Commentary: “Fear is the darkroom in which negatives are developed.” So said a fortune cookie at a local restaurant Thursday.
“Of the many factors that make up your worldview, one is more fundamental than any other in determining which side of the divide you gravitate toward: your perception of how dangerous the world is. Fear is perhaps our most primal instinct, so it’s only logical that people’s level of fearfulness informs their outlook on life.” So write two political scientists in Prius or Pickup. (We have both.) They say our deep political divisions aren't over policies, but between the “fixed” worldviews of people wary of change and suspicious of outsiders, and the “fluid” worldviews of those comfortable with social change and “welcoming of people who look and sound different.”
Fear seems a major factor in our country's current policies and actions.
Ironically, a recent Pew poll of 26 countries showed: (a) that people's greatest security concern is climate change (which brings out the ostrich in Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans); (b) Islamic terrorism is second; and (c) people's most rapidly increasing fear is us. U.S. power and policies.
Fear is essential to survival. Alertness to danger and close observation of surroundings have saved my life. I don't suggest we step blissfully off cliffs like the Fool in the Tarot.
But when fear dominates someone's mind, s/he either stays home all the time or lashes out preemptively at others – or, less dramatically, misses out on a whole lot of life unnecessarily.
It is no different when fear dominates a nation. Our “fear-dominant” moments include the McCarthy Era and the briefer “Red Scare” soon after World War I. September 11 catapulted George Bush's poll numbers from a historic low to a historic high almost overnight. That doesn't mean we had nothing to worry about at any of those times; but hysteria makes us jail leftists with long names (1919-20) put patriotic citizens with Japanese heritage into camps (1942), and blacklist people who are guilty of no crime and pose no danger (1950's); and ban all travelers from whole countries, including nationalities from which no terrorist had ever attacked us.
In other countries, appeals to fear have turned democracies into dictatorships. Hitler is just the most famous example. Citizens of Perú, Russia, and Venezuela all experienced that transformation. (I strongly recommend How Democracies Die.) Frightened people will let things slide a little, such as press freedoms, civil liberties, and fact-based policy-making. A little snowballs into more.
There's plenty of political room between “an open border,” which almost no one advocates, and treating refugees and illegal immigrants as a danger to our national security. That's nonsense. Refugees seeking asylum are fleeing unbearable conditions in their home countries. The U.S. shares some responsibility for those conditions in many countries. Since the root cause of people's flight is conditions at home, policies ameliorating those conditions might work better than treating these people as if they were armed invaders or terrorists. (You got a fire down the block, do you mow down fleeing people with an AK-47 'cause they're trespassing, or call the fire department?)
Yes, there are more of those people right now than at earlier times; and, yes, that creates certain administrative problems; but we are not being “invaded.” Illegal immigration is down; and folks who enter illegally seeking work aren't attacking us.
My fortune cookie fortune read, “Greet each morning with curiosity and hope.”
[Discussing fear also reminds me that about six years ago, when Keith Whelpley and I co-hosted a daily discussion show on a commercial station, we were followed by Rush Limbaugh. The folks who called us largely shared his point-of-view, so it was a lively and sometimes draining two hours. At some point the station gave us a manual on doing talk-radio. Some of it was sound advice, like going into a station break not by saying "We gotta take a break now" but "When we return from break, I'm going to ask Joe about the time he was attacked by lions and only had a knife to defend himself with." But at some length it explained, quite explicitly, that the key to being a successful talk-radio host is to convince listeners of a grave danger and that only you can deliver them from that danger. Then you got 'em.]