Luuk Koelman: ‘Today, governments spread collective fear generously across the community’

Fear is a sticky substance, I thought recently. It sticks to everything. Even smoked sausages. According to a special committee of the European Union, the aromas that provide the smoke flavor could be carcinogenic.

Nowadays, governments spread collective fear generously across the community. It started with the fear of terrorism, which soon turned out to have considerable sticking power. For example, a lonely suitcase on a platform, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, suddenly became a potential danger. The perception had changed: travelers no longer saw a suitcase, but a bomb.

And then corona came. Suddenly it wasn’t that suitcase that was terrifying, but the fellow human being. In fact, your loved ones. Entire tribes of people – with their chests puffed out proudly, but their buttocks squeezed in fear – were calling for drastic action. If necessary, be prepared to impose house arrest on themselves, monitor each other and even socially exclude them. Because fear always breathes repression. It creates suspicion, alienates you from each other.

That’s what fear does. It builds up around you, like a wall. One that keeps getting higher and higher, because fear feeds on itself. Until you can no longer see over that wall. That’s when others have to tell you what to do. And, tada… there are the politicians again! Always inextricably linked to fear.

And when the stickiness of one collective fear diminishes, it is time for the next paranoia. The Russians are coming! Because Putin might attack. Even though he himself says not. But yes, we should never, ever believe that little cock. Unless he shouts something that fits our paranoia (for example: ‘I’ll nuke the whole of Europe with typhoid if I feel like it’), then yes, then we suddenly believe him. That’s how fear works. Every ratio is missing. We believe what we want to believe. Yes, we are busy convincing ourselves of the necessity and inevitability of all-out war with Russia.

So politicians do everything they can to turn that vague fear into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Polish Prime Minister Tusk reports that we ‘no longer live in a post-war, but a pre-war time’. NATO bigwigs warn that we should ‘expect the unexpected’. Minister Van Leeuwen (Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, and previously Rutte’s national security advisor) even calls out that we must prepare for civilian deaths and body bags. WTF!?

It is always a bad sign when politicians portray a certain future as inevitable. Nine times out of ten you can read their desire in that. Because wars don’t just happen. They are created. And for what? A nuclear war is the end of our prosperity. And any future after a conventional war is a life with the enemy. Just look at the history of humanity. So you might as well just skip the whole war, right? And already trying to make the best of it.