ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that by the end of the second decade of the 21st century mass, public fear came from social control efforts on behalf of global capital. Beginning about 1970 the system of capital became globalised and faced a long-term crisis of over accumulation and concentration with a parallel falling rate of profit. The need to control increasingly impoverished working classes throughout the world required concerted campaigns using forceful repression by intelligence-military-police apparatuses and ideological manipulations using propaganda and public relations. Technological developments made possible increasingly tighter control over public narratives, especially in the form of so-called social media. Fears were manufactured and public attention and consciousness were diverted so that the liberation and decolonial movements of the post-World War II period were blunted to assure continued hegemony of a global ruling class. In short, this chapter argues for constructed public fears as part of the increasingly critical class war during a long-term crisis of world capitalism.
