Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it. It should not be suffered to tyrannise in the imagination, to raise phantoms of horror or to beset life with supernumerary distresses.
Samuel Johnson in the Rambler (1761)
No-one’s disputing that very hot weather can be challenging, even dangerous, for some people. But I’ve been fascinated by the news coverage of the heatwave over the last week or so, largely because I’m currently touring in the American West, as I often am. Reading the British news one could be forgiven for thinking the country was on the brink of destruction.
However, it also links into an accumulating culture of fear which is having a paralysing effect on wider society. It’s been developing for years, driven not only by a news media craving stories, but also government seeking ever more control over our lives, and a vast industry capitalising on promoting fear to sell solutions, reassurance and ‘peace of mind’.
Out here the weather is seriously dangerous in ways most of we Brits have little or no idea. About two weeks ago I was driving across South Dakota into North Dakota through epic downpours that were like carwashes for the gods, and in 80mph winds. But the place carried on, as we did. I drive around 10,000 miles in the American West annually and I have developed a healthy regard for the weather, without letting us stop what we’re doing. We simply adapt.
You might remember that in 2023 there was a heat dome over Texas. Since we were due to fly into Dallas Fort Worth, we were a little worried, thanks in no small part to the tireless BBC that left us and everyone else with the impression that all Texas was about to be obliterated in a conflagration.
Naturally, when we rolled up, we found Texas was hot but in a 100% operational state. Everything was working as normal. We went about our road trip as planned. In southeastern Texas we visited a forest, lush with leaves and long green grass. We found a couple of nonagenarians, who in Britain would have been locked in a freezer to save their lives, out walking as they always did. We told them about the news in Britain. They laughed and carried on.
The interesting thing is not then the heat, or in my case the torrential downpour across the northern Great Plains on a remote and almost entirely empty road, but the fixation in the media and government to turn everything into something to be terrified of.
In recent years, Covid was utilised as the pretext for driving hundreds of millions of people to the brink of – or even actual – mental breakdown from fear. Now it seems the long-term impact on wider society is becoming clearer though Covid is only one facet of a mesmerising array of reasons to be petrified. However, we also have it within us to drive ourselves mad with fear.
In his Journal of the Plague Year (1722) Daniel Defoe included this observation of how fear of the contagion could lead to irrational behaviour, when describing what had happened in 1665:
It was in those shambles that two persons falling down dead, as they were buying meat, gave rise to a rumour that the meat was all infected; which, though it might affright the people, and spoiled the market for two or three days, yet it appeared plainly afterwards that there was nothing of truth in the suggestion. But nobody can account for the possession of fear when it takes hold of the mind.
The Telegraph has an article about how school trips are shortening because “Anxious parents are cutting children’s overnight school trips short”:
Steve Hallett, the Director of Operations at Rock UK, which offers residentials at centres across the UK, said a typical trip has fallen from four or five days to two or three.
He said it was partly because of costs but also described an increasing trend of parents collecting their children early or even staying at the site after they drop their children off.
Mr Hallett added that it had become more common for children on residentials to sit out certain activities, watching from the sidelines.
“The level of anxiety is really high. Children who have come through that Covid age, we’re seeing a level of concern even about going outside let alone being away from home,” he said.
A source at another residential company in southern England said a traditional trip was “always a week long” but had shortened since the pandemic.
They said: “Since the pandemic, many parents won’t even allow their children to go on your typical sleepover with friends because of the safeguarding concerns… to go from never being away from home to being away from home for a week is a big thing. Children find it overwhelming and exhausting.”
They gave examples of parents raising concerns about their children being abducted, the food their children are eating and calling the centre during a trip saying: “I’m worried that my child’s going to be cold in the accommodation.”
“There is this anxiety and it’s not helping with the children’s resilience. Parents are less likely – because of those growing fears from the pandemic – to want to allow those children to go off and take those types of risks that allow them to build that resilience,” they added.
One wonders what sort of adults these children will grow into. Last year, Joanna Gray wrote a piece called ‘Why Do Schools Now Resemble Prisons?’ for this site. It’s a dystopian tale of a world of security fences, lanyards and lockdown drills. I can second that. After I left full-time teaching in 2016, I delivered a Classics day to sixth formers at a West London comp. It was a terrifying place. Just being let in was like trying to enter a US high-security establishment. Inside it was a seething mass of teenagers contained in their ‘safe and secure’ environment like battery chickens.
We can only hope that when they grow up and escape into the adult world, they can leave the nonsense behind them. But I’m afraid it’s all too likely that growing up in a climate of fear is encouraging a significant minority to hide at home, unable to contemplate either going to school or facing adult life.
Before I was 10 years old back in the mid-1960s, my idea of fun on a Saturday was to meet a schoolfriend in London, spend five shillings each on a ‘blue rover’ ticket and then pass the day riding around on the tube with a nebulous aim to travel from the end of each line to the other.
I don’t think it ever occurred to my parents either to discourage or even stop me. In 1970 I was fortunate enough to go on a school classics cruise around the Mediterranean on a battered old ship called the SS Nevasa. Twenty-four boys in the charge of one teacher and not a risk assessment in sight! I remember vividly how the captain reminded us sternly that we were embarking on the high seas and not to go near the rails in rough weather.
Fear is a very useful phenomenon. A fear of crashing waves, based on knowledge of what water can do, might keep one away from the end of a jetty or off the deck of a cruise ship in a storm. A fear of traffic helps keep us away from roads. One might take reasonable precautions to avoid catching a serious infection. But there is a limit. To return to Defoe again, representing himself in the first person as the anonymous ‘Citizen’ recounting his experiences:
I had two important things before me: the one was the carrying on my business and shop, which was considerable, and in which was embarked all my effects in the world; and the other was the preservation of my life in so dismal a calamity as I saw apparently was coming upon the whole city, and which, however great it was, my fears perhaps, as well as other people’s, represented to be much greater than it could be.
In other words, as Samuel Johnson noted, fear can assist reason but fear for fear’s sake can overwhelm us. It not only makes things seem far worse than they are but also cripples our ability to cope.
Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with many books to his credit. His most recent is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus 2025). His next is Brief Lives of the Ancient World (Yale, September 2026).
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When people are fearful of everything, they are easier to control and manipulate!
This has all been building for years! I remember in the early 2000’s ‘elf and safety being introduced everywhere!’
Corps camp at school in the CCF during the 1960s they let us loose (well on the army range) with Bren guns and 303 rifles! Great fun!!!
At school many years ago, I was in the CCF and given a 303 rifle to take home and bring to an event the next day. I was stopped by a policeman, apparently for carrying a gun in public, but let go when I explained the firing pin had been removed.
How did society survive with such dangerous behaviour?
My God! Couldn’t you have provided a Trigger (pun intended) warning at the start of your story?
It doesn’t matter that the firing pin had been removed. It’s not about the risk of you shooting someone: it’s about the Risk that seeing you might have caused someone Fear, Alarm or Distress. Far worse than being shot!
Always like an article on this subject.
What I’d like to emphasise is how cunning all this fear-porn is. It doesn’t create fear out of absolutely nothing: that would be to mischaracterise it, and this mischaracterisation makes it harder to fight against.
It creates fear by suborning real, reasonable (as part of a context) human responses. For example, some parents do worry whether their child might be cold/hot/lonely on a school trip; some people (luckily not me) do get really uncomfortable in the kind of heat that happened last week.
The process is not one of creating these worries/concerns out of nothing; it’s one of removing the obvious next item in a normal, sane conversation about them: “He/she will be fine at the school trip; you’ll be fine in the heat, try X or Y or Z to make it easier”. This next item is utterly individual (rarely, a particular child might actually NOT be OK on a school trip; a particular person might actually really be at medical risk from excessive heat). The fear-porn overrides this conversation, making only one conclusion valid for everyone: Freak Out!
It tries (and to a great extent succeeds) in turning everyone into the… Read more »
One does wonder how our generation (I’m 69) ever survived
The security around schools has two obvious answers, one the kids have been told their lives are worthless so schools can shut on the whim of a cold, so they try to escape and the fences keeps a couple in; Two there is a crowd of melanin loaded 20 something men standing outside the gates filming on their government issued phones……
Frightened people are easily controlled. Those governing us want a frightened population.
And if they’re frightened people who have no resilience and can’t cope with the slightest challenge, so much the better.
Sheep are terrified of the Big Bad Wolf, who might take out one of the weaker sheep in the herd. But it’s the Kindly Shepherd who cares for them, who fences them in and then rounds them all up and takes them for slaughter.
I was a child in the 60s and 70s. I liked the story of the Blue Rover on the tube. I used to do the same with a Red Rover ticket on the buses. At age 11 I’d go from my home in north east Kent, via Bromley to Crystal Palace and then up to Oxford Street – very little money to spend, just exploring.
Always remember 2020…..
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Project Fear…. people falling down dead in the street…..
Then ‘the blob’ can’t get you🤔
But the “High Trust Societies of the West” have been rapidly dismantled by The Elephant in the Room, which the author blithely ignores, despite the fact that every single one of the main problems in the West are caused and exacerbated by the Mass Third World Invasion.
Covid might of turbocharged some peoples aversion to risk but it’s a trend that started at least 20 years ago. I used to work as an outdoor pursuits instructor and even 15 years ago some teachers would have crazy ideas about what was a health and safety risk. Sometimes a teacher would say that kids shouldn’t walk over a cattle grid because their school’s risk assessment classed it as dangerous, another school insisted that when kids went on an evening walk in the dark they had to wear helmets in case they walked into a low hanging branch.
Risk can only be properly understood when riding on the edge of what can’t be understood. To understand risk one has to put themselves at risk – life-threatening or mentally catastrophic risk. There is no other way to assess risk, it must be experienced. The State knows this, so they manufacture risk so that they can dictate reaction to ‘risk’. We’re ripe for the picking exactly because we don’t face risk, so we don’t know how to assess it. We got too comfortable.
Nice point, never thought of it that way before. My take on it – which is consistent with your idea – is that the reaction to risk in a sense creates the risk. It’s like Baron Munchhausen pulling himself into the air by his bootstraps.
“The State knows this, so they manufacture risk so that they can dictate reaction to ‘risk’”
But in “performance”, as it were, I see this the other way round. It’s the reaction to risk – the constant, grating precautionary messaging – which brings the “risk” into existence in people’s minds.
Your version isn’t wrong: the whole thing is so Munchhausen, so self-elevating, independent of reality, that “A produces B” is as true a description as “B produces A”.
My version works to freak people because – somehow – people still believe that if there’s an Official Message about risk, that must be because there’s an underlying, real risk. Somehow, nobody grasps that the “risk” and the “risk response” are utterly invented, and mutually self-supporting. Or, if they do, they can’t be the first to speak out.
You’re right, it’s a circular thing. What the state has been doing for quite some time is to provide the risk and the appropriate risk response i.e. it’s very hot, you must do A, B and C. That, itself, automatically triggers a state-approved risk response to the next similar risk. Each risk and risk response elevates a sense of fear and reduces what risk is actually required in order to get the required risk response and, critically, people stop assessing risk themselves and become entirely dependent on the state and ‘experts’ who provide instruction on what a risk is and how to behave to the risk. Before you know it, we’ve moved from people stood like robots at pedestrian crossings, without a car in sight, waiting patiently for the lights to instruct them to cross the road, to being able to manufacture a pandemic, instruct people they must wear a mask when stood up, but not sat down, and that they must be injected with an experimental product that has no worthwhile safety data and no need for anyone to be injected. In other words, we’ve all gone a little bit mad, largely in part to being exposed to risk… Read more »
There is a genetic inheritance, evidenced from the behaviour of single cell organisms, to avoid nonconformity for fear of social exclusion. In these circumstances we all should be blaming the press/tv/radio for promoting fear and leading people into over-reaction because they fear censorious response to possible errors of judgement. The problem is the media will take no notice until it hits them in the pocket. Maybe the only practical course is to boycott the mainstream media – easier said than done.
I spent the last weekend with my eldest child who is in the top end of his 40’s. Near the end of my visit I was told I was a tin foil hat theorist. This was because I challenged the alleged heatwave, climate scam and the covid nonsense. Oh, and I was also told that I had moved from left wing politics to far right. I countered that I hadn’t gone far-right but that the country had moved far left.
I find it incredulous that intelligent people have been so easily indoctrinated into this scaremongering. But that might be because the tin foil has given me dementia!!
It hasn’t, don’t worry!
I find people who mindlessly regurgitate fear porn utterly repulsive.
They display a toxic mix of hideous behavioural straits: lack of thought, needy attention seeking, weak mindedness, herd mentality, absence of any spine.
It is totally despairing to see a population lose its mind over literally nothing.
100% agree. As well as fear, I think with the hot weather as with “covid” there are also strong elements of laziness and the desire to escape from one’s routine. Both offered an excuse for people to ditch work, school, other commitments and presumably do nothing very much. I find that very sad.
100%. It’s a coalition of climate grifters, skyvers and weak minded useful idiots
Some people will always be suckers.
An entirely deliberate policy delivered from the very top of society.
And lapped up by an infuriatingly stupid public.
Westminster is the top of society? Not in my book.