SIEGE MENTALITY

SIEGE MENTALITY

Human behaviour - the herd, the collective influence of the swarm through nothing more than autosuggestion until outcomes manifest as self fulfilling prophecies. 
You know what I mean. 
Jeremy Rifkin posits that capitalism as it stands will be subsumed by a process he calls collaborative commons, (find it here) a system of trade and commerce that's already underway through the advent of technological trading and where the power sits with the smaller online dealers - the real masses. It will inevitably and inexorably depose the centralised capitalist system much like the frog in the boiling water analogy. 
Within this dynamic he speaks to the paradox around the fear of scarcity - when everything is so open and accessible, driven by "zero marginal cost", won't stuff run out? 
And that's the point - paradoxically it doesn't. It never does. 
Yet humans exist in this paradigm whereby the suggestion by someone - especially an "expert" - creates a behavioural response that fulfills the prediction. 
Take a holiday long weekend for example. That's when siege mentality really kicks in. Nobody has even suggested that general retail supplies will be depleted - it's just preprogrammed into us, augmented by a holiday when the stores are closed. 
Frenetic, binge buying ensues. It's not that everyone is entertaining guests or really need the tons of shit they buy for the long weekend but the siege mentality dictates that one must stock up and by fuck do they ever. 
Come Tuesday, amazingly, stock has arrived on the supermarket shelves once more and the zombie apocalypse is averted. Yet again.
But the singular example of this self fulfilling prophecy paradigm has to be economic recession. 
Other than total devastation of economies through war, rampant disease or famine, almost every recession is fabricated out of nothing. 
We aren't in a recession - everything is trundling along hunkily-dorily but experts say due to such-and-such a condition and this-and-that situation, we are heading for one. Presto, people hear this, become apprehensive, withdraw from their usual market activity and trade slows, money flow reduces from the fiscus - and in no time at all, we, the traders have created a recession. The prophecy is fulfilled. 
Just because a bunch of douchebags suggested it, we bought the play and inevitably the recessive trading behaviour ensued.
This has been going on for millennia and it beggars credulity that humans haven't cottoned on to the simple premise of being played to create the desired outcomes of the manipulators.
It even stretches to seasonal colds and flus. The same people buy into the reality / they create it - that when the broadcast media starts talking about the onset of winter and flu, flu-shots, the prevalence of these creeping viruses, nine times out of ten, the same group of people who came down with flu the season before are the ones that get nailed again. And again. And again.
There are two words that describe this phenomenon - fear and belief. 
In the same way the placebo effect manifests physical benefits to a person who believes they are ingesting something that will make them "better" - the same paradigm applies to the belief that what you're being told (an impending recession, a scarcity of food supplies and so on) is inevitable therefore it becomes so because you behave as if there is no way out of it.
There is.
Don't believe the bullshit. Believe only the good shit.
If one's beliefs can exert manifest influence on the outcome of phenomena in the physical/material world we all occupy - and they can - then there's much more sense in projecting that belief onto positive things.
Try it.
It works.
Believe me...