Humans have always been fearful and intolerant. The Catholic Church was probably the first to exploit this primal and deeply powerful emotion called fear on a large scale.
Politicians do the same thing and it works, because done right it always works. Monkey brain or wherever I’m not sure where this fear emanates from. However it does come from an ancient part of the brain. A part that evolved with the very earliest humans.
That’s because fear is linked to survival. Without fear, we wouldn’t have survived and evolved as a species. But a brain that took millions of years to evolve now has to deal with some very rapid social developments.
Humans have only been dealing with different races on a large scale for a few hundred years. The Age of Discovery, spanning from roughly the 15th to the 18th centuries, brought a wide variety of people into contact with each other for the first time.
The evolution of our brain has taught us to be fearful of new people. Having someone ‘protect’ us from our fears gives us comfort. Which is pretty much the standard election tactic that politicians campaign on. Low and behold the politician is the protector against this fear.
However we have also evolved the capacity to reason. An evolved and enlightened individual should be able to use reason to overcome their fears — in most cases anyway. But it takes application. Without it, the dominant emotion of fear will overcome reason every day of the week.
Fear is what causes stock market panics. Fear dominates all else. There is no reason. From an investing point of view this is where we see how the average investor under-performs the general market with amazing consistency. Many investors have a bad habit of fiddling with a portfolio usually at the worst time.