Michael Crichton's STATE OF FEAR

His Very Relevant 2004 Novel...

At the suggestion of someone I know, I just finished reading Michael Crichton’s 2004 thriller about eco-terrorism, State of Fear. Crichton is perhaps best known as the author of Jurassic Park and its sequels, which made him immensely wealthy. However, he didn’t just write amusement park rides. State of Fear is a very philosophical book with a very serious message encased in a techno-thriller casing. It seems just as relevant today as the day it was written—perhaps more so.

It’s not the only novel criticizing philosophical environmentalism and its excesses, of course. One of the earlier ones was co-written by a friend of mine, The Green Progression (1991). When I told the author I was reading State of Fear, my friend said he thought that Crichton might owe him royalties. There are certainly similarities in theme and message.

L.E. Modesitt and Bruce Scott Levinson’s eco-terrorists are Soviet-backed environmentalists fighting pesticides to destroy agricultural production while shutting down industries by targeting Washington, DC power centers. Their goal is to use environmental regulation to weaken American industry and the military, ensuring Soviet domination.

But while both plots feature eco-terrorists, and share some common concerns, there are significant differences in focus which make both works worth reading independently. And when it comes to what is happening now with climate change, COVID, and globalism, I think Crichton may have been even more prophetic, because while the USSR is now gone, global climate change remains an unresolved political issue.

And Crichton’s protagonists are explicitly globally-active fanatics who create environmental crises around the world, designed for international media coverage, intended to support a lawsuit from a small Pacific island nation over rising sea levels caused by carbon dioxide generation in First World countries.

It’s basically a conspiracy theory about Hollywood elites, NGOs, law firms, politicians, academics and big business getting together to screw the little guy from someone who published one of the earliest best-sellers about pandemics in 1971—The Andromeda Strain—long before COVID.

But State of Fear is a more frightening novel than The Andromeda Strain because Crichton goes on to analyze the phenomenon of crisis formation used as a tool of psychological warfare by elites to manipulate populations through the media, by generating a titular “state of fear” in the citizenry.

His theory of elites generating a “state of fear” to exercise power closely approximates what Dr. Robert W. Malone has called “mass formation psychosis.” In way, the book is prophetic nonfiction.

This sort of intense and relentless agitational propaganda enables demagogues to pursue policies actually inimical to the interests of those whom they govern, which may be in the self-interest of elites.

In other words, Crichton has a philosophical point to make in his novel about the mechanism by which human psychology may be exploited for nefarious purposes by purportedly eleemosynary institutions, who have convinced people that Planet Earth faces destruction, “…a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear. Amazing.”

In Crichton’s view, belief in climate change is religious, and primarily emotional, like the response to a hellfire and damnation sermon in church. And in this case, as with the universal Catholic Church, the climate change religion is global. In a section that reads almost like a Socratic dialog, he explains his theory.

“How has this world view been instilled in everybody? Because although we imagine we live in different nations—France, Germany, Japan, the US—in fact, we inhabit exactly the same state, the State of Fear. How has that been accomplished?”

Crichton details a mechanism of mass persuasion by forces stronger than the infamous “military-industrial complex”:

“In reality, for the last fifteen years, we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population—under the guise of promoting safety.”

He argues such fears must be artificially created because:

“Western nations are fabulously safe. Yet people do not feel they are, because of the PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable, precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate and make money. The media need scare stories to capture an audience. Together, these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless. If it has no basis at all.”

Sound familiar? Crichton lists Dow Corning’s silicon breast implants as a case where a company paid billions of dollars in legal damages although later epidemiological studies showed “beyond a doubt” that breast implants did not cause disease— “but the crisis had already served its purpose and the PLM had moved on, a ravenous machine seeking new fears, new terrors.” In other words, by the time the facts came to light, the damage had been done, since Dow Corning had to go out of business because it could not afford further costs of litigation.

“I’m telling you, this is the way modern society works—by the constant creation of fear. And there is no countervailing force. There is no system of checks and balances, no restraint on the perpetual promotion of fear after fear after fear…”

To those who argue that it is simply a matter of freedom of speech and the press, Crichton responds vehemently with an example of how claims that high-tension power lines cause cancer have resulted in a dangerous misallocation of economic resources:

“If it is not all right to falsely shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, why is all right to shout ‘Cancer!” in the pages of The New Yorker? When that statement is not true? We’ve spent more than twenty-five billion dollars to clear up the phone power-line cancer claim. ‘So what?’ you say. I can see it in your face. You’re thinking, we’re rich, we can afford it. It’s only twenty-five billion dollars. But the fact is that twenty-five billion dollars is more than the GDP of the poorest fifty nations of the world combined.”

This misallocation of economic resources is repeated many times over—diverting money from the poor and middle-class to the rich and powerful through their PLM-Fear complex. Essentially, the elites have become a rentier class, exploiting their influence over institutions to strip the rest of the country, and the world, of their assets. And asset-stripping is not a good driver for a healthy economy. For this insight alone, of the destructive power that has been unleashed by dangerous belief systems, Crichton deserves thanks. (That Crichton made hundreds of millions of dollars by playing on peoples fears in thrillers from Coma to Jurassic Park may have helped spark his original insight into how the PLM-Fear complex works).

However, that is not the only insight Crichton shares in this book, for he has also included an impassioned article about the scientific corruption, written in response to the global climate change debate, titled “Why Politicized Science is Dangerous.” Crichton felt so strongly that “climate science” was a politicized hoax, and that environmentalism was a religion rather than science, that he testified before the US Senate in 2005. You can watch it here:

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Not surprisingly, in the article in State of Fear, Crichton details significant parallels between the politics of contemporary “Climate Science,” and Nazi Eugenics as well as Soviet Lysenkoism, which were embraced by the scientific establishments of their day—only to be dropped after the results proved horrendous.

I might add the most relevant precedent for the “climate science” situation may have been Galileo’s confrontation with the Catholic Church, over the movement of the planets, subject of a play by Brecht. Galileo’s famous statement, "Eppur si muove," should be a mantra for any true scientist opposing bureaucratic, political, and religious corruption.

In light of the horror stories he tells, Crichton concludes this essay:

The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches… In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called “the demon-haunted world” of our past. That hope is science.

But as Alston Chase put it, “when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.”

That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.

Sober advice to reflect upon, especially nowadays, when we confront political corruption not only in “climate science,” but also, tragically, in the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath—which has ended far more sadly than Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain.