Fear as Control

Ryan Brown

March, 10, 2011.

Fear as control is a shockingly large topic in the book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. There are two forms of using fear as control, the first of these is very obvious, a method that uses direct terror to control your behaviours. An example of this type of control can be found throughout chapter four in the book, at what can be assumed to be Alcatraz. The more common form of using fear as control is subtley, or as some may say, the second pearson fear. This is where someone uses the fear of something to make someone do something subconsiously, almost without recognizing it, this is what we will look at.

Imagine you have a strong irrational fear of spiders, you want to go to a place like Wal-Mart, but every door you try to enter has a nice little spider hanging from the top. Unbeknownst to the store owner they just stopped you from entering their store. This works near the same way in chapters five and six of Little Brother. The government, or more particularly the Department of Homeland Defense, uses the fear caused by the terrorists to survey everyone at all times looking for "terrorists". Quite honestly it is a possibility, not a fact, that the DHS may have done the terrorist attack themselves just so that they could servey everyone, at all times. The reason that they can do this act is that in peoples fears they do not see past their basic want for protection. Thus, this act of surveillance goes along unharmed, in fact encouraged at many points.

That is fear as control, at a very basic level, using fear created at some point, wether by the controller or a second party, and harnasing that fear to get what you want out of a pearson, people, or nation.

http://www.surveillanceequipment.us/ (For my lovely photo)

Little Brother, Doctorow, Cory (2008) (For the topic of my writing)

dictionary.reference.com (For the definition of fear, terror, and control.)