By Joe Schaller
Guest Columnist
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.” – H L Mencken, American journalist, 1956
Like a mind-altering roller coaster, people and media love the thrill of a good Chicken Little alarmist scare. As I touched upon in the Sept. 18 issue of the Sun, mankind has a long history of panics, eco-alarms, and technophobia, including convenient memory loss of them. How soon we forget the gasoline price panics of 1981, 2008, and 2022, or the inflation rate panics of 1920 (23%), 1947 (19%), 1980 (15%), and 2022 (9.1%), dwarfing our current 3.4% rate (1% to 3% is the target).
Many fears are rational yet many modern “-phobias” are misnomers. Technophobia is a bona fide irrational fear of technology. Institutions, academics, and guild monopolies/corporate cartels have systematically weaponized worst-case scenario modeling and moral panic to induce public fear of new technologies—primarily to protect their own dominance and secure state-sanctioned protectionism.
Eco-alarmist panics demonstrate that the rhetoric of environmental doom has enduring clout. The global climate crisis industry was valued at $690 billion in 2005 by Climate Change Business Journal and has grown to $3.6 trillion. From 18th-century crop failures predicted by Thomas Malthus to modern climate-doomsday computer model predictions, the strategy remains identical: Use flawed linear statistical models to create public terror, disregard human ingenuity and market adaptation, and demand expanded centralized government control as the only viable solution. Flora and fauna adaptation is also overlooked as we’ve seen with false bee, polar bear, and coral reef alarms.
From Ben Franklin’s “God’s wrath” lightning rod to Luddites raging against the machine to “grid anxiety” to “A.I. psychosis,” history reveals that the public almost always overestimates the immediate doom of new technology. Only a few panics were warranted.
We are now experiencing hysteria over artificial intelligence, featuring big tech lobbying efforts. The A. I. honeymoon phase is over, with big tech facing financial chasms and a late-stage A.I. market bubble. Their solution? Government bureaucratic regulation with “Too Big to Fail” bailout funding and elimination of competition via regulatory capture aka “moating.”
The goal of regulatory capture is to use the coercive power of the government to shield a dominant company or industry from free-market competition. Instead of an agency protecting the public from a powerful industry, the industry “captures” the agency. They weaponize laws, licensing rules, and compliance standards to neutralize rivals, maximize profits, and establish a legally enforced monopoly or oligopoly.
Regulatory capture through artificial emergency is the deceptive blueprint of big government fascism/corporatism. The regulatory state is in control, but unlike socialism (state ownership), government is shielded from downstream accountability when the corporation fails (think Solyndra 2011). Manufactured crises allow dominant firms to position themselves as the “only viable partners” for the state. This often leads to exclusive subsidies, bailouts, and customized regulations that systematically disadvantage independent operators and small businesses.
Whether it is 15th-century scholars trying to ban the printing press or modern multi-trillion-dollar tech firms lobbying for “A.I. pacing” frameworks to eliminate open-source competitors, the mechanism remains identical: use extreme, doomsday scenarios to manufacture public panic, completely ignore human adaptability and economic growth, and demand centralized regulatory barriers as the only way to save humanity. The Chinese Communist Party gives two thumbs up.
