The 21st Century is one of William Gibson’s dystopic tales.
Or maybe Philip K. Dick, I can’t tell.
Anyway, one can’t deny the fear and anxiety that permeates the air like a thick cloud of smog.
Couple that with technology accelerating toward a Technological Singularity that seems to want to enslave all ordinary folk, well, one can see why people are slowly going insane.
At the center of this? Who knows? Theories go from the politicians, Bilderbergers, Freemasons, Trilateral Commission, to the Jesuits, Catholics, the CFR, all worshipping Lucifer!
The person studying the result of all this fear is Ignorance Isn’t Bliss and he’s made quite a few films on these subjects and my chicken scratchings hardly do him justice:
In the 21st Century we have two primary threats thrown at us. In the blue corner we have man-caused Global Warming, and in the red corner we have Islamic Terrorism. What are the risks and absurdities of each, and what is really driving these agendas?
The intention here isn’t to convince people they’re right or wrong about being liberal or conservative, but to point out how remarkable it is that each side of the agenda setters & policy makers have taken such staunch stances on these opposing issues, and to show the realities of the perceived threats..
These proclaimed threats are complex issues. The point here is to put them into perspective. What can we compare these issues to? How much do we know? What don’t we know? What makes sense? How far should we go? What should we jeopardize? What are the ascertainable risks?
These are the questions that need to be asked no matter the issue, especially if any given issue is to cost into the range of a trillion dollars per year, as regardless we all face total economic collapse. So hang up your preconceptions and political biases for a chance at a better understanding of many things. Let’s try to slow down for a minute, and try to assess what the non-Left/Right biased realities are, while discovering the unifying benefactor in pursuing both objectives as we’re being told to.
Ask yourself when haven’t you seen 2 people dramatize an event between them, and didn’t each have different stories as to what actually happened. Now consider, Democrats are supposed to be anti-war and pro-Global Warming mitigation. Republicans are opposite on both issues. This creates a small selection of scenarios: (1) One side is right about both, making the majority of the other side wrong about what they advocate (consider the odds of over 50 million people being totally wrong on both major issues). (2) Each side is right about what they promote, which makes them each wrong about what they argue against. (3) Each side is wrong about the intensity of what they advocate for, and are overall right about the lack of doomsday threat about what they argue against.
Odds are that either scenario 2 or 3 is the right answer. Then consider how hyped everything always is, and then crunch some odds numbers. Before we explore each issue, consider what is known in academia as the “Politics of Fear”.
A Primer On Fear
In the archetectualization of policy responses to perceived threats, few thinkers actually seem to address their statistical realities, nor do advocates of such policies. Should we listen wholeheartedly the strongest advocates of policy responses to any majors threats? The fact is, humans are aren’t very often ‘logical machines’ with emotions, instead humans are ‘emotional machines’ that think.
The fear reaction reflex is the most overpowering of all neural mechanisms. It’s a hard wired survival system, and when it goes into effect our cognitive abilities to rationally respond are almost quite literally physically incapable of rational thought. This is particularly the case if we don’t understand and acknowledge this inherent feature of quite literally all human brains. Without understanding this you’re almost powerless to suppress it when faced with complex fears.
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There have been countless scholarly papers studying the media-driven Politics of Fear, but you wont hear about these on the news like you would the latest scholarly paper on global warming. Consider the intro of this paper by Frank Furedi:
Fear plays a key role in twenty-first century consciousness. Increasingly, we seem to engage with various issues through a narrative of fear. You could see this trend emerging and taking hold in the last century, which was frequently described as an ‘Age of Anxiety’. But in recent decades, it has become more and better defined, as specific fears have been cultivated.
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Fear is often examined in relation to specific issues; it is rarely considered as a sociological problem in its own right. As Elemer Hankiss argues, the role of fear is ‘much neglected in the social sciences’. He says that fear has received ‘serious attention in philosophy, theology and psychiatry, less in anthropology and social psychology, and least of all in sociology’. This under-theorisation of fear can be seen in the ever-expanding literature on risk. Though sometimes used as a synonym for risk, fear is treated as an afterthought in today’s risk literature; the focus tends to remain on risk theory rather than on an interrogation of fear itself. Indeed, in sociological debate fear seems to have become the invisible companion to debates about risk.Agenda’s tend to be pushed based on how much fear potential they carry, while the metrics of actual risk are ignored. The problem with all of this is the majority of issues trumpetted as primary items have been decreasing for decades, and not just because we’ve been afraid or because of insane funding for various things. In general, itis the issues that we’re most helpless against that are pushed the hardest. Issues like crime, school shootings, airplane crashes, airplane hijackings, terrorism, nuclear armageddon, and a pissed off planet frying us with CO2 that we breath out of our faces are all over-reported based on the actual ascertainable risks. As fear expert David Altheide explains in his paper “Notes Towards A Politics Of Fear“:
The politics of fear relied on terrorism as a constant threat that can never be defeated; The term “terrorism” was used to encompass an idea as well as a tactic or method. Like the Mafia, it was everywhere and nowhere, all-powerful, but invisible. Crime helped shape the direction for terrorist victimisation. The politics of fear joined crime with victimisation through the “drug war,” interdiction and surveillance policies, and grand narratives that reflected numerous cultural myths about moral and social “disorder”. Numerous “crises” and fears involving crime, violence, and uncertainty were important for public definitions of the situation after 9/11. So perhaps it was natural that the terrorist attacks fed off this context of fear. The drug war and ongoing concerns with crime led to the expansion of fear with terrorism. News reports and advertisements joined drug use with terrorism and helped shift “drugs” from criminal activity to unpatriotic action. A $10 million ad campaign that included a Super Bowl commercial stated that buying and using drugs supports terrorism, or as President Bush put it, “If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.”
The Politics of Fear is going strong in 2010. The bruhaha over the mosque near the site of the old World Trade Center exemplify this by the inhabitants of New York City expressing their fear and anger with/of the Muslim community. Another example of the meme of fear and anger management by the political class/corporate media is the scheduled Koran burning in Florida on the September 11th anniversary.
Is this what Jefferson and Franklin had in mind when they formed the Republic 234 years ago?
Search within yourselves and answer that question.
The Global Meltdown of FEAR: Eliminated by 60+ visual aids.
