Fear Fantasy and Hope Fantasy

We're getting the garden ready for planting this season. I've been using "natural methods" for improving the soil and suppressing weeds for the past couple of years. If you watch youtube videos on the subject, you'd think it's a miraculous cure-all that'll make your garden crank out basketball sized lettuces and beach ball sized watermelons with no work. There's a hard sell for it, like there's a hard sell for almost everything.

The hard sell for the covaids bullshit is that if you don't take one of the vaccinations you'll die from a disease for which the most common symptom is no symptoms at all. Some people have severe complications from covid, just like some people have severe complications from colds and flu every year.

With the gardening videos, the hard sell is based on a hope fantasy. People can easily fall into a reverie about the ultimate pay-out. It's the basis for many scams. The covid infomercial is based on the fear fantasy, which is also the basis of many scams.

The real world is mundane, of course. Nothing is a panacea. Every endeavor of human beings is mixed, and outcomes are uncertain. Our plans rarely come to fruition.

Why don't the gardening channels frame their promotion of natural methods of farming in mundane real world terms? Unfortunately, there's no audience for that. The reality is, the natural methods work OK, but they're not a silver bullet. The reality is the weather is so variable year to year, and the circumstances in the garden are so variable year to year that the outcomes are uncertain and inexplicable failure is the most common option.

There is an audience for outsized claims and the childish hard sell though. "Electric cars will fix everthing!" Blah blah blah. There's too many examples to name.

The scare based scams are pretty shameful. It's unfortunate people keep falling for them. Cold war, Osama bin Laden, hackers, covaids, etc... Adults are as easy to frighten as children. I was terrified of bigfoot when I was 10, and I was terrified of nuclear war then too. I think the prospect of death by either bigfoor or nukes was roughly the same back in the early 80s.