Thought of first in my article The First Fad, but from an entertainment angle, and Consumerism of goods and services and the marketing that surrounds that. A whole area of psychological study around how people can be encouraged and manipulated into thinking certain things, wanting certain things and becoming a tool. Useful Idiot or Useless Eater covers an angle of what type of tool that may be. And recently I wrote a piece A State of Mind, And Fear, which looked at the psychological effect something can have without even having to happen, just the worry and fear it will can change a person, their thoughts and way they live thereafter.

But rather than just using fads to sell products, and entertainment and fantasy, they are also using it to sell fear. As a side package almost to the things you pay for, you get it as a free extra. In movies, music, education and history, in media and news, trying to insert itself into some aspect of your daily life. It’s only been within employment mostly it seems that people were left alone to get their head down, don’t be distracted and pay your taxes. Unless you were in the military of course, then your job would be one with an overtone and undertone of a fearful, high alert environment, using the fear of it possibly being any moment now, or just around the corner. For the average person it would be fear of some section of society, of drugs, of violence, of terrorism, of the weather and so on. The lines are becoming somewhat blurred though, where the everyday fears, the military fears and a grouped version of them all are being thrown at everyone. The vision of the future appears laden with fear if you believe the constant stream of horror and distress being funnelled by way of the internet and media, trying to make everyone Ready for Doom, if they hadn’t already succumbed to the conditioning going back generations.

And it seems many different fads have been put out there, to try to capture each group and type along the way. And it may be only a short-lived interest or fad for some, creating a temporary hold, or fascination but for others, it seems it can turn into something quite different, with idolisation and obsession feeding into what it becomes. And if you then add fear into that, as a trigger, or undertone, or emotional manipulator, then people can become very unstable, and unpredictable, to a point. There are a certain number of variables when it comes to behaviour, but people do mostly follow a set pattern, so predictably unpredictable. And that’s where maybe thinking can be our undoing sometimes, because you can spend an awful lot of time going over things in mind and end up nowhere further on from where you were. Remember, there is a time for thinking, and there is a time for doing, you just need to know which one is required when the time comes…

(c) K Wicks