By Ross Pomeroy
Human beings are a panicky species – quick to fear and slow to understand. Over much of our evolutionary history, this ingrained alarm served us well, keeping us alive in a wild world brimming with dangers. But as humans came to dominate the globe and render the Earth more and more harmless (at least to us, mostly), we started to fret about increasingly innocuous things.
In his 2024 book, Fear/Less: Why Your Lifelong Fears Are Probably Groundless, Professor Wojciech Janicki, who’s based at the University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska in Poland, recounted some of the things humans once feared that probably seem silly to us today. His ultimate point? “Even though humans have solved problem after problem, averting the obliteration of the species, it is still widely believed that catastrophe is almost inevitable.” It’s time to consciously allay our fears and deal with threats as challenges rather than reasons for dejection and doomism.
Here are four formerly widespread fears, many of which were dispelled through innovation:
1. Train Travel. As railway travel proliferated in the 19th century, worries spread in media, scientific literature, and popular culture that this futuristic form of transportation could wreak havoc on passengers’ physical and mental health. It was claimed that jarring movements and loud noises at unnaturally-fast speeds of sixty miles per hour resulted in chronic inflammation, impaired vision, and a nauseating host of other physical ailments. Worse, some people could suffer from “railway neurosis”, driving them temporarily or permanently insane. Habituation to train travel, along with improvements to tracks and locomotives, gradually assuaged travelers’ concerns.
2. Electric Wires. Today, electric wires fade into the background of modern life in much of the world, but in the late 1800s, residents of New York City looked up at them with trepidation. Though fewer than 10 percent of households were connected to the grid at the time, the metropolis was one of the first to see rising adoption. In 1889, when Western Union lineman John Feek was electrocuted on the job, the public’s unease turned into mass panic.
In an article recounting the saga in IEEE Xplore, J.P. Sullivan explained Americans’ thinking more than a century ago. “They believed that new technology would improve society, but at the same time worried that they had no control over the pace and direction of this change… The tension between technological enthusiasm and pessimism created a profound anxiety about electricity and the new urban world it was creating.”
We know what happened. Electrical safety improved, and the benefits of electricity grew too large to relinquish.
3. ‘Drowning’ in Horse Manure. In the 1890s, residents, officials, and planners living in London and New York worried that their streets would eventually become impassible and their cities unlivable from a build-up of horse manure. The hundreds of thousands of horses traversing city blocks to move freight and passengers left behind millions of pounds of fresh feces and urine each day. City cleaners would pile and move the gathered loads to designated locations, but sludgy excrement still caked the streets. As the cities’ populations rose, so, too would the mountains of dung!
Worries quickly evaporated when motorcars and electric streetcars arrived on the scene. “A kind of paradox, don’t you think? A car with a combustion engine was a solution, not a problem!” Janicki commented.
4. Global Population Crash. From Paul Ehrlich in the 1968, to Thomas Malthus 170 years prior, to Confucius in the 6th Century BC, esteemed thinkers have fretted over human population growth. Many portended imminent and catastrophic crashes, often through widespread famine. Thus far, on a global scale, they’ve always been wrong. There are roughly 8.1 billion humans living on Earth today, and global poverty continues to fall, albeit not as fast as it could. Eating too many calories is a more common problem than eating too few. Human population growth will likely halt later this century, but not because of mass death – rather, due to higher living standards and voluntary contraception.
This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.
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James Thurber’s mother, just one of many.
The ever-changing climate incites lunacy amongst some, who run around waving placards demanding “Stop Climate Change”! As if.
The solutions for the horse manure problem were, in order, cable cars (not just in San Francisco!), electric streetcars (cheaper than cable) and finally automobiles (though many early ones were electric).
You should read “Romance of the Rails” about the history of passenger rail. Amazing how each new generation of urban rail was first reviled, then tolerated, then taxed, then mandated, as each next generation came on the scene.
William D. Middleton’s book, The Time of the Trolley devotes several pages to the history of street railways and other forms of urban transport. Dealing with manure was just one of the problems with using horses for locomotion.
What technology wants by Kevin Kelly gives an interesting perspective on technology as an independent force.
https://www.amazon.com/What-Technology-Wants-Kevin-Kelly/dp/0143120174/ref=sr_1_1?sr=8-1
It also contains an interesting description of the way the Amish deal with technology, which is different than most people think.
There are a bunch of Amish living in South America. A recent documentary on one of their communities included coverage of a bit of a schism. They decided to buy a tractor! Why? To improve the production of the crops which they sold to support the community. Then there was taking children into the nearby small city once a month where they’d get treated to such horrible things as *ice cream*.
For a portion of the members those and other things were just not welcome. So that group bought a plot of land even farther back in the rainforest where they could live with no possibility of having electricity or other modern conveniences. Probably complained all the way about having to go there on a boat with an internal combustion engine.
Can’t imagine living there without AC but think of the money they save, on deodorant for example.
Charles Mackay still has the definitive work on this subject, one hundred and eighty-four years later.
https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Madness-Crowds/dp/1539849589/
Fear itself.
Government, but that one is always valid.
To be honest, most people are not consumed by any such fears … but media writers and politicians love to promote such fears in the popular press as if they were universal. It’s how they make a living.
There have of course been lots of fears over the ages that were not foolish, were well founded, and deserving of serious respectful responses. Automobile safety is one – the risks of dying in a car accident today are tiny compared to what they were 50-60 years ago, before the wide adoption of safety devices like seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, collapsible steering wheels and padded dashboards. I remember the bad old days, and the highway death stats then and now bear that out.
Disease fears have been well justified forever, despite all the naysaying about Covid somehow being a “hoax”. Disease pandemics have wiped out whole human populations, including very large swaths of indigenous peoples in the Americas, to taking out half the population in medieval Europe … and more recently the scourges of public heath were TB (not only fatal, but a very bad way to die), polio (people today have no idea how that disease impacted America 70 years ago), to cancers.
But of course there are still the fake fears promoted by people with an agenda. Whether it be climate change, GMO modified foods, brain cancer from cell phone use (remember that? it really used to be a thing).
I have read way too many comments the posters said they would not have children because they did not want to bring them into a doomed future.
Most people just live their lives, but with modern instant and repetitive communications, brainwashing occurs.
My fear is that we are developing a hive mind. When they start installing wifi computers in your head, you might want to find the off switch.
Many, if not most of our fears are simply based on ignorance, misinformation, or outright lies. We need to always be thinking, learning, and questioning what we think we know. In many cases, our fears are misplaced and lead us to do things which may be unhelpful, or even harmful. Take, for example, the widespread, even hysterical fear of germs. Sterilize everything. Kill the germs, we think. Germs are “bad”. Some, perhaps, but most aren’t. The fear of “Carbon” can rightfully be considered a mass delusion, and one that has been manufactured. It has the trapping of a cult, or even a religion, with “renewables” representing salvation.
We have gone so overboard on antibiotics that we have a whole new problem of bugs we can’t kill.
Most hand sanitizers have antibiotics for those who did not know.
Story Tip:
1,000-foot-tall ‘mega tsunami’ threatens US across three regions, experts warn
https://nypost.com/2025/05/19/science/1000-foot-tall-mega-tsunami-threatens-us-across-three-regions-study/
Climate fear, of course:
a potential powerful earthquake combined with rising sea levels could lead to a mega tsunami,
Sea level rise contributes significantly to a 1000 foot tsunami? Sea level rise contributing 0.05% to the crest is terrifying!
But,
within the next 50 years, which could cause coastal land to sink up to 6½ feet.
How much rising sea levels over the next 50 years is compared to the sinking of 6.5 feet? 1 inch per year, maybe? Simple arithmetic: 75 inches > 50 inches, so how is the rising sea level being so important compared to a 12,000 inch tsunami?
IMHO the concern needs to focus on the possibility of the land sinking quickly due to the earthquake rather than the modest annual change in ocean levels. Neither seems worrisome compared to the apocalypse of that “mega tsunami.”
Towards the end they extend plausible deniability. It might not happen.
Cue Gilda Radner.
Enjoy.
I think the 4th fear is real and will become evident well before the end of the century. Many countries, Japan, S Korea etc, are already experiencing population decline. The US population would already be decreasing if not for immigration, legal and otherwise. About half of all countries have birth rates below replacement rate. And even those that are still above 2.1 show rapidly declining birth rates. I won’t live long enough to see, but I expect Demographic Collapse be the BIG story of the second half of the century, and will dwarf all other concerns.
Seems if you give women of any socio-economic status the option, “Do you want to have kids?”, the answer is often, “No. Well maybe one. When I’m a lot older.”
Since we’ve been there before, it’s not likely that a population crash is any real life threatening crisis unless you’re an economist taking too many meds for fretting about deflation.
A population crash is an economic nightmare for all the government funding and social programs. This will require a new learning curve, but it won’t be the end of all civilization. But if something else like the black plague goes throughout the world, ending 50% to 90% of the local populations, technological advancement will be put on hold for about 100 years.
As far as fearing electricity, the Non Ionizing Radiation scares were fairly recent. People
fearing power lines or cell phone towers.
I think some of that was Soviet dezinformatsiya aimed at NATO phased array radars in the 1970’s.
Isaac Asimov’s foundation theorized an Earth popu;ation suffering chronic fatigue from exposure to radio waves (from the kind of radios people once used to hear music in their cars).
I need to re-read that. I’ve only read the trilogy once, and was way too young to get anything out of it.
Very nice.