A Brief History on the Economy of Fear
Here’s the thing. I commented a while back that I didn’t buy all the talk about group [x] being the downfall of our society. I don’t much care who your scapegoat is, ultimately it is really just a scapegoat. But a look into this behavior highlights, to me, the thing that I am willing to believe could cause the downfall of our society. It isn’t bombs, or revolution, or socialism, or any other commonly named group. We are not Rome. We are not founded on military strength. Yes, we won a war to gain our independence from Britain, but I think we can pretty much agree that we squeaked that one out. And having a military capable protecting your country is necessary to the continued existance of a state. I’m willing to concede that there is a certain importance to military strength, but it is not the axis that our society revolves around, and as such it is not the thing you want to target if you wish to see our society crumble apart. To destroy America you don’t sack Washington or New York.
You introduce fear. America is founded on an idea, and we’re not the only ones like this but that’s where I live so that’s where my focus is at the moment. Feel free to make the changes necessary to apply this to your country if you’re elsewhere. But, an idea has a particular tendancy in that it can only be killed two ways. The first is by starvation. Enough people stop believing it, and it fades away. This is mostly theoretical, as pretty much every idea ever conceived has, at worst, been put into stasis for a time and then brought back when this method has been used. The second is to conquer the idea with another idea. And the idea that can be best used in this case is fear. Either way, if this society passes away, it will be with a whisper rather than a bang. We will not burn out, we will only fade away. And it would take some time to even realize that it has happened.
The reason terrorists are called that is because that’s what they do - but don’t think for a second that they introduced it to us. The seeds of what I’m talking about were sown back in the Civil War. Allow me to explain. Sure, there were threats to America’s sovereignty before this time, most notably the War of 1812, but really the society ran about as smoothly as something as admittedly ad hoc as our society could be expected to. Then came the war. The thing to remember, for our purposes, is that while slavery was the issue that pushed the button, it wasn’t really the point to the war. The North didn’t declare war on the South to make slavery illegal - slavery was already illegal, and rightfully so if you ask me - the war was about whether or not the South had the right to secede. Which sounds like an odd right to be debating about, until you remember that the country was founded on the idea that divisions of a nation did have that right and, technically, it wasn’t ever stated anywhere that they didn’t have it. The South was fighting for the rights of the states to part ways from the federal government should they become incompatible, while the North was fighting to establish the right of the federal government to make everyone just get in line. It sounds like I’m sympathizing with the South, and maybe to a degree I am, but that’s not really my point here. The point is what happened afterward.
You see, prior to the war, the state one came from was more important than the country. This had a reason - according to the Constitution, the states are really more important governing bodies for the lifestyles and such of the citizens than the federal government. The federal government supercedes them, of course, and unites them and has a number of roles to carry out that the states don’t, but for our day-to-day lives it’s the states that we deal with. We talk about the checks and balances system a lot in school, but hardly ever mention that one of them was between the states and the federal government. I say ‘was’ because that’s faded. Once the war was over, it dealt a massive blow to the idea of the individual states. By determining that the federal government had absolute sway and no attempt could be made to deviate quite too far from it, the balance of power (which was never even anyway, and really shouldn’t be) became much more lop-sided. It opened the door for the federal government to seize control over areas that had been designated as the role of the states. Now, whether or not you like that, let’s examine what happened as a result. And I’m not talking about government programs, but overall effects.
If a body of people gain a sizable control over another, they begin to get segregated from each other. One cannot simply elevate in power by moving up, they must also keep the competition down. And it is human nature to distrust any such layout, at least as long as the humans in question are on the lower end of things. It is the fear of losing power that causes segregation, and it is the segregation that causes fear of submission. What we end up with, before too long, is a centralized government that is aloof, distant, and wisely distrusted. Now, there’s a way to fix that, and it is to relinquish some of that control, which is just about as unlikely as one can suspect something as being. The problem is, in a governmental system run by the votes of the masses, in order to maintain that power you have to play off something, anything, to convince those with the power to remove you that you’re really on their side. That the chasm is not so deep and wide as it is. The only common ground you have between the two groups, eventually, is fear. And so, it is fear that will get used to build your bridge.
What are the people afraid of? We know what the federal government is afraid of, the loss of power, but that’s a hard sell. Communism, fascism, gays, terrorism, liberalism, conservatism, the judges of the past, the judges of the future, whoever. It doesn’t really matter, ultimately, as long as the people are sufficiently afraid of it and you can convince them that you are, too. Every single politician has their target scapegoat, the group that will destroy the world we know and love if we only give them a chance, and every one of them has some group or party out there afraid of exactly that thing. And hey, when all else fails, just make up something for them to be afraid of and drive them crazy with it until they’re as afraid as they need to be to follow you against it. You don’t have to actually do anything about it. You just have to sell hope. Promise change. Give vague plans that sound like they will fix the problem without needing to actually carry them out. Hey, there’s a whole Congress and a President to block it from working. It doesn’t have to succeed, you just have to have people convinced that you’re working on it. And if you can keep them convinced that it’s not working because the other party is opposing it, well, all the better.
Every president that has held any popularity for any noticable amount of time did so by targeting something we should be afraid of, associating his opponent with it, giving what looks like a noble effort to correct it (in some cases, they even meant it. And, sometimes, they even pulled it off), promising change from their predecessor and hope for the future. Whenever that is. And the opponents in place used the exact same strategy to try and wrench that power away and claim it for themselves.
We’re afraid of Iranian nukes. Korean nukes. Russian nukes. Our nukes. Arabic terrorists. Domestic terrorists. Poor healthcare. Socialist healthcare. The economy. The economists. Dick Cheney. Sarah Palin. Barak Obama. That preacher that apparently knew Barak Obama. Swine Flu. Bird Flu. Spanish fluency. Immigration. Segregation. Integration. Other countries. Ourselves. People who might shoot our children. People who might kidnap our children. Our children themselves. Good Lord, people, what isn’t America afraid of?
The biggest fear America is facing right now is the fear of doing anything ourselves. This country is afraid of letting any inconvenience be addressed without the intervention of the federal government. We have come to the point where we can freely view the federal government not only as aloof, separated, distinct from the rest of the country, and still be so afraid of everything else outside of them that we view them as our only hope. And then they turn around and talk about how they can’t be trusted to do anything without the consent of the rest of the world. And then there are the dissenters, the ones who realize that America still has a token fear of losing its sovereignty and accuses the rest of Congress of being too European or too willing to sell themselves out to China and the UN and whoever else comes along with a loud enough voice. And we find ourselves so afraid of all of these things that we become numb to it. Fear becomes the deciding factor in everything we do, and we don’t even recognize it. We talk about the way the world is without once thinking that, maybe, that’s not how the world is. That’s how the world is painted. That’s how we see it. That’s how we act. And left unchecked, that will be what we are. It might have already happened. We wouldn’t be able to tell without hindsight. It’s too gradual of a slope. We can only see how far we’ve come when we stop looking at the road and start looking around to see what we’ve really surrounded ourselves with. I could have sworn the clouds were down here yesterday, now they seem to be way up there. I saw the top of this tree months ago, and now I’m resting in its shade. Is there a point of no return?
No. I don’t think there is. There is a point where we are unlikely to return, but it isn’t impossible. It’s never impossible. We can always turn around. But we can’t do it by being afraid. We must become uncomfortable with our fear again. We must recognize it for what it is and decide to oppose it. This is the downfall of our society: to walk headlong into fear until we give ourselves up to it, and in doing so, give ourselves over wholly to anyone who baits the trap with the promise of removing it. Welcome to the economy of fear. What will you sell to buy into it? What have you already sold?
“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
- C. S. Lewis
Well written!
