By Austin Snedden, Ranching Contributor, Valley Ag Voice
A human’s survival instinct is a powerful force — that survival instinct causes us to be acutely aware of threats and potential threats. However, the downside of this powerful instinct is that it makes us susceptible to overreacting to false threats. Almost as powerful as the survival instinct is human nature’s desire to control others.
Once an ancient human hungry for control realized he could manage others through fear, hypothetical threats became a tool of the power-hungry. Thus, ancient cultures had rulers who would control their people by conjuring hypothetical threats. Managing our threat perception is critical not only to our personal lives but also to our businesses.
A hypothetical threat could turn out to be true, but the most useful one to those seeking to control others is the threat that sits on the horizon and never fully manifests itself. The greatest hits of the tyrant’s hypothetical threats are potential weather, potential disease, potential invasion by foreigners, and oncoming war. Generally, to be an effective agitator of the people, a hypothetical threat needs to have some logical chance of happening, but it is surprising how logic can be pushed to the side if the propaganda advertising a hypothetical threat is expansive enough.
In modern times, the hypothetical threat is used as justification to build government mandates and regulations. It is challenging enough to comply with regulations based on a threat that may seem dubious, but it is egregious to comply with mandates that may not stop the threat if it is real. In recent times, we saw this carried out with the pandemic. Portions of reality combined with exaggerations of the threat created fertile soil for controlling societal behavior. The disease was dangerous but the government-created solutions to the disease turned out to be possibly just as damaging when it comes to society, the development of children, and human health.
Now or in primitive times, the threat of adverse weather has been a reliable favorite of tyrants. If the peasants didn’t show loyalty or pay their taxes, rulers promised oncoming drought or weather disasters. When I was a kid, I remember so-called experts forecasting that we were going into a mini-ice age, but they didn’t get the regulatory teeth into it until several years later when experts came up with global warming.
Man-made climate change emerged as an ideal hypothetical threat that would justify increased taxation and control. It is ideal as a theory because the climate has always been changing, all that you need to do is get people to believe that they are causing it if they don’t comply. There are so many variables that contribute to our climate, that fighting “climate change” has a multitude of targets in which one could justify tax and regulation. Climate change is hard to prove, and virtually impossible to show human causation, but has been used successfully as a hypothetical threat to tax, control, and steer money toward connected folks in industries created to “fix” it.
These hypothetical threats create government regulations and bureaucracies that inevitably become real threats to our businesses. Our businesses all have real threats, both economic and environmental, created by natural cycles, but the layer of threats created by a bulging regulatory culture, justified by questionable hypothetical threats, is more than some businesses and industries can bear.
