Fear

What would you do if you could control the level of fear in a population?

Is it a good thing to have some amount of fear? Presumably it makes you consider your actions and reduces your propensity to be foolishly reckless, like, say, jumping out of a plane with just a bunch of (small) helium balloons.

But what if you don't really have control over your life? What if someone comes up to you with a gun, and says "git on the plane o'er 'ere, i'm gonna push you oot wid jus a bunch of small helium balloons. Git! Git!" and say you'd rather get splattered over a large area of ground than shot. Well in that case is fear and paranoia really a useful thing? If you go about all day thinking "shit i hate jumping out of planes with just a bunch of small helium balloons, i'd never do that", but when it comes down to it that fear doesn't make it less likely that someone will come up to you with a gun.

There's a psychological effect where people always prefer to feel even the illusion of control, where they'll pay more to choose their own lottery tickets rather than have it chosen for them, or to press a button which runs a random number generator determining payoffs. Maybe it's just more cognitively comfortable to fear something and take actions against it, even if your actions just don't help. But it's also stupid to be paralyzed by fear of something you can't control, isn't it?

I guess in reality there are few things we don't have at least a little bit of control over, though. So some fear and awareness is good.

*decides he's thinking too much like an economist*