Category Archives: Fear

Doom Boom

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Fear

 

Fear was not invented recently in America. Long before people bought condos in missile silos, fear was a profitable business. It has always been there. It always has been profitable.  There were ample fears earlier in the United States too. The Cold War was brimming with fear.  Many thought there were communists under every bed. Many feared nuclear annihilation. Of course, as always, politicians ensured that the most important people had the most protection. That meant, of course, they were protected. As Evan Osnos said,

 

“During the Cold War, Armageddon became a matter for government policymakers. The Federal Civil Defense Administration, created by Harry Truman, issued crisp instructions for surviving a nuclear strike, including “Jump in any handy ditch or gutter” and “Never lose your head.” In 1958, Dwight Eisenhower broke ground on Project Greek Island, a secret shelter, in the mountains of West Virginia, large enough for every member of Congress. Hidden beneath the Greenbrier Resort, in White Sulphur Springs, for more than thirty years, it maintained separate chambers-in-waiting for the House and the Senate. (Congress now plans to shelter at undisclosed locations.) There was also a secret plan to whisk away the Gettysburg Address, from the Library of Congress, and the Declaration of Independence, from the National Archives.”

 

Frankly, I would have felt better if the political leaders were the last to be put into bunkers, so that their conduct would not be overly reckless. In 1961 John F. Kennedy encouraged “every citizen” to help build fall-out shelters.  Thousands of Americans complied. Back home I knew someone a block away who had one in his house. Now that seems crazy.  Few people would have survived a nuclear attack in those shelters. But this advice played on American and Canadian fears. Many people felt better doing something.

This was part of a cherished American tradition of fear mongering–one of the most popular sports in America. Right next to NASCAR racing, wrestling, and NFL football.

Osnos described the American fear movement this way,

 “In 1976, tapping into fear of inflation and the Arab oil embargo, a far-right publisher named Kurt Saxon launched The Survivor, an influential newsletter that celebrated forgotten pioneer skills. (Saxon claimed to have coined the term “survivalist.”) The growing literature on decline and self-protection included “How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years,” a 1979 best-seller, which advised collecting gold in the form of South African Krugerrands. The “doom boom,” as it became known, expanded under Ronald Reagan. The sociologist Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, “During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I’m seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What do I do now?’ ”

 

I doubt that anyone ever lost money overestimating American fears.  Doom is always booming.

 

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Strange Fears

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, criminal Justice, Decline of the west, Environmental Apocalypse, Fear, Social democracy

 

All unreasonable fears are strange, but some are stranger than others. Some fear environmental collapse. Not such a strange fear at all.

Some of the people who put down $3 million to purchase a condo in a former missile silo in Kansas have strange fears. In the land of conspiracy theories that should not surprise. Maybe they all do. Evan Osnos interviewed Tyler Allen a real estate developer in Florida who bought a unit in the Kansas silo. He worries about future “social conflict” in America. That really is not so strange a fear.  Allen also thinks that the government will deceive the public, as it has done in the past. He even believes that Ebola was allowed into the country “in order to weaken the population.” Unsurprisingly, he is transfused with fear and conspiracy theories. But I am not putting down $3million. Of course, I can’t put down $3 million, but if I did, I would think that there must be a better way.

Allen claimed that when he started suggesting ideas like this people thought he was crazy, but they don’t anymore. He said, “my credibility has gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this just seemed crazy that all this was going to happen: the social unrest and the cultural divide in the country, the race-baiting and the hate-mongering.”

Of course, how will people get to their bunkers? The buyers don’t live next door. Tyler lived in Florida. That is a long way from Kansas. Tyler thought he would have 48 hours to make it to Kansas. Most people he believed, when the crisis came, would head to the bars while he headed towards Kansas. I guess they would be watching from “Sports bars.” Of course, if a nuclear bomb hit American, such driving would be difficult. Did you see the images of the highways around New Orleans when the people there were told to evacuate because of impending Hurricane Katrina? We would not want to be in the line-up. Pretty messy!

As I have said, all of this is driven by fears–in particular fears of the very rich. Osnos does not disagree,

“Why do our dystopian urges emerge at certain moments and not others? Doomsday—as a prophecy, a literary genre, and a business opportunity—is never static; it evolves with our anxieties. The earliest Puritan settlers saw in the awe-inspiring bounty of the American wilderness the prospect of both apocalypse and paradise. When, in May of 1780, sudden darkness settled on New England, farmers perceived it as a cataclysm heralding the return of Christ. (In fact, the darkness was caused by enormous wildfires in Ontario.) D. H. Lawrence diagnosed a specific strain of American dread. “Doom! Doom! Doom!” he wrote in 1923. “Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America.”

 

Do these doomsday fears not tell us something important about the über rich? This is what they are bringing about! They have no one to blame but themselves. Can’t they do better? Their own actions are creating these fears. Their own actions could forestall them.

There must be a better way and its not being brought in by forest fires from Ontario.

Logical Fear

Decline of the west, Fear, racism, Social democracy

 

As we drove through Salina Kansas where rich people have bought bunkers in an old missile silo to protect them from the impending chaos, I asked myself, for them what might that be?  I asked myself, ‘What generates fear among rich people”?  Particularly what triggers fear among rich white people?  I think the answer is obvious. They fear African Americans because they know they have the objects of horrific injustice that has never been remedied or compensated, and in many cases even acknowledge.

 

The election of Barack Obama led to a spike in survivalism. Many of white Americans feared (and this is the operative word) that as a black President he would ignite racial tensions because expectations of Blacks would rise too high and too fast. They thought Obama would react by restricting gun rights and expanding the national debt. Many of them loaded up on freeze-dried cottage cheese and beef stroganoff that had been promoted by Glen Beck and Sean Hannity. As Osnos reported, “A network of “readiness” trade shows attracted conventioneers with classes on suturing (practiced on a pig trotter) and photo opportunities with survivalist stars from the TV show “Naked and Afraid.” The fear of American whites—based on the fear of the tables being justifiably turned over against them—is a deep and pervasive fear. Such fear is a is a well spring of racism.

 

Not all survivalists think collapse is about to happen soon. Many of them take the position that the risk of catastrophe is so severe if a political collapse occurs that the smart betters will take precautions. They are playing the odds. As one of the techies told Evan Osnos The New Yorker writer, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”

 

To them,  in other words is fear is logical. It is not paranoia it is a reasonable fear.  Such fear may be unreasonable. By definition, it that is correct this is  not paranoia. One C.E.O. of another large tech company told Osnos, “It’s still not at the point where industry insiders would turn to each other with a straight face and ask what their plans are for some apocalyptic event…He went on, “But, having said that, I actually think it’s logically rational and appropriately conservative.”

I think it is a sign of the decline of western civilization.  The rich elites are losing their confidence. Do they know something we don’t?

 

Riding out the Apocalypse

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, Fear

 

We didn’t stop in Kansas, but I am stuck there metaphorically near the silos occupied by the fearful rich. That phenomenon really puzzles me. It calls to mind what the Eagles said, “every form of refuge has its price.”

Antonio Martínez was very rich and wanted a refuge far from cities, but he did not want to be too far off the grid either. As he said, “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” It won’t be simple to “ride out the apocalypse.”

Martínez thinks that Americans are in a difficult position. As he said, “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

 Evan Osnos writing in the New Yorker described these wealthy survivalists this way,

“In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

 

Another wealthy forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, Tim Chang, said this,

“There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens… I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to… Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.”

 

Chang called this a “terror scenario.”  That phrase is apt. People like Chang and his cronies live in fear. They are terrified. They fear that soon the gig will be up. Chang also realizes that he will need more than caches of food and gear. He will need weapons to defend himself and his family. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.” Archery that ought to do the trick.

Some of these guys are young yet incredibly rich (even though many also seem incredibly stupid). Welcome to modern America. One of them is Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which was valued at six hundred million dollars. Not bad for a 33-year-old, but he was not happy. He was scared shitless! Osnos says that some of these survivalists are in it for “brogrammer” entertainment. They like the real-world sci-fi with fancy (and expensive gear).  Others like Huffman treat it much more seriously. He has been scared ever since the saw the film “Deep Impact” in 1988. That film depicted a comet striking the Atlantic causing a massive tsunami. As Huffman said, “Everybody’s trying to get out, and they’re stuck in traffic. That scene happened to be filmed near my high school. Every time I drove through that stretch of road, I would think, I need to own a motorcycle because everybody else is screwed.”

I remember seeing scenes like that north of New Orleans when people fled the city to avoid the dangers of Hurricane Katrina. The roads were clogged with traffic as people fled in mass.

After that film in 1988 “Huffman  has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He fell in love with one of its core principles, “radical self-reliance,” which he takes to mean “happy to help others, but not wanting to require others.” I would call this radical fear. Paranoia in other words.

 It is such fear that breeds conspiracy theories as Richard Hofstaeder pointed out in his class The Paranoid Style in American Politics. That spirit is alive an well. Really not so well.

 

Unreasonable Fear of the Super-rich

Decline of the west, Fear, Social democracy

 

Paranoia is one of the least appreciated yet most significant emotions in the United States today.  As Richard Hofstadter explained decades ago in his book based on an earlier article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, paranoia is the basis of one of the things that is undermining the country as it reinforces conspiracy theories.  America is a fearful country and that fear manifests itself in many strange ways.

What is paranoia? It is unreasonable fear. We all have fears and many of us also have unreasonable fears. Disaster can flow from unreasonable fears if they are not constrained. America has experienced this repeatedly. It experiences it now. There are many examples of the power of unreasonable fears.  This morning we drove near to one of them

An ancient Titan missile site is located near Salina Kansas close to the Nebraska border.  It was one of two such sites in North America during the Cold War. The other was located in Green Valley Arizona where Chris and I lived for a month a couple of years ago when we first enjoyed an extended stay in the American south in winter. That missile site was turned in to a museum. We toured it with friends John Wiebe and Margaret Daley-Wiebe.

The second site near Salina where we drove today, is being developed as a security haven for the super-rich of America. It is astonishing, but these are among the most fearful people in America. You would think they had nothing to fear. After all, what can harm the super-rich?

As Evan Osnos said in an article for The New Yorker, “Some of the wealthiest people in America—in Silicon Valley, New York, and beyond—are getting ready for the crackup of civilization.” Sometimes the practitioners of this art are called survivalists, because they hope to survive what they see as the inevitably impending doom. They hope to survive something that is intuitively unsurvivable. Full disclosure I fear the same thing but have not invested a fortune is finding a way to survive it.

 

As Osnos said,

 

Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.

 

 

I am fascinated that this is being developed by the very rich. Why is that? I don’t know, but I have a theory. I think the rich in America live in fear.  They fear that their wealth will crumble and they will be left to their own devices among drug crazed hooligans out to get them and their families and their wealth. In fact, I think (entirely without evidence of course) that this fear emerged out of a sense of guilt. Guilt is the existential edge of unreasonable fear. American society–and American wealth in particular–is based on 2 ultimate horrendous injustices. The first was the genocide of Indigenous peoples that the first European settlers encountered in the New World. The second was the astonishingly long imposition of slavery on African-Americans. Immigrants from Africa as Ben Carson famously called them. That injustice leads to guilt, which leads to fear. Many rich Americans are incredibly fearful.

 

The Religious  Mob

Classic Books, Extremism, Fear, Freedom, Politics & Religion, Rebellion and Resistance

 

In the amazing novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when it is discovered that a slave has escaped from his master, a mob of white people—mainly good Christian white people—got excited and gave horrific chase to the slave aided and abetted by his young white friend. These were good ordinary citizens of America. They believed it was their religious duty to give chase to an escaped black slave and return him to his owner. Of course, it helped that they might reap a $40 reward from the owner. Is that all it takes?

 

Azar Nafisi was a Muslim woman living in Iran who taught Huckleberry Finn to young Islamic men and women.  By and large these students were respectful of the tyrannical regime in their country. Like good American citizens, they were good citizens and good Muslims? What would they think of Huck Finn?

The book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is as I have been saying a book about freedom and resistance to authority.  Those are both characteristics that have usually been absent in Iran. At least that was true until recently, when there have been some rebellion led by young women resisting the authority of the government to impose dress requirements upon them, as well as other even more important impositions on their freedom. The women have demonstrated uncommon bravery in the face of that tyranny. A number of them have been killed by the government for their opposition.

Mark Twain in that brilliant book showed how an uneducated white boy and his black slave friend revolted against the “conscience” of the nation. Most people in America, at the time, believed in the racial superiority of whites and in their absolute right to do as they saw fit with the inferior black race in their midst.

Nafisi said this about the book:

“It looks at how ordinary decent people, or outcasts like Huck and Pap, could abandon their hearts and take the easy road, embracing ugly thoughts and prejudices when they are sanctioned by society. Could such horrors as slavery or the Holocaust happen without the complicity and voluntary blindness of decent, ordinary people, those who go to church and volunteer for good works and yet can easily turn, as they do in Huck Finn, into a murderous mob? It might have been the question that gave Huck such a dramatic sense of urgency when I taught it in those violent revolutionary days in Iran”.

 

How can good people wreak such havoc on other more vulnerable good people? Is a $40 reward all it takes?

Yet the young students of Iran largely supported the rebellious position of Huck. They applauded his actions in refusing to return the slave to the master.

Even though they were good Muslims, they did not support the religious mob! I found that interesting.

Leveraging Sexual Anxieties

American Fascism, Fear, Freedom, Tyranny and Fascism

 

We must always remember that the principal values of democracy are freedom and equality. Those are robust values. They are worth defending and fighting for. Many people in the US, among many other places, seem uninterested in defending those values. Freedom does not include the right to exploit others, because that negates their freedom. You can’t have such freedom. Many forget this. One of the “freedoms” some claim is the “freedom” to impose your view of sexuality on others. Again, that negates their freedom so such an attitude should be off limits for a proponent of freedom.

As Jason Stanley the philosopher of Fascism, said when interviewed on PBS’s Amanpour & Co.,

“Among the freedoms were enjoy in democracy are the freedom to identify with whom we want, to have the adult partners we want. And this freedom is under attack. And this attack on LGBT citizens is very eastern European in character. It comes in the wake of an attack on so-called critical race theory, but the attack is not really on critical race theory, it’s an attack on the teaching of our history, the teaching of our anti-democratic racist history and now we have an attack on LGBT rights. This puts us into the world-wide autocratic context.  If you look at autocrats and would be autocrats around the world, from Russia’s gay propaganda law of 2013, that prohibits teaching minors about non-standard life-styles and had a terrible effect on LGBT communities in Russia. If we look at Viktor Orban’s Hungary the recent election was dominated by attacks on LGBT. If we look at Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil who won election with attacks on LGBT communities. We see American right now embracing this world-wide far right autocratic attack on freedom. This is just putting us in line with the fascist right world-wide”.

 

American conservatives like Tucker Carlson strongly support Orban in the name of freedom, but as I have said imposing your approved sexuality on others is not freedom. It is anti-freedom. Pedophiles also don’t believe in freedom, because they want the right to impose their lusts on other—the most vulnerable in society.

Many Conservatives in the US seem to think that all liberals are pedophiles.

Recently, the Republicans in the US Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, showed by their absurd questions that they believed, or at least wanted others to believe, that she was a pedophile supporter (if not a pedophile).  US. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene said that the 3 Republicans who voted for her must be pedophiles too. Of course, much of this comes from QAnon and Greene is one of the most famous QAnon supporters among the many in the Republican Party. QAnon claims that the Democratic Party is infested with pedophiles. QAnon used to be considered a fringe group, but increasingly it is mainstream Republican.

Of course, all of this might just be a deflection from the fact that the Republican Party no longer has any policies other than missiles in the Kulture wars. The American right has an uncanny ability to latch onto primal American fears. It used to be communists. Now it is pedophiles, or other “sexual deviants” as they refer to others with different sexual orientations. Many Americans fear nothing more than an attack on innocent children by pedophiles. And that fear has generated a plethora of crazy conspiracy theories.

Nancy McLean, a professor at Duke University, says the Republicans have been seizing on parental anxieties about children being attacked or groomed for attack by pedophiles in order to gain support for their causes. They have been focusing on this, she says, not out of genuine concern for children who are vulnerable, but for personal gain. They are doing it to get anxious parents to vote against Democrats. Does anyone really think that Ted Cruz actually thinks Ketanji Brown Jackson is a pedophile? Of course not. He just thinks the Republican base will love his spirited attack on a strong, intelligent,  black American woman. That’s all his nasty insinuations are about. McLean said Cruz is “despicable, and dishonourable but the Republican base eats this stuff up.” That is how you leverage sexual anxieties for political gain. And Cruz is good at it. That is how American and Russian fascism work.

It is not about freedom. It is about imposing your will and your views on others. Again, that is the philosophy of the bully. Pick a vulnerable person or group and impose your will on them.

 

The Mennonite Pharisee and the Polish Samaritan

Fear, Fellow Feeing, Immigration and Refugees, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Refugee crises are invariably wicked problems. Every country wants to control its own borders. No country just wants to open the gates completely wide. After all, what good would it do to let countries be completely swamped?  No one benefits when anarchy is spread everywhere.

On the other hand, most countries want to help, particularly their neighbours. But that is not always easy to do.

What we need is calm and compassionate consideration and temperate with rationality. That is not an easy task.

Turning our backs on the refugees is not the answer for most of us. Most of us don’t want to be Pharisees. We don’t want to turn our back on the poor soul mired in the mud or lying on the ground. But how can we help? Destroying our lives and those of our loved ones is also not the answer. What is the answer? The first thing that is sure, is the answer is not simple. Miriam Toews was right. Kindness is complicated.   As a result we will make mistakes.

 

Melissa Martin in her Winnipeg Free Press  article said she did not believe that the  way we deal with difficult refugee problems is inevitable. we must make choices. Yet Poland has shown to us what is possible if we work together. Big problems can be solved. Only with teamwork would it be possible for a small country to do what Poland has done in accepting 2.5 million refugees.

People on all sides tend to oversimplify problems and their solutions. As she said,

 

“News, often, has an unfortunate way of flattening places and events into a narrow focus without nuance, without texture. In one such narrative, Poland becomes all good; in another, its treatment of largely Muslim asylum-seekers caught on the border, it’s all bad.

 

The reality is, of course, is that it’s neither. Yes, it’s in Poland where a border dispute has forced people to suffer in limbo, but it’s also in Poland where activists and aid groups risk everything to get food and warm clothes to the people huddled at the Belarusian border. Some have been caught by police and taken before a judge; still, their brave and ferociously loving work continues.”

 

Poland has shown us clouds from both sides. They have shown us the best of people, but have also shown a dark side. I remember when my own Member of Parliament—presumably a good Mennonite—showed us what the Pharisees were like. When people from Central and South America were trying to enter Canada because they feared what Trump and his cronies would do to them, and fled here across a frozen Red River, he told us to fear these refugees and complained that our Prime Minister was opening the borders wide.  That was very different from the Poles that Martin described in her article. People living near the border sneaked into the woods to hang bundles of aid in the trees even though they were threatened by the police.  One of them told the New York Times, “no one will die in my forest.” There was the Good Samaritan—the good neighbour. My pious member of Parliament looked down on the hapless people freezing in the cold, and urged us to do the same.  on the other hand, Martin described how volunteers in Emerson in the winter of 2017 when there was an unprecedented wave of people walking across the border north into Canada from the US  tried to make sure no one froze to death. More good neighbours.

 

As Melissa Martin said,

“The bad in the world, and in people, speaks in cruelty and destruction. But if you want to see the good in people, you will find it in the same place, and from there you can see the foundations of bridges that are waiting to be built. The lesson of Poland’s refugee crisis — not two, but one — is that the good is ever-present, waiting for an invitation to happen.”

Each of us can choose to be a Pharisee or a Samaritan.  And we may have the chance to make that choice more than once. One time we can be a Samaritan and the next a Pharisee. It’s  all up to us.