form, the way brakes turn kinetic energy into thermal energy. We may no longer believe that illness is caused by angry, vengeful gods, but many now believe that some illnesses are caused by a global cabal of elites implanting our children with microchips in order to bring about the New World Order (or something like that). Millennia of knowledge about the nature of disease have simply transformed the fear into one that is fundamentally the same, though with a modern vocabulary.

In our efforts to deal with these fears, though we rarely discuss the core phenomenon directly, many advocate for better access to education. In this, we can observe one of the infinite mechanisms by which this fear is not destroyed, only converted into new forms. Our children are forced by law to go to school. If they choose not to go, armed agents of the state will be sent to find them and punish their parents. When they do go, they enter these school buildings through metal detectors. They are forced to do "active-shooter drills," wear transparent backpacks (so teachers can see if they are carrying guns), undergo physical and digital surveillance, and comply with the arbitrary schedules and rules with which every current and former school-child is all too familiar. They are constantly tested and graded in relation to their peers, judged in perpetual competition with each other. Perhaps they do learn more about the biological realities of vaccines, becoming less afraid of the vaccine, but in the process, they also learn not to trust adults or each other. Their fear born of ignorance is thus transformed into distrust, paranoia, and even violence.

Even within education, the phenomenon continues into adulthood. Those who seek higher education in the US are often saddled with crippling, predatory debt. This debt generally cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Any potential enlightenment from this education is tainted with more fear — fear of financial ruin, of civil institutions, and of the very schools from which they received their education.

This high fear dictates so much about our society in the way that the kinetic energy of a car going much too fast dictates the behavior of its passengers. Though we have agency, all our decisions are limited by the ever-present constraint that we are doing something fundamentally wrong — that we are out of control. If our public health officials slightly misspeak during a crisis, as when Dr. Fauci said "fall or winter" instead of "spring" in an August 2021 NPR interview, we swerve wildly the way our speeding vehicle might do when it hits a bump. The New York Post called it his "latest mistake," saying Fauci "has been under fire repeatedly for flip-flopping on his public advice from the early days of the pandemic." Two years later, we barely remember this little gaffe, if at all, because it is fundamentally unimportant, but at the time, it caused many headlines. Fauci had to go on CNN to be "grilled" by their performatively serious anchors, a demeanor they maintain to mask how deeply unserious the whole charade really is.

Fear can also be wielded the way weapons of war wield energy. In a low fear system, we would simply laugh at the New York Post's obviously bad faith reporting, or CNN's anchors' comically furrowed brows. They would be sparks in an empty room. Instead, the sparks catch, because we are all constantly terrified. These organizations attempt to control the form fear takes for their own benefit. Tucker Carlson tries to convert the fear into fear of other, while the Catholic Church, one of the world's largest and most powerful institutions, became so stoking our most existential fears of the unknown, becoming an intermediary between the ignorant and the divine knowledge. When William Tyndale translated the Bible into English, the Church murdered him, because even that glimmer of divine knowledge threatened their cultivated reservoir of ignorant fear in the population they sought to control.

Despite all this, we live in a golden age of knowledge. The last couple centuries have revolutionized our understanding of the natural world. We went from the millennia old belief that disease is caused by unbalanced humors to germ theory; from very rudimentary models of the atom, like the "plum pudding" model, to understanding atoms so well we can now split them into their smaller, previously unknown components, and harvest the energy. Look at any academic field, and it is highly likely you'll find recent major advances unparalleled in the history of said field.

This presents us with a problem. You cannot just science away fear, but most of our collective fear, for most of history, is fear of the unknown. It is a great store of fear that our newfound knowledge is rapidly converting. Sometimes, we trade this kind of ignorant fear into another, the way a see-saw swaps the potential energy of its two sides. We have known the Earth is round since the ancient Greeks, yet Flat Earthers are a growing, mostly-online community today. They have even founded the International Flat Earth Research Society, appropriating the language and aesthetic of science into their paranoid delirium.

Other times, ignorant fear is transformed into other, more dangerous kinds of fear. Germ theory gave us antibiotics, but we have overused them, creating a crisis of resistance we seem powerless to avoid. We are warned of the dangers by institutions like the CDC. A lower fear society would accept this warning, but we cannot; we convert our previous ignorant fear of disease into a conspiracy theory about how this is all Big Pharma scaremongering, probably to make some drug company money by keeping us sick (I won't link to these sources for obvious reasons, but I am now personally more afraid for having watched a few of these YouTube videos).

Though infinite mysteries still remain, our knowledge of physics has uncovered much about the very substance of reality. Until recently, this was considered the purview of the most esoteric, metaphysical speculation. This has displaced some of our metaphysical fears of the unknownable nature of reality into fears that others would create a weapon with this newfound knowledge. We then went ahead and did so, unleashing horrific violence at Hiroshima, then again at Nagasaki. This new kind of fear stuck with us throughout the Cold War, during which an entire generation lived minutes away from complete annihilation.

Nuclear weapons were created to make us safe from the other people, who then also created nuclear weapons. In this, we repeat the lesson of the vaccine story — science and technology cannot remove fear. Americans are terrified of each other, and therefore purchase guns, a technology. These guns make us further afraid of each other, so we buy more guns. For every gun purchase, the owners' fear is displaced, but total fear remains the same. As a result we have an entire terrified population, armed to the teeth, and demonstrably less safe.

Sometimes our fear is so great that, like the unstable potential energy of a ball on top of a hill, we invent technologies that exist only in our imaginations, just to find more stable forms of fear. In 2016, American diplomats in the Cuban embassy started reporting "Anomalous Health Incidents." This has become known to the public as Havana Syndrome. Reputable journalists and government officials breathlessly speculated about the specifics of the evil communist ray guns that were somehow directing microwave or radio energy at our diplomats throughout the world, causing all sorts of symptoms. Earlier this year, American intelligence agencies concluded in a report that these incidents were almost certainly not the results of evil communist ray guns. This wasn't even the first time Americans had panicked about communist ray guns, causing an interational incident, nor was it the last time we experienced some sort of mass psychosis about an evil communist technology. Starting the 28th of January 2023, American media spent a week live-streaming footage of a Chinese high-altitude balloon. As it turned out, the balloon was a spy balloon, but the panicked response was so obviously disproportionate to any actual threat it posed — an overreaction made all the more absurd by the contrast of the balloon with a cheery blue sky, flanked by talking heads yammering about the dangers of a rising China. Americans are terrified of communists, and these examples highlight the complex relationship between technology and fear. Sometimes, new technologies make us afraid. Other times, our fear is so great that we create nonexistent and/or wildly exaggerated technologies to justify it. We fear wizards, especially communist ones, even when they do not exist.

This is not to say that technology cannot make us safer. The relationship between fear and safety is a tenuous one at best. Though many fear the COVID vaccines, they have made us much safer. Many car technologies have made car collisions much safer than they were fifty years ago. In most countries, car accident related deaths are in decline. In the US, however, these deaths are increasing, fueled by our stupid giant trucks and SUVs. Putting aside the obvious and well-documented problem that these trucks are too big to even see pedestrians (Americans would never walk anywhere anyway), this results in what is known as "crash incompatibility." Big trucks are designed with stiff frames, while small cars have crumple zones. Crumple zones, a technology, work really, really well in keeping their passengers safe, unless they hit a giant truck with a stiff frame, which acts like a battering ram and smashes through the crumple zone, killing the other passengers. As a result, Americans view small cars as unsafe, even though, had we all smaller cars, we'd all be safer. Our fear has undone the progress technology made.

For similar reasons, the internet has not brought about enlightenment, as many had hoped. Instead, when given access to a global repository of almost all human knowledge, we find new, creative, and often dangerous ways of being afraid. Our world is so overwhelmingly full of fear that the biggest internet technology companies have chosen to follow the example of the medieval church. They convert our fear of being isolated and lonely into a frenetic, breathless, doom-scrolling fear that hollows out our very souls and keeps us engaged. There are so many stories of internet-fueled conspiracy theories destroying families, including a recent, horrific murder and police shootout. Facebook is what we feared the plague doctor to be. It comes to cure us of our loneliness with the most modern science and technology, but instead provides cold, unfeeling, inhuman death. This is not a metaphor. Facebook, the tool that supposedly connects us, has been instrumental in genocide. There is no worse thing to have done, yet we do nothing about it, because we are all too busy doom-scrolling, scared out of our minds.

There is no scientific finding or technological invention that can solve this problem. Fear cannot be engineered away, nor can it be eliminated with knowledge. It is a feature of the system. Technology and knowledge can offer paths to safety, but they cannot give us safety. For that, we must set aside our fear and work together to remake our world such that we are not all so terrified of each other all the time.