Fear is our greatest enemy.

Our country is moving down a frightening path. The economy is in trouble; houses are losing value, the credit crunch and inflation are slowing growth. We are fighting two wars and are about to start a third that will make the other two look like a playground tussle. The public spirit has been corrupted by a steady diet of hatred and eliminationist rhetoric from conservatives. When people let their fears overcome them they often give in to their violent fantasies and tendencies. Chris Floyd discusses such a situation in Israel in a recent post.

There is no good outcome to the dynamic of eliminationism and
dehumanization. It leads, quite literally, to madness and death and ruin. Israel
is not the only nation on that road; the dynamic is not specific to any country,
creed, race, religion or polity. It belongs to all of us, it's a danger we all
face. And it requires vigilance, skepticism, action and awareness to break up
these patterns as they rise among us, to derail the dynamic -- before it's too
far gone and must play out, in one way or another, in the given extent and
circumstances of the historical moment, to the bitter end.

Many of us have convinced ourselves that people are inherently bad and can only be kept from violence through strict control. They have been told this most of their lives, from parents, religious leaders, and the government. This belief, this fear, overwhelms them, and they look for relief. Blaming someone else for their fears is very popular; it's the fault of the poor, the liberal, minorities, women, Arabs, Castro, Jimmy Carter, and so on ad nauseum. If only these people could be eliminated, the fear would be eliminated too.

But somehow the fear is never eliminated. When one enemy disappoints, another is found. Bush called it the War on Terror, but it's really the War of Terror. We are terrified, and we'll strike out at anyone who frightens us. We have always been afraid, though. Iranians, Al-Qaeda, Iraqis, China, Communists, Russia, Bolsheviks, anarchists, immigrants, British, Indians--from birth to the present, we are a nation of the terrified.

There's a reason we are afraid all the time. Fear operates where logic is rejected, where worship is valued over reason, where obedience is demanded--or else--from childhood. We don't trust ourselves, therefore we don't trust anyone else. We didn't feel protected by our parents, so we constantly seek protection. We want someone to tell us we are good, like all children want to be told they're good. So we do whatever we want to chase away the fear and say it's good and necessary. Even when the result is racism, fear-mongering, and murder through war.

It doesn't have to be like this. We don't have to be afraid all the time. Fear is a choice, as well as a drive. We can choose to look at our fear, take it to pieces and find out its origin, and then destroy it. We are not helpless. We are not evil. We are adults, and when the bad times come we must either dredge up the courage to face them, or drown in an orgy of fear and violence.

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.

Arthur Silber is back, thank heavens, telling the truth to people who don't want to hear it. As is Chris Floyd.

There is always hope of America becoming better, there is always hope for
positive change. But that hope does not reside -- and has never resided -- in a
single politician, or party, or faction. It resides in every individual citizen:
in what they think and believe, in what they will accept and countenance, in
what they will not stand for, in what they will work for. Hope resides in the
amount of knowledge and truth and insight that we can all produce and
disseminate and act upon. And hope depends on our ability -- and our willingness
-- to confront reality as it is, to deal with our leaders and would-be leaders
as they are, not as we wish them to be. For how can you change anything if you
cannot see it clearly?

Why can't we see this clearly? Because we lie to ourselves. We say that we need someone to save us, we need a hero, a strong leader to tell us what to do, how to think. Why on earth would we want someone to make decisions for us? Because we don't know what to do. We don't know who to trust, to believe. We don't know what we want or how to get it. We don't know how we feel, or why we feel the things that do affect us, such as fear and anger. How can we be such strangers to ourselves?

We lie. We say our nation is the greatest in the world, the most kind and helpful. We say we are helpless without an authority to tell us what to do. We say our parents were all good and kind and selfless, our children better than average, our way of life the only way to live. Our god is real, and the one true god, while all the others are false. We lie. Over and over and over. And then we lie some more. We go to our graves buried in our lies.

Obviously, we do this so we can survive, feel good enough about ourselves to get out of bed in the morning, face the world of pain and grief and uncertainty. But everyone doesn't do this. Silber and Floyd don't. They accept the pain, accept the uncertainty, accept the truth. And because of this, they can look at the world with honest, seeing eyes, while the rest of the nation sees through a glass darkly.

The Logic of Repression

More and more I am seeing people point out the painful and painfully obvious fact--people do what they want to do. I would add, people also do what they need to do. Illogical actions are often based on emotion, not reason, and only understandable by that standard. (Illogical actions are also often perfectly logical as long as you know the true motivation of the actor, but that is another story.) Understand the emotion and you will be able to understand the action, and fight it if necessary.

Chris Floyd understands the irrational actions taking place. He points out that if our nation--its people and leaders--tolerate torture, it's not because they are being forced to.

They lie about [torture] because they want to torture people. That's the first thing you must understand: They want to do it. They enjoy the thought of it. They want to hear the details, they want to hear about the pain, about the broken spirits and the ruined minds. They literally, physically – perhaps even sexually – enjoy the idea of people getting beaten, tormented and waterboarded at their command. There's no question about this. Bush tortured animals when he was a child, and now he tortures human beings with the same kind of furtive, sniggering, naughty glee. And when someone catches him at it, he lies about it, just like a brattish child. And now the whole administration of the United States government operates on the degraded moral level of this profoundly stunted and twisted little wretch.

It's very hard for us to believe that we are a nation of sadists, that our president tortured animals as a boy and now shows a depraved indifference to human life. That we can callously watch millions of people suffer, and indifferently hear our administration petulently demand that they be grateful for our actions. So we refuse to believe the bad news about torture, rendition, disregard for justice and law, hypocracy and malevolence. We turn our backs on our victims rather than admit we don't care if anyone else is hurt.

How can ordinary people be so callous? Psychotherapist Alice Miller explains in her book Breaking Down the Wall of Silence that children who are mistreated by their parents grow up without empathy, for themselves or others.

Children who have been beaten, humiliated, and abused, and who find no witness to come to their aid often develop a grave syndrome in later life; they have no knowledge of their true feelings, fear them like the plague, and are therefore incapable of recognizing vital connections, Without realizing it-and without taking responsibility for it—they work out the horrors that they once experienced on innocent people. Like their parents before them, they regard their actions as “redemption” for others.

That is the logic of repression. I refuse to know what my parents did to me and to others. I want to forgive them and not to condemn them. I don’t want to question them. They are my parents, and therefore they are beyond blame.

The mistreatment of my own children, horrific wars against supposed enemies, the destruction of life wherever I see it growing, allow me to raise a monument to my parents and retain my blindness.

Children want and need their parents' approval and will do anything for it, even later as adults. If people acknowledge their parents couldn't love them, they are giving up hope on attaining that love, and most people are utterly incapable of doing that. So we become callous and hard to our own pains, to preserve the illusion of love, and of course callous and hard towards others. Deeply hidden anger at mistreatment isn't allowed, since it will burst that Leave It To Beaver fantasy. So the anger is directed towards others, and everything from child abuse to wars happens as a result.

Bush, who tortured small creatures as a child, doesn't hesitate to kill a million or more people in Iraq. They are merely numbers on a sheet of paper, easy to ignore as he strives to show he is strong and right and better than his dad. Killing Saddam was perfect because it showed his father who was the real winner and it also showed his father that he would do anything to avenge him. A plea for love, a release of pent-up rage, a way to retain the power that feeds his insecure ego--he had many reasons for going to war and then staying there. Iraq is indeed very, very complicated--for some.