Society faces mounting pressure from multiple so-called existential threats, each presented as an imminent catastrophe requiring immediate and drastic action. Climate change, misinformation, inequality, future pandemics, and threats to democracy are continuously positioned as civilization-ending dangers. However, this constant bombardment of catastrophic messaging serves a specific purpose: to push people toward psychological vulnerability.
When individuals are repeatedly told that everything and everyone faces imminent destruction, it creates a numbing effect. This state of perpetual anxiety and helplessness makes people more susceptible to manipulation and control. As their critical thinking abilities become compromised by fear, they become more likely to accept whatever solutions are offered by those claiming to protect them.
These manufactured crises all share a common thread – they target the foundational Western principle of individual autonomy. By emphasizing collective threats that supposedly require collective solutions, these narratives undermine the concept of personal agency in favor of group-based identities and actions.
None of these proclaimed threats truly qualify as existential – they neither threaten the permanent extinction of humanity nor represent unprecedented, irreversible dangers. The term “existential threat” is deliberately misused to lend artificial gravity to various political and social agendas. Its philosophical origins, rooted in subjective experience rather than concrete danger, are ignored to create an illusion of scientific certainty.
The actual existential threat comes from an interwoven network of government agencies, NGOs, foundations, academic institutions, and media organizations working to reshape society. Their constant manufacturing of emergencies serves to maintain a population in a state of perpetual stress and decision fatigue, making rational analysis increasingly difficult.
This systematic approach aims to create a society where failure becomes impossible – but by extension, so does meaningful success or challenge to existing power structures. The true targets are any potential threats to this established order, which explains why “their” democracy, rather than genuine democratic principles, receives such fervent protection.
The environmental concerns being championed often ignore actual ecological devastation in favor of superficial solutions that benefit the elite. Similarly, information control focuses not on protecting truth but on maintaining narrative control. Equality is pursued not as genuine opportunity but as a means of preserving existing hierarchies. The pandemic threat remains a powerful tool for emergency powers and social control.
These various threats form an intentionally complex web of fears and responses, making it difficult to identify their true nature except through careful observation. While the next declared crisis cannot be predicted with certainty, its beneficiaries are already clear – those who maintain power through the perpetual state of emergency they themselves create.
This systematic exploitation of fear serves as a powerful mechanism for social engineering, allowing those in control to gradually reshape society while maintaining the appearance of responding to genuine crises. The result is a population too exhausted and frightened to effectively resist the erosion of their fundamental rights and freedoms.
Understanding this dynamic is crucial for recognizing and responding to future manufactured crises. The pattern of declaring existential threats serves not to protect society but to transform it according to the wishes of those who benefit from perpetual emergency.