There’s a way to tell if your fear is rational, or indicative of disorder.
If your fear is rational, and you take steps to alleviate the fear, and the fear diminishes — that’s a good sign.
If you take steps to alleviate the fear and your fear remains — or even intensifies — that’s an unhealthy sign.
Throughout the last year, I have watched people go through this pandemic syndrome. This time last year: “I am scared to death. I certainly can’t leave my house, unless I have to.”
What will it take to encourage you to leave the house? “A vaccine,” was the most common answer, in spring 2020.
Now we have a vaccine, in spring 2021. Confidence in the vaccine is so strong that everybody feels compelled to get it, without question — and to have a guarantee that everyone else get one too. The same people who think it’s perfectly fine for the FDA to take 20 years to approve a life-saving drug now suddenly are just fine with bypassing all kinds of approval for the vaccine. Why so trusting?
A year ago, all that mattered was the vaccine. “Once I can get a vaccine, I can mostly go back to normal.”
So what happened? Millions are getting the vaccine. But many, I find, are still staying home. Or leave home, but only fearfully. They project this fear onto the blaming of others. “Well, if everyone would wear five masks, like we’re told to do, and if everyone would get the vaccine, then I wouldn’t have to be so scared.” It’s other people’s fault you’re scared.
But the anger at others is just a mask for the remaining, totally unaddressed fear. And even if it were somehow possible to guarantee that every single person on the planet will get the vaccine, and every single person on the planet can be forced to wear 5 masks, the fear would still not diminish. In fact, it would probably grow.
Self-refuting logic is a sign of irrational fear. If you really believed the COVID vaccine made you safer, you would not feel tempted to stay home; and you would not feel greater fear because some didn’t take the vaccine.
What makes fear of coronavirus so irrational is not the perfectly legitimate desire to avoid a virus, even a virus that is usually non-life-threatening. What makes the fear of coronavirus irrational is the faulty premise we don’t apply to ANY other ailment: a ZERO tolerance of risk.
When you strive to do the impossible, which is what “irrational” means, you end up doing things that only make the fear worse. The quest for ZERO risk, with regard to viruses, is untenable at this point in time. The more people look for that elusive zero risk, the worse the fear will become.
Imagine if an edict were written as follows: “Until we have a 100 percent guarantee that there will be ABSOLUTELY NO TRAFFIC FATALITIES, EVER AGAIN, then all driving must cease.” When, exactly, do you think people would be able to start driving again?
Irrational fear is self-reinforcing. The more steps you take to alleviate the irrational fear, the worse the fear becomes. Each ridiculous and self-refuting step — designed to bring about ZERO risk — leads to an intensification of the fear. The remedies for addressing the fear become more and more irrational, untenable and even unjust.
If you were an evil dictator and wanted to compel a society to bring itself down, turning citizen against citizen, then instilling such irrational fears would be a brilliant, though evil, way of going about it.
Other than President Trump, no one cares enough about America to protect it. So why are we spending $1,000 billion annually to defend ourselves from alleged foreign threats when there is no defense against our country’s theft by the ruling Establishment and woke Democrat identity politics ideologues? Why vote Republican when the party does not defend us?
If the Democrats succeed in stealing the Georgia senatorial seats as well, which is likely given the absence of protection against electoral fraud, they will rapidly move to consolidate one-party dictatorship.
Here is the agenda:
Illegals will be amnestied and given the vote. As there seem to be about 22 million of them, this alone suffices to guarantee Democrat rule.
As a backup felons will be allowed to vote, adding more millions to the Democrats’ base.
Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico will be made states, adding 4 more senators to the Democrats.
An anti-white-male political coalition consisting of radical feminists, LGBTQ, radicalized people of color, and white liberals will be used to suppress opposition to “reparations” made in many forms to the voting coalition that the Democrats have formed.
To insure the success of violence as an intimidating tactic against white people, the Second Amendment will be nullified and weapons will be confiscated.
These actions successfully repress the white majority that an open borders policy will soon turn into a minority.
As Jim Quinn puts it, the only choice white people have is to heel or to fight— https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/12/jim-quinn/time0-to-heel-or-fight/ . I would say the choice is flight or fight. Where to go? Hungary, other Eastern European countries, and Russia had enough of unaccountable government in the 20th century and are also hostile to Identity Politics. There is still a morality based in Christianity present in those countries. Costa Rica is a frequently mentioned place for refuge, but vindictive Democrat ideologues could force the small country to make the Amerian expatriates suffer in some ways. Whether these countries would accept the number of Americans seeking escape from tyranny and abuse is unlikely.
Marxists wanted to erase capitalism. The new violent ideology wants to erase whiteness. But are the multi-billionaires, the CIA, FBI, global corporate CEOs, organized lobby groups, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and World Economic Forum that comprise the American Establishment going to succumb to the ideological regime or are they going to use it for their own agendas.
I suspect the latter, but sometimes managed revolutions get out of hand. It is even possible that white people will wake up, screw up their courage, and accept the instruction from Solzhenitsyn:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
“[I]f I were president-elect of the country, it’s the last thing I would say. Even if I believed it, I doubt that I would put it this way. But I don’t believe this anyway. Our darkest days are ahead of us? What a bleak way of looking at things. … We Americans have adapted to our problems. … Our freedom has allowed our adaptability. If disaster is coming our way, we don’t just sit there and endure it. We come up with ways to avoid it, to beat it back, to overcome it, but we don’t just sit there and accept it. And, as such, we don’t just resign ourselves to the fact that they’re living in the darkest days because we, at least to this point, still have the greatest degree of freedom of any people on earth. Now, it’s under assault and under attack and we all know this. But I don’t believe our darkest days are ahead of us. I never have. People have been asking, “You’ve always told us you’d tell us when it’s time to panic. Is it time?” It’s never time to panic, folks. It’s never, ever gonna be time to give up on our country. It will never be time to give up on the United States. It will never be time to give up on yourself. Trust me.” –Rush Limbaugh, 12/23/20
Fear is one of the most powerful human emotions. While highly useful in situations where threat of immediate harm exists, it is the most debilitating and dangerous of emotions when present unnecessarily. In this video we will examine how fear can be used as a tool to manipulate others, and how those in positions of power, past and present, have effectively used fear to control certain aspects of society.
Humans, especially since the Industrial Revolution, have become increasingly protected from the dangers that our ancestors faced in relation to the natural world. But as mankind’s fear of nature and the elements has fallen, in its place many other fears have come to fill the void. Some of these fears have arisen in response to real threats, but many have been in response to things imagined.
As the Stoic philosopher Seneca pointed out:
“There are more things…likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” (Letters from a Stoic, Seneca)
While some of these imagined fears are of one’s own making, many are the consequence of narratives created by those in positions of power. Individuals looking to take advantage of, and manipulate others, have long realized the power of fear. When one is gripped by fear of a threat, real or imagined, their rational and higher cognitive capacities shut down, making them easily manipulable by anyone that promises safety from the threat.
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear”, wrote the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke.
Ruling classes for thousands of years have understood the power of intentionally invoking fear in their subjects as a means of social control. Henri Frankfort, in his book the Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, noted that between 1800 and 1600 BC a fear psychosis spread through Ancient Egypt, precipitated by the invasion of foreign rebels hungry for power and conquest. Initially this fear psychosis was justified by a real threat, yet even when these foreigners were successfully driven far away from Egypt, the ruling powers sought to artificially maintain fear among the population – realizing that a fearful population is easier to control than a fearless one.
As Frankfort explained:
“The common desire for security need not have survived after the Egyptian Empire extended the military frontier of Egypt well into Asia and thus removed the peril from the immediate frontier…However, it was a restless age, and there were perils on the distant horizon which could be invoked to hold the community together, since unity was to the advantage of certain central powers…A fear psychosis, once engendered, remained present. And there were forces in Egypt which kept alive this fear psychosis in order to maintain the unified purpose of Egypt.” (The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, Henri Frankfort)
The artificial construction and maintenance of fear in a population by a ruling class has remained pervasive from the time of Ancient Egypt up until the modern day. Oppressive governments often maintain their grip on a nation by continually invoking fear, and then proceeding to claim that only they, the ruling powers, have the means and ability to protect the population from such a threat:
“The whole aim of practical politics”, wrote HL Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
John Adams, one of the founding fathers of America, echoed this sentiment writing “Fear is the foundation of most governments”.
While there are numerous tactics and strategies that have developed over the centuries to effectively exploit the public through fear, two of the more powerful and efficient are the use of false flags, and the implementation of propaganda via repetition.
A false flag can be defined as a “covert operation . . . designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by entities, groups, or nations other than those who actually planned and executed them”. In his book Feardom, Conor Boyack provides a nice explanation on the effectiveness of false flag attacks for those looking to institute social control:
“…physical attacks lead to a corresponding increase of trust in political leaders and submission to them. This effect is likely the same whether the attack be a surprise, known to political leaders yet allowed to happen, or directly orchestrated by these same leaders who stand to benefit from the increased trust and submission…False flag operations are used because people generally do not have access to the details, so they are prone to rely upon what they’re told, and thus are easily deceived. People will, for the most part, believe what they are told in times of crisis, and so government officials, whether their motives are good or evil, capitalize on or completely fabricate the crises.” (Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and What You Can Do to Stop Them, Conor Boyack)
Repetition is also a well-known and prevalent propaganda technique used to solidify falsehoods and perpetuate fear in the public consciousness. By repeating specific phrases and warnings, and displaying particular symbols and images over and over through various mediums, those in power are able to paralyze entire populations with a fear psychosis.
The Nazi Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was well aware of the power of repetition in cloaking falsehoods in a garb of truth, stating:
“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise.” (Joseph Goebbels)
George Orwell, in a related manner, viewed political language as largely a form of propaganda designed to deceive people, as he wrote:
“Political language. . .is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” (George Orwell)
The technological advances of the last century have given those in power the ability to propagate their narratives and engage in fear mongering to an extent never before seen in history. However, despite the unnerving situation we find ourselves in, there is an antidote to the power of propaganda and fear mongering: that being, knowledge.
Plato rightly stated that “ignorance is the root of misfortune”, and as long as we remain ignorant of the fact that all too often those who claim to protect us from fear are actually manipulating our fears for their own benefit, then we will be contributing to the misfortune of the world through our ignorant compliance.
The philosopher Voltaire stated that “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” To avoid being an individual who can be convinced of absurdities, one must become an active truth seeker, instead of an all too common passive propaganda receiver. An important step in becoming an active truth seeker is the realization that when evaluating the claims of those in power, skepticism is warranted and even necessary. Very often those who rule do not have the best interests of the public at heart; for as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it “political genius lies in extracting success even from the people’s ruin.”
The reality is that most of us are not in a position to single-handedly change the world, but we can at least try to rid ourselves of the unnecessary fears which are the fuel for so much hate and destruction in the world. In fact, taking responsibility for one’s own actions and the beliefs that motivate such actions, may be the most important thing one can do when faced with the prospect of an oppressive government. For as Stanley Milgram noted: “The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.” And furthermore, might there be truth to the comment by F.A. Harper’s that “the man who knows what freedom means will find a way to be free.”
At this point some may be thinking that while the use of fear by those in power certainly contributed to horrible situations in the past, most notably in the totalitarian states of Russia, Germany and China in the 20th century, Western nations of the present are far from approaching a situation so dire. Hopefully that is true, but it is important to realize that those who have lived through the rise of oppressive governments have seldom realized the perilous situation they were in until it was too late. We will conclude this lecture with a fascinating but ominous passage from the book They Thought They Were Free, which is based on interviews with normal Germans who lived during the Nazi regime. The following quote comes from one of the German’s interviewed, where he discusses why he thought that more ordinary Germans didn’t take a stand against the rise of the Nazi government.
“One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse… You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow…
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked … But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between comes all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next…
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident. . . collapses it all at once, and you see that everything – everything – has changed…Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed…” (They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer)
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 