Hey what’s up! Welcome back to another episode in the mini-series we are doing on Appeals to Emotion.
Today’s new fallacy is the Appeal to Fear. By now, you know that an appeal to emotion is when someone tries to get you to act by evoking a feeling in you rather than by making a good argument. This works the same way. An Appeal to Fear is when someone tries to get you to do, think or believe something by making you afraid of the alternative.
Now, I’m going to spend a little bit of time on this one b/c fear is a powerful emotion. It’s powerfully motivating, but it also affects us in some fascinating ways.
We’ve just come through 2 years where we’ve seen the Appeal to Fear in play in a BIG way during the Covid pandemic. I’ll never forget seeing some of the things people were saying in an attempt to get people to stay home, isolate and stay away from other people. It was like, “stay home, wear your mask…you don’t want to kill Grandma, do you?” Guys, that was a classic appeal to fear! They weren’t saying anything that was a real argument, they were just playing on the fear of Grandma dying.
We also see this in the climate change arena. When people said that the East Coast would be underwater by the year 2000, that was an appeal to fear. Who wants to lose their home, their towns and possibly their life to rising sea water? Nobody! So fear was used to get people to agree to the plans they were presenting for alternate forms of energy.
Sometimes religions or churches will even use an appeal to fear to get people to join their religion or make a decision to believe in God. They’ll appeal to their fear of hell or judgment to try to force them to make a different choice.
Here’s what’s wrong with the thinking behind an Appeal to Fear: They’re trying to get you to do, think or believe one thing by creating fear around the alternative. But, as with all the emotional appeals, it’s a fallacy if they’re not actually giving a solid argument for what they’re saying.
Here’s why an appeal to fear is especially insidious: Fear affects us in fascinating, and often devastating ways. We are hardwired to seek safety, and we fear things that threaten our safety, either physical, financial, relational, etc. So when we are confronted or, in some cases, bombarded by messages that we should be afraid of something, the resulting fear impacts us physically, mentally and emotionally. I want to take a quick minute to talk about the effects of living in fear over a period of time…and I’m not just a short-term scary experience. I’m talking about the effects of living in a society that is constantly bombarding us with appeals to fear and propaganda using tactics to make us afraid. It affects us…in some big ways.
This is so fascinating to me! Did you know that fear can affect you physically by weakening your immune system, damaging your cardiovascular system, sending your digestive system into upheaval and it can even accelerate aging? That’s crazy, right?
Did you know that fear affects us mentally by impairing memory and even damaging certain parts of the brain?
Fear also affects our brain processing. It makes it harder to learn, harder to think clearly, harder to think before acting and harder to make ethical decisions.
Long-term, chronic fear can also cause fatigue, PTSD, anxiety & depression.
The other thing that fear does is it makes people easier to control. When you’re in a state of fear, you’ll take almost any option presented that promises to alleviate that fear.
This is why the German people turned a blind eye to the terrible things done to the Jews in WW2…they had been taught to fear and hate them so much that the answer to that fear, as horrific as it was, seemed like a better alternative. The propaganda had worked. This is why we have to learn from history, so that when we see someone using the same tactics again, we can see right through them and refuse to get caught up in the fear-mongering.
I promise you this…there will always be someone offering you something new to be afraid about. Fear sells. Some of them are legitimate, and some are totally overblown. You have to use discernment; you have to be able to filter it through a brain cell and see what’s behind the fear message.
Knowing all this, when you’re faced with someone trying to make you afraid or offering you an appeal to fear, you have to make the conscious decision to stop for a minute, set the fear aside and ask yourself some good questions. Who is behind this? Why are they trying to make me afraid. Is this really something I should be afraid of or am I being manipulated? Otherwise, you may find yourself doing some crazy things as a way to alleviate the fear that you’ve been fed.
So, here’s the question to ask yourself if you’re facing an Appeal to Fear: “Is what they’re saying being backed up by a real argument or are they just trying to play on my emotions?”… *repeat*
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
