September 28, 2008
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Fear and Politics
They are inseparable. They always have been. What besides fear would impel anyone to give up his power to another, in exchange for protection — whether that protection be from enemies, from natural perils, or from the wrath of the protector? Niccolo Machiavelli understood that. Karl Rove understands it, and so does each of the current presidential and vice-presidential candidates. The political protection racket is legal, while unofficial protection rackets are prosecutable, not because they are essentially different, but because the politicians in power write the laws and pay the salaries of their enforcers.
Incumbents have an edge in elections generally, and it is not just because of name recognition and greater access to the means for election fraud. Some who support the incumbents believe, “better the devil you know than the one you don’t,” meaning that they fear the unknown more than they do the familiar miscreants. Others, who may vote for change if they believe in the secrecy of their ballot, will speak out publicly in favor of the incumbent because they fear reprisals otherwise. I know people who wait cagily to see who leads in the polls before placing the projected winners’ campaign signs in their front yards. It has ever been in the mouse’s best interest to curry favor with the cat, at least in the view of the fearful mouse.
Candidates try to convince voters that their opponents will not protect them from enemies and natural or economic perils as well as they themselves will. It appears to me, after watching the results of a quarter century of elections in Alaska, that most voters here are more afraid of unemployment and poverty than they are of catastrophic climate change and ecological disaster. In other words, they are greedy and short-sighted. Of course, the winners of those elections were the ones who made the most extravagant false promises of jobs and prosperity. Once in power, they had no need to deliver on the promises. The voices of dissent raised in protest were no more effective against the fear-mongers’ propaganda than was that little boy who tried to tell everyone the emperor had no clothes. All a politician needs in order to succeed is to manufacture or imagine a peril and convince people that he can protect them from it.
Every argument against anarchy that I have encountered has been fear-driven. People are paralyzed by fear, afraid of their fellow humans, and afraid of their inadequacy to deal with danger, afraid of responsibility and afraid of failure, despite generations of observations of incompetent leaders who failed in their responsibilities and created one disaster after another. Why do you poor, dumb, sick suckers always think someone else can do a better job than you can? Or is it just that you don’t want to make the effort or bear the burden, and the ones who do, and have done such a lousy job of it, are those who understand and crave the perks of power? Or rather than being fearful, lazy and irresponsible, are you spiritually immune, above all that greed and power-hunger, content to just be, and let the world be in the mess it’s in? You must derive some comfort and consolation from those beliefs, some comfort and consolation that I just don’t have, and don’t want.
Here’s a little medicine for your fear, if you can take it straight up.
Comments (9)
Very good. But we don’t have to stay in fear.
I really like this:Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.
–Karl Augustus Menninger
Who do you think is going to win the election?
It seems to be the human condtion, maybe caused by centuries of evolution: we can see only until the end of the next few days and fear everyting and everyone outside of our own little bubble.
^ yes well, I have heard we evolved in small communities.
not exactly suited to operate in the globalized and heavily interconnected world of today.
Or rather than being fearful, lazy and irresponsible, are you spiritually immune, above all that greed and power-hunger, content to just be, and let the world be in the mess it’s in?
I alternate between this and caring in a struggle sort of way. when I’m “spiritually immune”, as you call it, it’s not the same as apathy. I still do help out and do my bit to change the world. But I don’t suffer or feel a sense of urgent struggle over it because I’m not clinging to it. I think events are mostly determined by things other than free will, contary to the popular idea of us having lots of free will. Some theorists have said that free will is exercised unconsciously.
Spiritual ain’t in my dictionary; most of it falls into
a. personal growth b. various fields of psychology. c. philosophy
Usually some of both. Spiritual to me is an ego-boosting word which carries notions of some holy indian mystic on a mountain being all deep. Identifying with such ego-filled ideas is completely counter with what I want to achieve. What I want to achieve is more consistent with the goals and insights about the mind-reality relationship from Buddhism, because from introspection I have found most of them to be true so far. It’s the only “religion” I found to very consistent with what I already knew through personal experience.
What does spirituality mean to you?
btw I agree with most of what you’ve said here. Except when you say they are greedy & short-sighted, if that was meant to imply disdain, well I only feel compassion for them. They’re more deeply entwined in what those Buddhists might call samsara than some.
Thought: fear-based thoughts gave rise to civilization.
I still need to read The Illuminatus Trilogy, but this post reminded me of what I’ve heard about it. Great thoughts.
@Apocatastasis - ”Spiritual” is just a placeholder for me, a label for an imaginary division of a holistic being consisting, in some paradigms, of body, mind, and spirit. So, if it isn’t mental or physical, it is spiritual. That “ego boosting” spirituality you believe in seems to me to have some similarity to what I would call being “highly evolved.”
I totally agree that it was fear that drew people together into huge aggregations, AKA “civilization.” Now it seems obvious that if the species and the planet are to survive, we need to decentralize. Are you familiar with the “behavioral sink” concept?
@SuSu - I notice that quite often, people use it in an ego-boosting way. Like they say, “I’m a spiritual person” and they take a lot of pride in that. I wouldn’t say I ‘believe in it’, in the sense that I agree with it, if that’s what you mean. I do not like that kind of thinking; it is the opposite of what I’m trying to do. It’s gotten to the point where the word ‘spiritual’ carries all of those ego-boosting connotations to me, so I discard use of the word for my own purposes almost entirely. There is a book lent to me by a Buddhist guy, “Cutting through Spiritual Materialism”, which addresses the issue of egoistic thinking/delusion clouding spiritual development (whatever that may be).
I’ve heard a little about the ‘behavioural sink’ thing. So, err, out of the cities? Doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon. The behavioural sink idea could be part of the explanation as to why country folk are percieved as more caring than city folk. They are known for helping their neighbours out. I have heard about people in cities walking right past muggings, rapes, etc. but when the place is less crowded in the same situation, they are much more likely to stop and help.
@Apocatastasis - Overcrowding turns people mean and crazy. It happens with lab rats, too. You may have picked up on this — my longtime readers know: I not only don’t lock my door, whether I’m home or not. I can’t even latch the thing since an avalanche off the roof of the little cabin beside the trailer tore up the door frame. Cats can push it open from outside, and some of them can even snag it with a claw and pull it open from inside.
It’s not entirely that I trust my neighbors. It is a little of that, plus knowing we are well-armed and have the guns handy, and not being really attached to any of the things someone might sneak in and take. I’d miss some of it, but the expense of repairing the lock on something as run-down as this place is, when I know that any determined thief wouldn’t let a door lock stop him, and we are so far in debt already — not worth it. Besides, if I got the door fixed, the cats would keep us hopping to let them in and out.