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Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature.
“Fear,” he used to say, “fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.” That blew me away. “Turn on the TV,” he’d say. “What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products.” Fuckin’ A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells. That was my mantra. “Fear sells.”
But I do know that just like all those ex-atheists in foxholes, most Americans were still praying for the God of science to save them.
Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they’re used.
Marty chose, instead, to show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they’re going to be okay. There’s a word for that kind of lie. Hope.
Imagine if the world’s citizens, or at least those charged with protecting those citizens, had known exactly what they were facing. Ignorance was the real enemy, and cold, hard facts were the weapons.
I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.
