The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.

... from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.

Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?

I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.

The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.

In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.