What is The Fear

The following is a contribution to the website www.whatisthefear.com

The Fear is a label given to the state of anxiety driven by human consciousness of individuality, social division, and mortality. Civilisation is mediated by fear as the most basic social control mechanism of the State, and this fear feeds through into most social processes as a perpetual state of anxiety.

Where there is a strong and extended hierarchy dividing people then anxiety and The Fear increase. The website www.anxietyculture.com takes a light hearted look at some of the symptoms of the fear in contemporary culture.

The book by prof Bob Altemeyer The Authoritarians describes the authoritarian personality and its two sub-groups – the followers [brown shirts] and leaders [hitlers]. The Authoritarians relates to The Fear because the conservative mindset driving authoritarianism seems to be caused by anxiety and fear – authoritarianism and conservatism are ways of controlling the fear of uncertainty in a fractured (less collectivist) social world and seem to be caused by ‘tough-minded’ childrearing and other trauma during childhood. Psychopathy is a related trait.

The Fear then, is what happens when there is social division and competitiveness between people. It relates to the Masculine Principle of competition and conflict – and The Self. It is antipathetic to the Feminine Principle of connection, cooperation, collectivism and the general inter-relatedness of wholism.

The hierarchy of civilisation ultimately causes The Fear due to the dependency of those higher in its ranks on those ‘lower down’, and the consequent need to divide and control those whom you are dependent upon using implicit violence and occasional reminders using explicit violence (Derrick Jensen, Endgame: The Problem of Civilization)

The anxiety of civilisation is empirically valid, but the anxiety theory (cf. Hobbes) that argues that non-civilised peoples also live/lived in a state of anxiety and fear is unproven. So long as those societies are strongly collectivist then there appears to be no evidence of people living ’solitary, nasty poor brutish and short’ lives. It is social division (predominant within civilisation) that seems to invoke The Fear.

Fear Factor

On 14th April 2009 a report emerged saying that Britain is becoming a more fearful place. On the same day we see reports that police are now starting to make mass arrests in order to stifle political protest.

The authors of the fearful Britain research offer some superficial explanations for The Fear, ignoring the widening gap between rich and poor, dependency on consumerism, dependency through socio-economic hierarchy, and the overall culture of control and implicit violence that pervades our superficially free society. When people loose connection with each other (through economic divisions) their confidence drops and anxiety and depression rise.

The former Thai Prime Minister made it crystal clear on Monday when he said ‘when there is inequality in a society violence will increase’. It is our socio-economic and political structure that is to blame and those whose charge that is need to accept this fact and take responsibility.

In contrast with the newspapers analysis of The Fear which centred around CCTV, crime, media language, and terrorism, bloggers quickly came into the discussion with more cutting arguments about the culture of control that Britain seems increasingly set on building around itself. Responses to the question ‘do you identify with [the fear research]‘ resulted in the following list on the BBC Have Your Say webpage (highest peer rated first). This is what the people say:

This report must make HM Government very happy indeed. For years it’s been trying to frighten it’s citizen’s so it can push forward with things like ID cards, DNA database of every person and more and more CCTV ( all these things are for our good of course ). So it’s looks like it’s well on the way to increasing fear, and with fear comes control.

Recommended by 259 people

Interesting what they said about politicians and the media ‘fuelling a sense of unease’ – fear has long been a tool of social control.

A population that is afraid will more readily give up it’s civil liberties, freedoms and privacy in order to feel ’safe’. Fear makes it OK to demand more draconian punishments for offences, spy on one’s neighbours for the authorities and so forth.

They may even go so far as to support illegal wars.

I made a decision a long time ago not to give in to fear.

Recommended by 219 people

I am no more afraid of crime than I was thirty years ago.

But now that a council official can give me a criminal record for putting a piece of paper in the wrong bin – yes, I am afraid. Very afraid.

Recommended by 212 people

I’m fearful…. i’m afraid my country is changing, and my rights are being eroded… and i have a say in neither.

Recommended by 207 people

My only fear is a government that treats “1984″ as an instruction manual rather than a warning.

Recommended by 169 people

It’s a lot easier to control a scared society than a happy one, ever seen 1984?

Recommended by 169 people

Our biggest fear, in my humble opinion, is that our inept and corrupt political and economic systems have sacrificed the happiness and stability of future generations to satisfy the insatiable greed of the elite few in the present.

Recommended by 150 people

My biggest fear is the state and the powers they are giving themselves over overblown invented threats.

Recommended by 140 people

With the largest database state in the world now operating in this country we should be scared. With constant surveillence using CCTV and ANPR cameras, the introduction of ID cards, snooping on telephone calls, web browsing and emails, constant interference on what we do and where we go, we are losing our privacy to the state.
This is happening due to the government telling us how dangerous the country is and these measures are required to keep us safe, even if it means our loss of freedom.

Recommended by 135 people

I am fearful of the way the country is degenerating into a cultral free for all.

The British values are relegated to the bottom of the heap in a left wing push to see who they can promote against the wishes of the people.

I fear that the forces set up to protect the law abiding have been hijacked by those who seek to protect the wrong doers ,deviants and fanatics.

Recommended by 119 people

It is Nu labour’s policy to make us more fearful, because fear increases control. What scares me is a quotation made by Gordon Brown “I did maths for a year at university. I don’t think I was very good at it” and yet this man is going to lead us into a new financial era.

Recommended by 95 people

Is hardly surprising we are all feeling anxious.We have rising unemployment,rising bills,home repossessions,less money for food and a stupid,incompetent cynical government who live in cloud cuckoo land believing we can all get through this crisis if we “calmly carry on”whilst they continue to wallow in our taxes.I wonder if any of them have tried to survive on £60 a week?Its 1979 all over again.

Recommended by 87 people

There are many reasons for this, the least not being my huge annoyance at the benefits system that Gordon has put in place.
I find this exceptionally frustrating.
Handouts for all, and for those of us that have worked constantly that really grinds.

Many many reasons I feel anxious about this country now, Labour being one of them and considering I was a hardened Labour supporter, thats not a good sign is it Gordon. have gone to the BNP after 20 years of voting Labour.

Recommended by 83 people

People grow increasingly fearful for one prime reason, the victims of crime are fotgotten and not protected whilst the ciminals know there is little or no punishment because they are greatly protected by the politically correct brigade, do gooders and a gutless government that will not reintroduce punishment that will bring confidence back onto the street.

Recommended by 77 people

Not really any more fearful than 30 years ago. I think this “fear” is mainly caused by the media winding people up by publishing articles such as this one. The very old adage “sensationlism sells” is still as true as ever!

Recommended by 75 people

Authoritarianism – Culture and Mind

The cultural phenomenon of authoritarianism has been on the decline for decades, this is an empirical fact. But the psychological personality drive to authoritarianism still exists in all of us to greater and lesser extent.

What is going to happen when those with stronger authoritarian drives (perhaps the majority by many accounts) are threatened by the decline of authoritarian culture (or ‘old fashioned attitudes’) and the growing power of progressive liberal culture?

In my view authoritarian culture is on the decline because those who have always existed without need for it (those with low authoritarian personality traits, deep self-confidence, no need for father figure or gods) have been able to communicate outside the hierarchical-broadcast control framework of authoritarian communication processes. In the 1960’s there was a flourishing of this progressive reconnection, and now open-source and peer-to-peer communication via the web (net 2.0) is taken it its power to a qualitatively different level.

I have also formed the opinion that progressive liberal culture is adaptive, creative, innovative, and uncontainable. It is a force which could very well lead to people with non-authoritarian personalities subjugating those with authoritarian personalities. Not necessarily wilfully but through cultural dominance, economically and socially – net 2.0 is the structure in which this could happen, appears already to be happening. The first will be last and the last will be first.

Generally speaking the non-authoritarians with considerable latent power that could unleash itself via net 2.0 tend to be educated and intellectual – creative and adaptable. They do not need rules or fixed thinking patterns, they think for themselves ecologically not classically, and need no gods or dads to dictate life for them. They are people who were likely brought up outside a culture of fear and control that appears to be the genesis of the authoritarian personality trait. They are smart and ready to wage war against authoritarianism, from the need for God to the need for Kings and other strong masters. Being brought up free and self-confident they are creative and resilient. They have no Achilles heel (father figures) through whom they can be unsettled. But authoritarians (one example is the Christian Right) on the other hand tend to have lower self-confidence, less ability to adapt and think for themselves, less ability to deal with a complex world – seeing things in black and white and getting anxious and angry when clear distinctions or their gods’ existence are challenged.

So, to net 2.0 culture. What is going to happen when a majority that believes it still has power meets a minority that gradually is revealed to be usurping that power through powerful alternative networking and creative socio-economic processes (see this for an explanation of the field of battle).

I predict that we will have a situation of a kind not unlike civil war as authoritarians lash out against aspects of a new and more complex social-economic world that they are unequipped to deal with psychologically (e.g. fundamentalist Christian and Muslim authoritarian followers). Authoritarians need a simple order that they can understand. Their spirits will be crushed and they will attack all and every in their random attempts to recreate the simple order that they crave.

Those who are not authoritarian will have to find a way to help authoritarians heal the deep scars that got them there in the first place – to help them grow beyond simple childhood attitudes, and to understand the meaning of ‘the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the sons’, and to understand the true meaning of Love. In contrast with Richard Dawkins I believe that we should not be talking of waging a war against those who crave authoritarian leadership but of making peace and Love with them.

The Authoritarians

Check out this thread on Google Groups – The Authoritarians (discussions around Bob Altemeyer’s book The Authoritarians).

“It is the unmentionable reality of
civilisation that it depends on fighting.” (Lacey and Danziger, 1999)