Fear Makes People Stupid!
“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”—Edward R. Murrow, Broadcast Journalist
America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.
The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.
Tom Secker Presents Professor Lars Svendsen
In a culture that in many ways is characterized by social disintegration, fear is something we all share, a unifying perspective on existence. Political fear does not arise in a vacuum, it is created and maintained. This week we explore these ideas with Professor Lars Svendsen, the author of A Philosophy of Fear. We discuss why he wrote the book, where the modern culture and climate of fear comes from, whether philosophy has adequately confronted it, and how a politics of trust could be the antidote to the politics of fear.
Today, almost all politics are a politics of fear, and almost all policies are defended and excused through some notion of 'security'. Fear-therefore-security is the dominant political dynamic of our time. This week I take a look at these concepts, exploring whether all politics is a politics of fear, and offering examples of when this can work well and when it can work very badly. I focus in on the recent general election in the UK, showing how every candidate, even those offering some degree of real opposition, are all engaged in a politics of fear and security.
A Failed Regime Pursuing Losing Wars in which the Masters of Defeat Can Now Only Rely on the Masters of Deceit
Representative democracies and autocratic dictatorships respond to profound internal crises in very distinctive ways: the former attempts to reason with citizens, explaining the causes, consequences and alternatives; dictatorships attempt to terrorize, intimidate and distract the public by evoking bogus external threats, to perpetuate and justify rule by police state methods and avoid facing up to the self-inflicted crises.