David French | 6/04/2011 3:15:40 PM

This article was first published in The Morning Bulletin Titled (The culture of fear) dated 04 March 2011.

The week before last we interview Frank Furedi on 4RO. Frank is a well-known sociologist with a focus on what he terms is a “culture of fear”. Amongst the books he has written are “Culture of Fear, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, Therapy Culture and Paranoid Parenting. Frank’s views are controversial, so that’s why they are worth a look here. Being gloomy has become fashionable. Once the fun police were the precious domain of the movie theatre (a special hello to Rockhampton Twin Cinema’s, Mr. Styles), but now they are everywhere. Driven by painful political correct ideology, they seek to impose their totalitarian views on the rest of us. Most of us already understand the need to respect each other, but the PC crowd employ their tools to subvert intelligent debate and stifle development. At the same time, the pervasive Web has made available a huge amount of information. Problem is many people think they can switch off their brains, and default to the Internet instead. To use information sensibly, users need to be able to understand it. Sifting the wheat from the chaff generally requires education and experience. Currently western society devalues both. Against a background of stifling debate and undermining the capacity of society to think for itself, rules and regulations are ballooning. Often they are rules for things that cannot, by any normal assessment, be controlled. Government agencies may have ditched the carbon paper, but in the name of protection they substituted it for employment in triplicate. And we wonder why productivity s falling – go figure. Risk has become a swearword, but the other side of risk is reward. On the positive side, people are wired to move forward – it is not in our nature to remain stagnant. Hung parliaments in the UK and Australia may be examples of society beginning to stand up for itself. Ralph Norris and other business leaders have taken the debate up to Government. They publically lament the lack of leadership. They know it is detrimental to the welfare of our community, and they know that speaking up about it is right. The closest thing to a manual for life is the Bible, and its themes include taking responsibility, standing up for what is right and taking the trouble to get to the bottom of troublesome matters. These things are common to life in general, and investment in particular. Why are we supressing our strongest suite?

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