Has not galvanizing fear been exploited long before the age of science and is it not an essential part of religion? Like the medicine man’s treatments mined by modern science, the politician’s and pastor’s “intuition” held and hold many secrets to be unveiled by social and neuro-science. Is it not intriguing that fire and brimstone fools people not just in the sense that it cons them but in the sense that it stupefies them? Does that make fear-mongering a crime?

Now imagine what it feels like to be politically aware outside this, a country so self-confident yet simultaneously fearful. A country which believed not ten years ago that it was at the forefront of technological civilization and had nowhere to go but up and now, bristling with nuclear weapons, is embroiled in an exhausting, maniacal, and bellicose coup d’etat. Roosevelt had hope of the competitive industrial capacity, restless workforce, and isolation; what does the rest of the world have hope of? So ironic that Russia is now less threatening than the victor of the titanic struggle. What has Bush demonstrated? The public lesson is that a lone superpower cannot be trusted, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, that for whatever reason, be it crooked leaders or immoral populace, a self-proclaimed democracy representing a 20th of the world population cannot be trusted to maintain its integrity. And the private lessons? One hopes that the class warfare incidentally (wink-wink) waged by Bush (and the upper class) is generally repellant and threatening. Though some in the American spirit we are most proud of are having limited success, the public reaction is still unfolding and the private lesson is in abeyance. But other nations not comfortable with the tools of fear must be concluding that isolation is not the answer, alliance is. The addict to power needs an intervention.

Isn’t it interesting that a nation which faced WWII had the “morality” which Andy harkens back to? Trapped in this fucking semi-cyclical dynamic, where the population is periodically reeducated, who denies that the state (as well as business) suppressed morality? We are sold Bushite preemptive warfare but denied preemptive morality. Andy diplomatically avoids noblesse oblige and rage and engages target practice on the craptan’s ship but where is the detailed analysis of the betrayal and abandonment, where is the admission that democracy is foreclosed by capital, where is the admission that the worst worshipers of idols make their money subverting morality? Who are your idols of probity, Andy, the ones that can withstand the spotlight of scepticism? It’s no wonder this culture turns to the soldier for guidance (yet is still deceived.)

Last night at a Code Pink gathering I was rewarded with a Christian denouncing Bushit’s tarnishing of her faith. What hasn’t the X?!?!X! soiled? What really troubles me, is the sense that the tyrant has liquidated our delusions. The capitalist jig is up and the leader of the capitalist fuckers, liquidated social capital: faith, honor, hope, integrity, compassion, trust, etc. before we realized how much they were wrapped up with our dreams of capitalist progress. Until the very end, corporate socialism indebted the citizenry.

Mohammed’s family were well known in Medina and found all the food sources available and gave them all away in equal portions to all. When the food ran low, the people cried out for relief, which precipitated the transformation of Mohammed into a “spiritual” leader. The wars that followed, according to David Keys (researcher into ecological change an social impacts) were a result of resource depletion from a large volcanic eruption in 535 AD. It took 220 years to clear up.

Thus, offering wisdom grounded in compassion to all is just as abstract a notion and the positing of a prime mover. The early sutras in the Koran are compassionate. The problems mounted. Thus, the later sutras are violent and warlike. (Richard Dawkins) And for us, too, there are too many mounting problems and attitudes magnified by 24/7 news hyperbole. Again, it seems all we can do if offer compassion to those we encounter and be prepared to
parry intense interpersonal accusations, too often. Absolutism, political, spiritual, social, economic, legal, has no interest in compassion for any
beyond the in-group.

We are left with what we can do that we can effect given our resources. Organizing a mass movement to enlighten the beleaguered masses (job loss, downsizing , inflation, insurance woes, ecological concerns, unemployment, etc.) just does not seem feasible. How do we get them away from their TV’s and all the other material distractions?

Questions and considerations from the far horizon line. What has been called _The View From Nowhere_ (Tom Nagel).

The good, the true, the beautiful (philokalia). Would that it were. The rushing TV format these days (7 mins of show – 4 mins of hypercommercials) may well be aimed at keeping watchers hyped constantly with materialist dreams. And 9/11 – the most gargantuan fear inducer imaginable. Mix and match. Even the very careful journalist Robert Fisk has begun to realize that the steel core of the towers could not have fallen as it did and he’s realized he must stop calling those who ask for a reinvestigation into the events “cranks.”

All the known capitalist theorists feared such a excessive drive for “MORE!” stuff. Stanly Milgram proved how easy it is to get ordinary people to torture as long as there is an “authority” saying, “Go on….” And, the “holy land” (more – the Ares land) was in constant fear that Armageddon was just minutes away which meant constant fear based watchfulness for one of the
Jewish factions who were killing each other more intently in Jerusalem while the Roman legions calmly camped outside and waited for the internecine fighting to ebb.

Fear, Materialism, Violence or the good, true and beautiful? Yet, those carefully programmed fearful ones, without the intervention of some gentle consciousness raising understanding may continue to to fall easy prey to the fearmongers, the hatemongers, the “BUY NOW” mongers. Lets hope the inevitable incompetence of the power brokers defuses any potential to create another BIG false flag event. Yes, Andy. I must paraphrase: America is Stuck in an invisible hole. There are none so blind.

Ananda

Ryokan (lee ferrell)

I quote here from an online definition about Garfinkel’s work:

“Garfinkel suggests that the way individuals bring order to, or make sense of their social world is through a psychological process, which he calls “the documentary method”. This method firstly consists of selecting certain facts from a social situation, which seem to conform to a pattern and then making sense of these facts in terms of the pattern. Once the pattern has been established, it is used as a framework for interpreting new facts, which arise within the situation….Garfinkel suggests that we are all constantly making use of the documentary method in our daily lives to create a “taken-for-granted” world which we feel we “know” and can be “at home” in. We perceive our social world through a series of patterns we have built up for making sense of and coping with the variety of situations that we encounter everyday.” (http://www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/CURRIC/soc/ethno/intro.htm)

I had not gone through too many pages of Heritage’s book, when I got the very strong impression that this material was describing a framework for the phenomenon that happened in the U.S. after 9/11. A surprising feature of ethnomethodology apparently is that people place a very high MORAL value on the worldview that they adopt and that guides their responses to new stimuli. This is even though in most cases, the stimuli, and the worldview framework, usually involve non-moral or ethical matters. It is, I believe, why people are so insensed (not merely skeptical) when anyone questions the official report on what happened to the WTC and the Pentagon. Heritage reports that in experiments, people become very emotionally insensed over things that just don’t have much import – but if someone challenges the framework either by presenting contrary evidence, or an alternative explanation, it is taken as a very affront to the individual’s personal integrity.

As Robert Gates is quoted as saying, “The American People know what they saw with their own eyes on September 11…”. Of course, the central question is, “Do they really?” There was a great deal of coordinated media work done within the first couple of days to link, in peoples’ minds, the towers collapsing, with the 19 faces, plausible explanations of how the towers must have fallen due to the planes (“flames were so hot the buildings just coudn’t withstand the heat…”), the alleged Pennsylvania crash site that amounted to a hole in the ground while people found parts, luggage and remains for miles, the “pieces of an airliner” at the Pentagon, etc. We all accepted what we “saw” and heard many times over, but mainly because we were provided with a ready world view by entieies that at the time, we still trusted.

The research that your posting describes – very intriguing – develops the psychological content that can help us understand how people get to that point, and just as importantly, how to recognize the manipulation that exploits it. So many people suspect that we are in for a new “event” – on schedule – sometime between now and the 2008 election. Yet, these openly exprressed suspicions may have almost no effect on forestalling a rerun of the manipulation of 2001, because this underlying fear of death has been so closely linked to terrorism.

If life is about accumulating two thousand shoes, like Imelda Marcos, then you are seriously off the spiritual trail into the material realm.

And there’s a bit of the spirit of Imelda Marcos embedded in the heart of our consumerist –material, and death-fearing– culture.

The Bushites in their delusions– like linking Bush with Churchill. Those Bushites are really disconnected. They simply haven’t got a clue.

It is really amazing the discrepancy between who these people are and who they like to pretend (even to themselves) to be.

I think of that bit of footage of Mussolini that Woody Allen used to hilarious effect in CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS– such a contempt shown for the Duce posing as being such a big great leader, so arrogant, so full of himself, so ugly a spirit. It is used to mock his boss, and of course the insult costs him his job.

Bush sees himself as this tough cowboy, but we know him for the lying coward he is. We saw him sitting there in Fahrenheit 911, looking for all those minutes like he really doesn’t have it in him to deal with any real challenge. We’ve seen who he is, the self-entitled brat who was happy to escape duty in Vietnam by having his family pull strings to get him to the front of a lucky line, and then not even have the decency to fulfill THAT responsibility the way a man of character would.

And then of course there’s HITLER. When we see films of him strutting and preening and calling forth the demons from people’s hearts, we can hardly imagine that he and so many others could have believed him the great FUEHRER, object of adulation, “Heil, Hitler” being mandated in all their greetings. BUt to us he is this monster, this piece of disease ridden human filth that brought out all that was worst in his people.

WTC. Cultivate fear.

Seil heil. Cultivate a lust for domination.

Two different roads to the same destination.

Their heaven is in fact a form of hell. No wonder they’ve got such a warped image of what it is that they embody.

There simply is not a full-throated enough opposition to the Bushites. And part of an effective “opposition” would be a message that effectively and constructively addresses the fears of our audience, including those for whom a mere flash of a “WTC” is enough to send them into deep reverberations of terror and of support for fascist tendencies and values.

The needs of scared people to have their fear taken into account is nothing illegitimate. If we want to persuade them, we need to tailor our message to optimize our chances of succeeding. Some of them have been temporarily disabled by a campaign of playing on their vulnerabilities, as these fear mongers –with their countless ways of seeking to increase the people’s fears, rather than inspire them for the noble struggle.

Bush and Churchill– often paired from one side or another. Here’s where the difference is most profound: Bush has deliberated sought to inflame people’s fears, for no GOOD purpose. Churchill helped lead his people into being less afraid, more courageous and noble, than they might have expected themselves capable of.

Bush has sought to call forth the weakest part of our nature –that deeply resonant fear of death– while Churchhill (as Eric Hoffer said) cast his countrymen into the role of heroes and they rose up to play them.

The Bushites in their delusions– like linking Bush with Churchill. Those Bushites are really disconnected. They simply haven’t got a clue.