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Given a Choice Between Fear and Apathy, I'll Take Fear
Townhall.com ^ | March 15, 2017 | Jonah Goldberg

Posted on 03/15/2017 7:07:20 AM PDT by Kaslin

Dystopia is in the air these days. George Orwell's "1984" is selling like hotcakes -- if hotcakes still sold well in this low-carb world. Is the president to blame?

I think historians, no doubt working from their subterranean monasteries, bunkered from the radioactive wasteland above, will note that dystopianism, apocalypticism and other forms of existential paranoia actually predate the Trump presidency. It's a fever that passes from one subset of the population to another and occasionally blows up into a full-scale pandemic. We all carry the infection in us, sometimes slow-simmering, sometimes in remission and sometimes in extremis.

Hollywood has been running through practice scenarios of doom nonstop from its founding.

Indeed, end-of-the-worldism is, and has long been, a lucrative market niche. To believe that, one need only catch a "food insurance" ad on TV.

Under President Obama, survivalists and other tribes of doomsday preppers were the stuff of late-night comedian mockery and daytime MSNBC journalistic japery. Now they look more like trendsetters.

Shortly before the Trump inauguration, The New Yorker profiled Silicon Valley moguls and other liberal one-percenters stocking up on MREs and ammo. "I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system," an investment banker told The New Yorker's Evan Osnos. "A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That's not too rare anymore."

Madonna has a new little film out in which she declares we live in a "new age of tyranny" where "all marginalized people are in danger" and "where being uniquely different might truly be considered a crime."

So an insanely rich, decades-long global media icon is claiming the mantle of the marginalized and oppressed. Where does she find the courage to speak up?

While it's always easy -- and often fun -- to point out the irrational paranoia in others, I generally like this tendency in American culture, so long as it's kept reasonably in check. The founders were terrified of tyranny. "The Federalist Papers" name-checks one tyrannical cautionary tale after another, from the "tyranny of Macedonian garrisons" to the "elective despotism" of the Venetian republic.

The framers' genius lay in their observation that the greatest check on unbridled, or "concentrated," power was the fear it aroused in competing factions.

In other words, fear gets a bad rap. Franklin D. Roosevelt gets too much praise for his claim that the only thing Americans had to fear was "fear itself." Fear imparts vital information. I fear snakes and sharks and the possibility of falling out of an airplane. These are all healthy fears. Fear is dangerous when it serves as a substitute for thinking. (I still swim in the ocean and travel on airplanes.) But fear can be very useful when it informs our thinking, when it focuses the mind on potential dangers ahead.

Apathy is the practical opposite of fear. Given that tyranny, going by the historical and evolutionary record, is the natural state of humankind, the greatest bulwark against it is a highly cultivated, deeply informed but nonetheless instinctive fear. Edmund Burke never actually uttered the most famous quote attributed to him -- "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" -- though that is a useful summation of his views. And it's certainly true.

Apathy is the grease that makes slippery slopes so treacherous.

One of the things that make our politics so ugly isn't fear, but a lack of sympathetic imagination for the fear of others. Under Obama (and FDR and others), many conservatives articulated thoughtful, informed and rational fears about where his policies might take the country. Other, often louder conservatives offered barbaric yawps based on some of the same fears. The standard liberal response was undifferentiated scorn and mockery. Today (as under Reagan and others), the tables have turned, and the roles have been reversed.

It's far better to cultivate mutual understanding of each other's fears than try to smooth away the fear of tyranny with the grease of apathy.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: fear

1 posted on 03/15/2017 7:07:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin
It's far better to cultivate mutual understanding of each other's fears

To paraphrase George C. Scott as Patton, that's a load of horse dung.

Goldberg's piece is an exercise in contradiction. He admits that fear is a largely irrational emotion but that we should understand - he actually means accede - to it.

The Founding Fathers feared tyranny? I would say their feeling was anger more than anything. Anger at the raw deals and anger at the crown's capriciousness and apathy. Fear leads to paralysis. Anger leads to action.

When people say they fear a fascist state because their pet fascist (Hillary) lost an election, how are we meant to understand such madness? When they say they fear internment camps and mass roundups, why we are we bound to assuage such paranoia?

When lefties 'fear' men and women using anatomically-bifurcated toilet facilities, what sane response might there be to such insanity?

The blind, unwavering support for Obama's lawless regime and their overnight antagonism towards a new president whose 'crime' is that he has an R after his name demonstrates that the other side have lost it all: their capacity for thought, logic, even basic comprehension of the issues because they have been primed to kick off at the slightest provocation or perception of their pet -isms. They are human fire alarms - they make an ear-splitting noise but can't tell you where the fire is or how to put it out.

These dogs can't be retrained so they must be restrained. Permanently. They can think whatever they like after that.

2 posted on 03/15/2017 7:25:12 AM PDT by relictele (`)
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To: relictele

Goldberg is a fearmonger in service of the establishment, so naturally he would be tasked with things like shepherding conservatives into ineffective positions like apathy and fear, admitting no alternatives.

Goldberg would never have amounted to anything on his own talent; only his mother’s influence got him a writing job. Amazed he keeps it with the utter trash he puts out.


3 posted on 03/15/2017 7:30:59 AM PDT by thoughtomator (Purple: the color of sedition)
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To: thoughtomator

I do appreciate and acknowledge that he wrote ‘Liberal Fascism’ several years before that term as an accurate, concise description of modern-day leftist tactics came into wider use.

I also recall that he admitted early on in primary season (or even earlier) that he had a personal axe to grind with Trump. He didn’t mention it much, if at all, after that but it was clear from his writing and his comments that his opposition was personal more than it was political or ideological. In this he was a bit different to his NR colleagues who simply looked down their intellectual noses at Trump.

But the impossible happened...Trump won the nomination and then the election. Goldberg’s not a total fool so he reckoned he’d better come up with a new touchy-feely shtick in order to survive financially and as a brand name.

He absolutely cops a heap of abuse on Lucianne’s site every time one of his pieces is posted there. I’m surprised they don’t delete comments that are quite vitriolic. Blood thicker than water etc.

To Goldberg I say what Christian (Mel Gibson) said to Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) in the film ‘The Bounty’ after the mutineers had taken the ship: ‘Why do you have to be so damned reasonable NOW?!?’


4 posted on 03/15/2017 7:43:06 AM PDT by relictele (`)
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To: Kaslin

Bullcrap

That Pantywaist can cower in fear all he wants, but kindly don’t suggest what real men (and women) should do or feel.


5 posted on 03/15/2017 7:57:31 AM PDT by RedStateRocker (Nuke Mecca, deport all illegal aliens, abolish the IRS, DEA and ATF.)
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To: Kaslin

Seriously, isn’t there any profound conservative intellectual who will write an *updated* version of Nineteen-Eighty-Four?

It wouldn’t be a book of fiction, other than showing what exists *right now* as it is used to abuse a fictional character, an “average American” Winston Smith.

Eisenhower warned against the power of the “military industrial complex”, which today has grown to (in order of raw power), to become the “Intelligence-Police-Military-Globalist-Corporate-Bureaucratic-Political (DemSoc) Amero narcotic-sexual depravity unistate”.

The novel could be voluminous, incorporating the vastness of modern American totalitarianism. It could likewise include some of the anti-intellectual elements of Fahrenheit 451, showing public schools that no longer educate but indoctrinate, interactive media that also spy and control, the terrible dehumanization that all of this brings, and the decline and decay it is visiting on us all.

By comparison, the Airstrip One of Nineteen-Eighty-Four would look like a quaint and friendly place, even if overrun by primitive Muslims.


6 posted on 03/15/2017 8:15:51 AM PDT by yefragetuwrabrumuy (Leftists aren't fascists. They are "democratic fascists", a completely different thing.)
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