Review
Version 1
Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
The Human Superorganism: Microbes for Freedom vs. Fear
Version 1
: Received: 3 July 2023 / Approved: 4 July 2023 / Online: 4 July 2023 (10:06:07 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Dietert, R.R.; Dietert, J.M. The Human Superorganism: Using Microbes for Freedom vs. Fear. Appl. Microbiol. 2023, 3, 883-905. Dietert, R.R.; Dietert, J.M. The Human Superorganism: Using Microbes for Freedom vs. Fear. Appl. Microbiol. 2023, 3, 883-905.
Abstract
Balanced fear supports human rational decision making and useful behavioral responses. In contrast, overwhelming, persistent, and unbalanced fear can paralyze the individual and result in heightened anxiety, lack of cognitive flexibility, fear-based public compliance and serious mental health issues. Psychobiotics research has established that a healthy microbiome is required for balanced fear and mental health protection via control of fear extinction. The recent Covid-19 pandemic featured daily, persistent, fear-of-a single contagion conditioning on a global scale paired with various behavioral mandates (e.g., lockdowns of the healthy, masks, isolation from environmental microbes and each other) that degraded the human microbiome and isolated us from each other and useful environmental microbes. It also ignored the historic role of secondary bacterial pathobionts, in pandemic deaths. This narrative review examines how institutional promotion of fear-of-a single contagion, lack of balanced risk communication, and appalling disregard of our fundamental nature (as majority-microbial human superorganisms) resulted in problems rather than solutions. This review concludes that government-public health-media promotion of pervasive fear and microbiome-degrading behaviors: 1) increased public compliance, 2) reduced cognitive flexibility, and 3) increased risk of mental health conditions. It further argues that microbiome-first public health should be embraced to ensure that human freedom, rather than paralyzing fear, dominates our future.
Keywords
microbiome; human superorganism; fear conditioning; fear-of-contagion; fear extinction; Covid-19; pandemic; risk communication; mental health challenges; self-empowerment
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Immunology and Microbiology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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