H.L. Mencken captured the dark art of governance with brutal precision: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary." In an era of 24/7 media, algorithmic amplification, and technocratic elites, this strategy has reached industrial scale. From climate apocalypse timelines that perpetually shift, to pandemic modelling that justified unprecedented controls, to cultural panics and foreign threats inflated for domestic gain, the machinery of fear grinds on. The article from The Focal Points on the "big business of fabricating threats" exposes how this racket sustains power, enriches insiders, and erodes liberty. The populace is kept in a state of managed anxiety, forever demanding solutions from the very actors who conjure the monsters.

The Business Model of Fear

Threat fabrication is not conspiracy but observable pattern. Public health bureaucrats, climate NGOs, defence contractors, and media conglomerates profit handsomely from perpetual crisis. COVID-19 offers the clearest recent case: models predicting millions of deaths guided lockdowns that devastated small businesses and youth mental health while large corporations and Big Pharma reaped windfalls. Subsequent revelations: lab origins plausibility, treatment suppression, vaccine side-effect underreporting arrived too late for accountability. The hobgoblin had served its purpose: compliance, centralised power, and trillions transferred.

Climate alarm follows the same template. Dire predictions of submerged cities, mass extinctions, and uninhabitable zones by specific deadlines routinely fail, only for new deadlines to emerge. Net-zero policies impose costs on working families and industry while subsidising green tech oligarchs and virtue-signalling elites. The underlying data on modest warming, greening planet, and adaptation potential is downplayed. The threat must remain existential to justify taxes, regulations, and lifestyle controls. Mencken's imaginary hobgoblins wear lab coats and deliver PowerPoints.

Foreign policy recycles the script. Each new adversary, from endless Middle East engagements to hyped great-power competition, demands more spending, surveillance, and deference to the national security state. Legitimate security concerns exist, yet threat inflation crowds out diplomacy and realism. Domestic divisions are mirrored abroad: the "other" becomes a unifying external enemy, distracting from governance failures at home.

Mechanisms of Perpetual Alarm

Modern tools supercharge Mencken's insight. Social media algorithms reward outrage and novelty. Legacy media, facing declining trust, chases clicks with apocalyptic framing. Government agencies and NGOs fund studies that align with preferred narratives, often with pre-ordained conclusions. Dissent is marginalised as "denialism" or "misinformation," complete with deplatforming and reputational destruction.

The psychological payoff is powerful. Fear activates the amygdala, short-circuiting reason and fostering dependence on authority figures promising safety. Practical politics exploits this: voters clamour for leaders who "do something," granting expanded mandates, budgets, and emergency powers. The hobgoblin never fully disappears, it mutates. COVID yields to "long COVID" or new variants; climate "tipping points" shift; terrorism becomes domestic extremism requiring monitoring of parents at school boards.

Economic incentives align perfectly. Defence contractors thrive on threat assessments. Pharmaceutical giants on perpetual preparedness. Renewable energy firms on climate urgency. Consultancies and think tanks on policy churn. The public bears compliance costs, opportunity losses, and eroded freedoms while elites consolidate influence.

The Human and Civilisational Cost

This racket extracts a steep toll. Chronic anxiety fuels mental health crises, especially among the young saturated in doom narratives. Economic distortions, from energy policy to pandemic rules, punish the productive and reward rent-seekers. Trust in institutions collapses when repeated predictions fail and contradictions surface. Societies lose resilience: real threats (border security, fiscal sustainability, cultural cohesion) are neglected amid manufactured panics.

Mencken, the great American sceptic, understood democracy's vulnerability to demagogues peddling fear. In the managerial age, it is less cigar-chomping politicians than credentialed experts and revolving-door bureaucrats. The result is the same: a populace infantilised, clamouring for safety theatre while core liberties atrophy.

The antidote is Menckenite realism: rigorous scrutiny of claims, demand for falsifiable predictions, and insistence on cost-benefit analysis. Not blanket rejection of risk, but proportionate response. Climate adaptation alongside mitigation where evidence justifies. Targeted public health for the vulnerable, not universal coercion. Foreign policy grounded in national interest, not endless crusades.

Citizens must reclaim agency, question models, examine incentives, support independent voices. Politicians and experts should face sunlight: transparent data, retracted failed predictions, and accountability for harm caused. The hobgoblins thrive in darkness and groupthink. Exposure and ridicule, Mencken's weapons, remain potent.

Practical politics will always tempt fear-mongering. An informed, sceptical populace, grounded in empirical reality rather than apocalyptic narratives, is the only reliable check. The endless series of hobgoblins serves the powerful. It is past time the public stopped clamouring for their chains and demanded leaders address genuine problems without inventing new monsters. Truth, not terror, should guide the body politic.

https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/the-big-business-of-fabricating-threats