The fear factor

Submitted by Lindsay
Melbourne Australia!

I will show you fear in a handful of dust. -T.S. Elliot, The Waste Land

(6/2019) Unlikely as it seems, the world is slowly getting itself together. Yes, for the first time in all its history, a common ideology is emerging, one that cuts across race, colour, creed and geography. It is dispersed and diffuse; we are aware of its results, but not it’s origins; It was not planned, but is introducing the greatest social change of all time. There are so many factors at work that It is beyond anyone’s comprehension, and we run, headless chooks, in circles looking for answers.

Its effects are profound, civilization as we know it is being distorted, and it will be the overwhelming feature of tomorrow’s world.

No, it is not climate change, not China vs. America or Democracy v Totalitarianism, colored vs. white. It has a simple, one word name we all are familiar with.

Control.

There have been signs of its emergence over the past 100 years - Communism and Nazism the obvious examples, where the state controlled everything, (or the people, in theory, did so), as well as the coups, the ethnic cleansing, the civil wars that sprang up in parts of Europe and Africa, but all these were the result of the most basic of human responses to the unknown:

Fear

Fear of losing what you already have and hope to have, of not surviving, and above all fear of failure. Fear helped us survive – run from the sabre-tooth, hide from the enemy, but it has also driven mankind to the most terrible of acts and policies, it has colored our upbringing, our governments and out religions and schooling.

These are all based on a subliminal sense of self-preservation. We are all primed to survive – it’s the first commandment – with our adrenals the means of attaining it, but there is another equal force at work: survival of the family.

Self-preservation is nullified when the family, the tribe, the clan is at risk, because in the end it is not the life but the genes that must be preserved. This is the basis of humanity, but this in turn is the opposite to dictatorship. Dictators go for the individual rather the family, and this produces the biggest risk to the whole of the race.

Its been with us ever since one person decided to take all the power for himself, (its never a woman, because family usually comes first), and it would hardly matter if it was not spreading like a plague of dystopian terror as it is now.

So, why now? Well, there are more things to fear now than ever before. The greatest of these is not climate change, atomics or war, it is the sheer number of people who now compete for space, water, and sustenance. Because this is not recognized, all the other things seem to drive it. Clan wars that have grown to be race wars; religious intolerance; refugees that are refugees because of these things, leading to fear of loss of national identity; divides between haves and have nots, and most profoundly, white supremacy.

Whites have always been in the minority, and the renaissance produced conditions that built on the creation of ancient monotheistic, male gods. That is, European know-how was superior to any other ability because white men were superior. Circular reasoning, sure, but it worked. Whites were better.

After almost a millennium that notion is ingrained in western thought, with the result that race, especially in your country, has played an enormous part in shaping your culture. Misogamy, xenophobia, narcissism – these have polarized the nation until today they are fertile ground for a president who is the very model of a modern dictator.

Enter, stage left, China and Xi Jinping. Another dictator who cherishes the title, who is putting in place the means of monitoring and controlling his vast empire. When you consider the other members of that club, (Russia, UAE, Iran, Syria, and the smaller players who are only part way there such as Hungary, Britain, Australia, France), you see that the same applies. Supremacy, rule by dictate, hatred of those not you, minorities, and all who wish to believe and behave in ways different to yours - these are not tolerated.

Whether state or church based, it’s the same. We know better than you. By far the worst of these are the church-based rulers. They take appropriate portions of their inherited writings, alter them for the day, and denounce all not theirs. And that’s not just Islam. It’s Christians as well, all who screech ‘fundamentals’ ‘back to the book’ ‘back to the good old days’ - these are dictators because they do not tolerate all who disagree with them. (Of course, in democracies they are scared of being punished by the law, but that doesn’t stop them.)

Underneath all that – as if it wasn’t enough - are the scardest of all, those with most to lose. It’s logical, isn’t it, that the more you have, the more you want to hang on to it. After all you or your forebears worked hard for it, traded wisely, or were just lucky. To have that taken away is a fate almost worse than death, and that’s motive enough to support those who will help you keep it. They are called conservatives because they want to conserve what is theirs, and the more you have the more conservative you will be – while maintaining a facade of decent democracy.

Yet there is something more fundamental to dictators than even this: A sense of self worth, self identity. It is them, not the people, not the nation that matters. They will go to any lengths to preserve it. They will take anyone or anything on in a kind of frenzied zeal, and that is where we are today.

The idea of democracy is dead. The rule of the jungle is baring its claws, when you will die to keep what you consider yours.

And we, peace lovers all, live in the sunshine of hope and expectancy as the new world order gets set to control our minds and lives.