Re: [Peace-discuss] Fear renders men…stupid and miserable…

[Morton K. Brussel]

Carl,

Your first paragraph below strikes me as disparagement without substance, buttressed only with some here irrevelent favorite thoughts from Chomsky, who, I'm not sure would agree with either the tenor or truth of what you say about the issue at hand.  

I have visited a great many of the old cathedrals and churches in Europe, Romanesque and Gothic, especially in France. One cannot be unimpressed with their magnificence as art and architecture, with their attractive power to bring forth the support of the multitudes, low and high. But I've always had a guilty feeling in visiting and admiring them, being conscious that they were icons of feudalism, built largely on the donations of royalty and the merchant class, who gained their exalted power and wealth at the expense of the vast poor and laboring classes.  And it is clear that an important motivation for their contributions was to exonerate themselves of their "sins" and to win a place in Heaven. Evidence for this is overwhelming. The other side of the coin is that Hell was a great fear, a motivator. That the judgement day could be terrible and terrifying is sculpted in innumerable portrayals of the last judgement at entrances to these medieval edifices, and elsewhere. That (western) religion has seemed to prosper in fearful and terrible times, and has profited by inculcating fear seems to me undeniable. 

This is not at all to say that religion has only been an agency of fear. 

So in conclusion, I think the guy who wrote the comment I copied has made an insightful observation. 


On Jan 2, 2010, at 8:52 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> Although the commentator's penultimate paragraph is accurate, her/his account of the "Middle Ages," common as it is, is as intellectually respectable (if not so sophisticated) as a belief in phlogiston.  This sort of ignorance is pervasive among the college-educated political class of the US; as Chomsky says, you have to be highly educated to believe stuff like that. A proper corrective would be to read some actual history - or even basic works like the Communist Manifesto.
> 
> It's certainly true that fear has been a political motivator particularly in the US.  A society founded on two of the greatest crimes in human history - the extinction of the native Americans and the enslavement of native Africans - has a lot to be afraid of, perhaps principally its own conscience, if not the revenge of the victims. But the fear of just retribution expands in the last fifty years as America's victims come to include much of the world.
> 
> In their supreme cynicism, that fear has been mobilized by the American elite. The post-WWII domestic policy of the USG is encapsulated in the advice of Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg to President Truman, that he "scare the hell out of the American people," in order to get his imperialist policies accepted - policies necessitated by the fact that only WWII had cured the Depression, and the end of the war seemed to mean the return of the Depression.
> 
> Luckily for our rulers, the new bete noire, terrorism, was conjured within a decade of the disappearance of its predecessor, communism.  --CGE
> 
> 
> Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>> Fear is what makes our world turn…  GGreenwald's piece, [http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/02] is followed by several perceptive comments. I cite one of them below. Published on Saturday, January 2, 2010 by Salon <http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/02/fear/index.html>
>>  The Degrading Effects of Terrorism Fears
>> by Glenn Greenwald
>> I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but David Brooks actually had an excellent column <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01brooks.html?sudsredirect=true> in yesterday's /New York Times/ that makes several insightful and important points.  Brooks documents how "childish, contemptuous and hysterical" the national reaction has been to this latest terrorist episode, egged on -- as usual -- by the always-hysterical American media.  The citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will -- in that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation -- Keep Us Safe.  Whenever the Government fails to do so, the reaction -- just as we saw this week -- is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad in the world ever happens.  Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive.  Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens:  /please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe./
>> This is what inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet of fear and terror for years.  It regresses into pure childhood.  The 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the closet, who then crawls into his parents' bed to feel Protected and Safe, is the same as a citizenry planted in front of the television, petrified by endless imagery of scary Muslim monsters, who then collectively crawl to Government and demand that they take more power and control in order to keep them Protected and Safe.  A citizenry drowning in fear and fixated on Safety to the exclusion of other competing values can only be degraded and depraved.  John Adams, in his 1776 /Thoughts on Government/ <http://www.ashbrook.org/library/18/adams/thoughtsongovernment.html>, put it this way:
>>    Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is *so sordid and
>>    brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates
>>    so stupid and miserable*, that Americans will not be likely to
>>    approve of any political institution which is founded on it.
>> As Adams noted, political leaders possess an inherent interest in maximizing fear levels, as that is what maximizes their power.  For a variety of reasons, nobody aids this process more than our establishment media, motivated by their own interests in ratcheting up fear and Terrorism melodrama as high as possible.  The result is a citizenry far more terrorized by our own institutions than foreign Terrorists could ever dream of achieving on their own.  For that reason, a risk that is completely dwarfed by numerous others <http://www.unitedjustice.com/death-statistics.html> -- the risk of death from Islamic Terrorism -- dominates our discourse, paralyzes us with fear, leads us to destroy our economic security and eradicate countless lives in more and more foreign wars, and causes us to beg and plead and demand that our political leaders invade more of our privacy, seize more of our freedom, and radically alter the system of government we were supposed to have.  The one thing we don't do is ask whether we ourselves are doing anything to fuel this problem and whether we should stop doing it.  As Adams said:  fear "renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable."
>> What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset.  The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety.  Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment.  That's because certain values -- privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more important than mere survival and safety.  A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power *even when*doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death.  And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety.
>> These are the calculations that are now virtually impossible to find in our political discourse.  It is fear, and only fear, that predominates.  No other competing values are recognized.  We have Chris Matthews running around shrieking <http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/#postid-updateA1> that he's scared of kung-fu-wielding Terrorists.  Michael Chertoff is demanding <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/31/AR2009123101746.html> that we stop listening to "privacy ideologues" -- _i.e._, that there should be no limits on Government's power to invade and monitor and scrutinize.  Republican leaders <http://www.mattwallace.net/2005/12/john-cornyn-civil-liberties-do.html> have spent the decade preaching that only Government-provided Safety, not the Constitution, matters <http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/000396.htm>.  All in response to this week's single failed terrorist attack, there are -- as always -- hysterical calls that we start more wars <http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/73651-lieberman-yemen-will-be-tomorrows-war-if-preemptive-action-not-taken>, initiate racial profiling <http://thinkprogress.org/2009/12/28/right-wing-ethnic-profiling/>, imprison innocent people indefinitely <http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/73883-senior-democrat-halt-detainee-transfers-to-yemen>, and torture even more indiscriminately <http://www.sphere.com/nation/article/poll-finds-americans-favor-waterboarding-christmas-day-terror-suspect/19299536>.  These are the by-products of the weakness and panic and paralyzing fear that Americans have been fed in the name of Terrorism, continuously for a full decade now.
>> Ever since I began writing in late 2005 about this fear-addicted dynamic, the point on which Brooks focused yesterday is the one I've thought most important.  What matters most about this blinding fear of Terrorism is not the specific policies that are implemented as a result.  Policies can always be changed.  What matters most is the radical transformation of the national character of the United States.  Reducing the citizenry to a frightened puddle of passivity, hysteria and a child-like expectation of Absolute Safety is irrevocable and far more consequential than any specific new laws.  Fear is always the enabling force of authoritarianism:  the desire to vest unlimited power in political authority in exchange for promises of protection.   This is what I wrote about that back in early 2006 in /How Would a Patriot Act?/:
>>    The president's embrace of radical theories of presidential power
>>    threatens to change the system of government we have.  But worse
>>    still, his administration's relentless, never-ending attempts to
>>    keep the nation in a state of fear can also change the kind of
>>    nation we are. This isn't exactly new:  many of America's most serious historical transgressions <http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/01/putting-terrorist-threat-into.html> -- the internment of Japanese-Americans, McCarthyite witch hunts, World War I censorship laws, the Alien and Sedition Act -- have been the result of fear-driven, *over-reaction to extrenal threats, not under-reaction*.  Fear is a degrading toxin, and there's no doubt that it has been the primary fuel over the last decade.  As the events of the last week demonstrate, it continues to spread rapidly, and it produces exactly the kind of citizenry about which John Adams long ago warned.
>> Here is a comment I found interesting:
>> /The fear mechanism is an old one. In the middle ages the best artists of the time were hired to depict it. The murals in European churches show the wonderfully imagined horrors and tortures of hell. You can understand why a populace would be willing to submit to the rituals and tithing of the church and to support a group of parasitic clergy living in gold plated luxury in order to avoid those torments. The people would be willing to go out on Crusades to prove their devotion and to bring salvation to the heathens. The practices of the aristocracy, the practices that caused poverty, faded into the background./
>> /For a while the paradigm shifted away from worshipping a church and submitting to the powerful. It shifted toward rationalism and personal responsibility./
>> /We have regressed to a people quivering before authority. "Terror" is the devil on earth. Terrorism is marvelously imagined, magnified, created, publicized and depicted in great vivid detail by the most skilled story tellers available. It is used to get us to submit to the rituals and spending required to control it. Out of our sometimes meager incomes, we will support a consortium of wealthy weapons producers in order to protect ourselves. Manufactured fear infantilizes us and distracts us from the business of life, from education, jobs and health. We follow anyone like children, joining Crusades, hoping for the illusion of safety./
>> /In both cases, the imagination is far more destructive than the reality./
>> /
>> /
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