Fear Itself

Is this any way to run a government?

Maybe you have heard the words ”There is nothing to fear but fear itself”  from our 32nd President - Roosevelt, in the beginning of a very depressed time in this country. One in which I was born and heard those words and others.  So I've been in and out of contemplating the fear and the fear itself for a very long time. 

Here, in this time, we have ample examples daily of fear expressing itself where actual fears are actually not generating, unless you redefine things that need to be feared which are actual harm producers which are actual harms to actual people in the sense of physical mangling starvation deprivation lack of housing. Those are definitely fearable if that's your approach to everything. Then there are made up fears.

 Then there is another major fear producer a kind of manufactured thing made up by certain kinds of people who from whatever motivation thrive on fear-making so that they may direct the fear as well as so-called protect from the fear. 

Those people in what I guess we can call ‘The AD religious epic era’ when the zealots began organizing people's emotional ‘fearotry’  to their own hierarchical ends not to mention newly capitalist ones. Yes the Church. It's a very old scam and it’s still working.

First there's the old caveman style fear of death which goes back many thousands of years. We are a mystery solving race.  Then there is the fear of wondering what happens to a body once it has died. Then there is also a wonder and the associated fear around natural events.  Then comes a kind of a natural progression to creating a structure of religious thought around those fears and mysteries. Then the religious becomes the political because how else are you going to control the whole population to fear along with you? Zingo.

This is where the scam begins: if you can pay your way out of what has been thrust at you as a certain kind of horrible death in an imagined hellscape, you could supposedly live a fear/less life. Except that the problem being you're always wondering perhaps fearfully every single moment about whether a thing you're doing is going to send you into that horrible direction. Unless you pay at the altar of conformity whatever kind of altar that is. And remain perfect according to a set of standards you have been taught to observe in every single moment of your waking.

So what is that altar and what does it look like? Besides the one in your place of prayer and worship it could also be your local supermarket, your local big box store, some vast online network, or even the status to be achieved by supposedly upper education with all its prizes. There is a substantial number of people who actually believe that that altar should always exist in evermore demanding and commanding ways, no matter previous agreements to the contrary such as in the late 18th century of this country. 

Since the political definitely has an effect on the personal many have taken to this structure to get their way as if the 18th century agreements meant much less than they actually do. Plain and simple: 

the ones with an overriding belief in religious fear-making have spread their fear-making into their political ambitions which is nothing new but has amplified itself hugely now. In a climate of diminishing education on the basics of growing up and civilian-making, fear-making has taken on enormous proportions with scam artists in various kinds of dress and sex basing their vote-for-me campaigns on the fear itself. 

Where fear is the basic prime engine of political contact there will always be people turning that into undue power because politics has a group effect, on everyone. Because some people seem to live by telling other people what to do. Perhaps because they actually don't really know what to do for themselves living in fear as they do.  The critical point comes when the emotionality of religion meets the rationality of politics. Chaos.

That's what we're seeing. The democratically made laws of a whole nation which work and keep working better when we perfect them to everybody's benefit, do not hurt the religiously driven folks. They simply don't want to admit that their religion needs to stay in their own hearts and homes and not intrude on everybody else's particular lives. The amount of obfuscating speech that goes along with this fear trickery is making itself better known as bad behavior, as chaos run amok, because nothing of that sort can work in an actual democracy. 

We are all the polis, political people, because we exist everywhere where things are decided in various formations of thought and conduct. We are all in this together.