What is the real danger here?

“Now, tiredness, exhaustion, hopelessness, all go hand in hand. These are the four horsemen of today: The inability to see any future. And if I tell you that one of the most important parts of human thinkingness is the ability to confront a future, or have a future, or find a future; and if I tell you...'You will have no future.' You can see at once that it has depressing mental aspects...

“... I would never join the ranks of those who attempt to drive people into an hysteria simply for their own gratification or their political ambitions.

“The greatest danger...is not small invisible particles drifting through the air, but the hysteria which is occasioned by the propaganda, the misunderstanding and threat which accompanies it.

“The hysteria is the danger, not the particle. Because the hysteria can grow to such a peak that whole populaces can go entirely out of control of their own governments.

“There are two ways to go out of control: One is to get upset and go down and throw bricks through the Prime Minister’s window or the White House. And there’s quite another way, and that’s simply to lie down and quit.

“Wherever you get one of these overwhelming mysteries, you get mental upset...'What am I supposed to do?' Well, he can’t do anything, so he gets sick.

“He gets various mental reactions to this. And the broadest of them is his first look at it which is an hysteria. He feels that he should react and he doesn’t know which direction to react. That is the main problem.

“Because they cannot do anything to strike back against this thing...they are then liable to strike at things which are not connected with it. And so you would have a tumultuous, hard to control society. That’s the only real danger...

“But we have a secondary course which is quite well open, and that is the control of civil populaces, problems appertaining thereto. How do you keep people fairly calm, cool and collected in the face of this much danger and trouble?

“Because if you can keep them collected, if you can keep them braced up* to it, if you can show them that it isn’t going to wipe them out, if you can give them some hope of one kind or another, they will come through it, where they otherwise would not. So the danger in the world today, in my opinion, is not—which may or may not be flying through the air—but the hysteria...”

L. Ron Hubbard. London Congress on Nuclear Radiation, Control & Health. Lecture "The Control of Hysteria" of 15 April 1957.

*Braced up: encouraged, strong and determined.W